Author: Emily Jensen
I bought a black zip-up hoody yesterday. I said it was because I was getting cold walking the windy streets of Hollywood on a last minute trip in a taxicab that left me scantily clothed in the waning daylight. But weather had nothing to do with it. I wanted to be emo. I see those little tykes jumping around with their heavy eyeliner and wacko hair that looks like it was styled by a drunken toddler, wearing t-shirts that pledge their allegiance to preposterous bands like My Chemical Romance and AFI, and I can’t help but wonder what it’s like to walk around in their ink-stained Vans. Admittedly, it’s not a completely foreign experience to me-let’s just say I had a phase, we won’t go there-but rest assured that I know my way around Hot Topic. Despite my early teenage quest into the abyss of emo culture, until recently I still had no idea where it came from, how it started and quite frankly what the hell it is. Listen up boys and girls, because I am about to unlock the secret past of the emo kid.
Apparently, a high percentage of the population has been devoting an inordinate portion of their lives to analyzing this ridiculous but increasingly prevalent trend, which some subscribers go so far as to call a “way of life.” I searched “emo” on Wikipedia, whose information I do not take with a grain of salt because it is a site so specifically tailored to my personal needs-Sparknotes for life itself-that it would never lie to me. According to the extensive history provided therein, emo was originally a sub-genre of hardcore punk music originating in mid-1980s Washington D.C., whose most prominent artists include absolutely no one you’ve ever heard of before. Then again, they’re not much to hear anyway. One gem mentioned on the list of these “emotional hardcore” bands known for typical hardcore music were Rites of Spring (think the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten, thoroughly plastered and inexplicably enraged, backed by a band boasting musical prowess somewhere between Sum41 and a bad high school grunge group). This is not the emo I was seeking. I don’t care how bad the music is, it can’t be as socially awkward as that wrist-slashing, black-nailed angst currently plaguing suburban high schools across the country. As it turns out, those kids are manifestations of emo’s “third wave,” a movement best represented by Hawthorne Heights.
In a pathetic grasp to appear intelligent, they cite their namesake as Nathaniel Hawthorne, perhaps imagining the products of their own brooding to be on the same level as The Scarlet Letter. But alas, their hit song “Ohio Is For Lovers” suggests quite the opposite: “And I can’t make it on my own/Because my heart is in Ohio/So cut my wrists and black my eyes/So I can fall asleep tonight, or die.” Jackpot. Now that’s what I call emo. So how can crappy garage rockers who sporadically cry onstage fall under the same category as the blood-dripping, dirge-wailing, make-up wearing scenesters we see today? I’m not going to pretend to know exactly why for fear that a real live emo kid will expertly bitch me out for my ignorance of his or her scene, but at my own risk I’ll take a stab at it (stab, get it?).
Essentially what happened was that traditional emo bands went mainstream, shifting into more radio friendly styles that the next generation imitated and passed off as, or were received as, emo, despite their clearly pop-based music. The end result was the malignant mass of whiners that infests modern society, steadfastly believing in their own sour, generic worldview. But don’t hate the little guys-that’s exactly what they want you to do. The best course of action in taking down the emo kid, who we now know with historically-backed certainty is completely illegitimate in every way, is to laugh. If you’d like to waste more time learning about emo culture, visit yourscenesucks.com to view detailed illustrations and brief backgrounds of the many subspecies, including the Myspace Whore and the Halloweencore Goth.
Emily Jensen is an undeclared first-year. She can be reached at ejensen@oxy.edu
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