surprise? Humans have maintained pretty poor relationships with their emotions for as long as they’ve had them. Every day we are puzzled, even baffled, by them. It’s hard for many people to look their emotions square in the eyes. Many flat out ignore their emotions, even though what makes us human is our capacity to think and, most importantly, to feel. So the word “emo” is intrinsically problematic because emotions themselves are intrinsically problematic. Calling someone or something “emo” is to blatantly and singularly identify them or it as not just having emotion, but having a more emphasized relationship with emotion to the point where it needs to be commented on.
Nobody ever self-described as emo to begin with because the people who were making the music already knew they were doing it with extreme emotion—that was the point. But people who weren’t making this music and people who weren’t feeling the types of emotions that these bands were articulating were at odds with it. That’s because it’s difficult for people who haven’t suffered to understand suffering, and suffering is a large part of what these songs and records were confronting. And what generally happens when people are confronted with something outside their comfort zone? There is resistance. There is degradation. There is othering. And that’s all because, initially, there is fear.
To control that fear, people gave it a name: Emo. Once something has a name, it can be easily packaged into a neat little box and contained. But if there is one thing that none of these bands wanted to be, it was contained.
“This is not pretty,” remarks Shane Told, vocalist of Silverstein. “[It’s] in your face. I think that and the screaming that was coming into the music, too…this was not background music. This is intense music and if you’re a fan of this, then you care about this and then it was like, are you all in or not? If I’m listening to this music, then I am listening to this music. That was when it became such a thing, when people’s lives started revolving around these bands.”
Jacob Marshall, the drummer of MAE surmises, “It wasn’t trying to brag about your conquests or achieving a certain lifestyle status. It wasn’t mindless, it was mindful. It was actually reflecting deeply on the things that hurt us or healed us.”
Reflecting deeply (and out loud) about emotions like pain and love is not traditionally culturally acceptable for a male, and the bands in the emo and screamo music scenes were mostly comprised of young men. Sure, it was okay for the likes of William Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe to do, but in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the average man was not setting out to write a great sonnet. The prevailing mentality was that emotions were things that belonged to women.
Jacob Marshall: “In culture in general, there is a certain expectation of what masculine energy is supposed to be. When something shows vulnerability or invites the more reflective aspects of our nature and puts that front and center, that makes people who are, in a sense, trained to hide their emotions very uncomfortable. So it’s easy to make [emo] a derogatory thing. I’ve never thought of it as a limitation.”
Ryan Phillips (Story Of The Year): “Not to be derogatory, but it’s not hard to imagine a super jock guy to be like, ‘Man, this guy sounds like a pussy.’ But then you’ve got another guy or girl that’s more sensitive that’s like, ‘I’ve had my heart broken, and I feel like screaming to the world,’ or, ‘If my girlfriend cheated on me or broke my heart, I wish I could scream this right to her face.’ And to some people that really struck a chord. It’s okay to wear your heart on your sleeve. It’s okay to be emotional. That doesn’t make you weak. It doesn’t make you less than.”
Chris Simpson: “It didn’t feel like weakness to us—it felt like our strength. Across the board in punk rock and indie music at the time, there was probably some feeling that that was kind of a weak thing to do. I think that’s maybe why emo got such an easy and immediate backlash. But a lot of that had to do, I think, with the term. Critics and people on the outside put this little cutesy term on it that, to me, felt belittling to the content and the music. I listen to the power of some of the music, and there’s something very masculine about the music but also something very soft and feminine. It can kind of hold both of those things. You could write about anything. I think that should always be the case with any sort of art or expression. I think there are times throughout history where it kind of becomes something that you don’t do, that isn’t done.”
David McLaughlin (Associate Editor, Kerrang! UK): “It’s become a lot more commonplace to do so in recent times, but when I first got into emo, there weren’t a lot of artists around who articulated their personal pain and embraced their own faults and failings like this genre seemed to. So I think starting that conversation in the alternative music sphere was emo’s key purpose. You hear it said a lot now that ‘it’s okay to not be okay,’ but the first time I felt like that was true was through emo bands. When you consider how much more open the world is [now] about its issues with toxic masculinity, there’s an amazing trickle-down effect from artists who dared to be emotionally vulnerable back then. Especially when compared to the braindead, Neanderthal attitudes celebrated across the mainstream metal world (which was then equally dominant in the pop charts).”
Plenty of men and young boys who didn’t feel it was possible to talk about their feelings never got the help they needed because of such toxic masculinity. There was (and still is, albeit less so) a sweeping sense of shame and guilt to admitting to emotional suffering.
Jamie Tworkowski (To Write Love On Her Arms): “For us as a [mental health] organization thirteen years in, I know it’s true that we hear from more females than males. When I show up to speak at a college, there’s always more young women in the room than guys. I think what we see, and it’s sort of stating the obvious, but it’s sort of easier for women to talk about their feelings and to talk about their struggles. We get excited, and it’s always felt important to make it known that the work we do is intended to be inclusive. The work we do is for men and women.”
What emo music did that mainstream thought didn’t approve of was throw traditional macho behavior out the window. The bands who started to develop this sound and this scene were tired of the straightforward aggression and masculine posturing of other rock, metal, and punk genres. Emo and screamo bands didn’t want to fake a socially contrived sense of masculinity; they wanted to convey true emotions exactly as they were. At first, creating an inclusive community with their music was mostly just a byproduct of their creativity, but as the scene gained a greater following, there developed a distinct intent to preach inclusivity.
Ethan Fixell: “As much as we all love Black Flag or Bad Brains, I think hardcore punk fans were desperately yearning for music that was less politically charged and generally raucous, and more personal, reflective, and viscerally painful.”
Shane Told: “Punk music from before was like, ‘Yeah well, you don’t like me? Then fuck you.’ Emo was like, ‘You don’t like me and I’m really sad about it and I’m just gonna listen to The Cure and think about this and what’s gonna happen the next time I see you and how I’m gonna feel.’ That’s real. That’s different.”
Ryan Phillips: “The lyrics were a lot more vulnerable and a lot more sensitive and, I think, in the zeitgeist, it kind of caught on because people were craving that after listening to Limp Bizkit and Korn. Maybe I’m wrong on that, but that’s how I felt. I was so into the nü metal stuff, but then [I heard] Jimmy Eat World and Finch and Glassjaw. I remember the first time I heard Glassjaw, and that was like the death of nü metal for me. It was a relief from the macho-ness.”
Chris Conley: “After punk and grunge, everyone was still aggravated and alienated. Thank god emo came around because all of a sudden you were allowed to have your feelings. You were allowed to be who you are.”
Aaron
