Finding Emo

Ok, I must have slept too long. Too much downtime. Too long underground.

I come to the surface to take a look and what I'm faced with sickens me.

It's called Emo Music. Instantly, I was thinking, "What the hell?"

I'm sorry I asked.

Now, let's get right down to it. Have you seen these people? Over half of them that are in this particular scene scare the shit out of me. This is what the goth subculture spun off? This is the offspring? The lovechild? Of what? Whiny garage bands with a splash of The Sisters Of Mercy for color...or lack thereof?

Nine Inch Nails has even fallen under this category! Trent, for shame!

Now, granted, I've been depressed in my life. There were times where the light at the end of the tunnel looked like an oncoming freight train and times when I screamed, "QUIT FUCKIN TEASIN AND JUST GET IT THE HELL OVER WITH!" to the sky or any pages of a rather large notebook that would listen. The writing combined with bands like Concrete Blonde, Type O Negative, Stabbing Westward, Gravity Kills and Marilyn Manson got me through it all. I'd found poetic expression of a lot of pain back then. I vented my really abysmal moments. I got it out. It's called "catharsis" and it was great for purging. Out with the bad. The goth music, metal, hard rock, etc were applicable to every facet of living adult life but this emo shit....it's high-school disappointments being the end of the world and that one fouled relationship amounting to a world of crap.

Hey kids, check this out, all that crap that adults teach you about high school having the bearing on the rest of your life, throw it out. There's no such thing as a permanent record, there are things you're going to need and things you're not, make sure you have the basics of everything down and then build on the shit you'll really need. If someone thinks you're shit in high school, chances are, they're not gonna think that forever. Some people do grow up and some don't. Another thing...the hairdos...The Misfits did them better and they were called Devil's Locks back then...get the hair outta your eye, you're not in a goddamn anime movie and that style works...if you're Japanese.

Another thing, these overly wordy ways of expressing your suicidal tendencies over that lost jock are nice, grammatically speaking, but they don't matter in the grand scheme of things, just move on. I've had far worse as an adult.

Last but not least, this overly depressing music should be called just that...overly depressing. It's not the only music out there that gets emotional. Listen to Concrete Blonde's song "Joey" if you don't believe me. How about Def Leppard, "To Be Alive" even. Maybe some Nine Inch Nails "Hurt". Emotion runs the gamut of music. Every song conveys one. From the violently euphoric to the overtly abysmal there's something for everyone. You didn't have to go find the most whiny and depressing shit available to classify it like all other music lacks emotion.

In fact, ten years ago, these guys were in shitty garage bands. Due to the music industry's lack of options, that's where it looks like they went.

I went to sleep at the wrong time. I went to sleep when Headbanger's Ball was still on the air, Slayer was one of the ruling bands, Megadeth still held on a tight grip, Metallica hadn't sold out yet and Type O Negative was a band of quickly rising stars. Marilyn Manson had just started his havoc upon the world and shocked millions worldwide and finally, Rob Zombie was just establishing himself as a solo artist...and a damned good one.

I woke up to FM radio and MTV in hell. But hey, I'm just one guy, right? What do I know?

Well, here's someone who's in total agreement with me...I'm going to bed.

From A MySpace User's Blog:

EMO?

Note from Neo: These views are not necessarily my own. Frankly, I'm offended, because I'm so emo and dark and sad. I mean, I watch tv in a wasteland while I wear black.

Anyway, enjoy the read!

I wonder when people will realize that the "scene" has become homogeneous. It's full of 14 year old girls with uneven bangs, black and white striped shirts, and tattered low-top black Chuck Taylor's, who swoon over homosexual kissing and pathetic whiny lyrics and overuse the symbols.

Their favorite quote is, invariably, "The truth is you could slit my throat and with my one last gasping breath I'd apologize for bleeding on your shirt" because it like, so totally describes their relationship with that one HAWT sophomore who totally ripped their hearts out when they were like, SO in love with him.

Their favorite type of music is, of course, "emo, screamo, and hardcore", three terms which, in their minds, invariably include the bands Taking Back Sunday, Thrice, and Hawthorne Heights.

Their AIM screennames often include x's, the words "electrikk", "disaster", or some play on their favorite song from their favorite band, you know, the one they saw on MTV like a couple times, but shouldn't be on MTV because they're like, way too emo for that.

They take hundreds of black and white pictures with way too much contrast of themselves looking plaintively down at the ground, pointing a gun made of their fingers at their heads, or kissing the camera while displaying their expert application of lip gloss around their labret piercing and the thick dark eyeliner that circles their eyes.

They embrace the "dork" that is inside their polished, fashionable exteriors by writing in their LiveJournals or Xangas about how they and their friends had an 'N Sync sing-a-long at one of their sleepovers because, remember, 'N Sync is soooo not popular anymore and they like, sooo wouldn't follow any of the fads of today, so they embrace the fads of yesterday.

They adore "retro fashion", meaning anything from the 80's, because they totally used to wear neon colors and big beaded bracelets, even though they were born in, at the earliest, 1988 and remember jack shit about the fashion and culture of the 80's.

It's full of "emo boys" who often are difficult to differentiate from "emo girls", who have meaningless tattoos even though they're 15, smoke a lot of cigarettes, drink a lot of hard liquor, and are in some shitty band that plays a couple of gigs in someone's basement because they're "too cool to go mainstream" when really, they just suck.

They weigh roughly 90 pounds, wear girls' jeans that hug their asses in just the right places, belts buckled somewhere around the side of their right leg, tight striped 80's style polo shirts or band t-shirts, and skater shoes, even though they don't skate because that's soooo lame.

They write awful poetry about the dark abyss of their souls and how the gun is pointed at their heads, the trigger poised to blast away the bloody memories of a failed romance. They cried when Blink-182 broke up, and they have a secret obsession with Avril Lavigne because, like, she really IS kinda hot even though her music totally sucks.

They spend more time at the mirror than their female counterparts do, making sure that the long black shock of hair at the front of their heads lies covering one eye just so, that their lip piercing is perfectly placed so that it looks hot when they kiss other boys, that their pants are the right degree of tightness so as not to exude gayness.

Emo boys and girls often use the suffix "Xcore" to describe themselves, using a number of adjectives or nouns to accomplish this task. This is a play off hardcore music, or "hXc". Some of these descriptive words include "fashionXcore", "retroXcore", or even "yournamehereXcore."

This way of speaking is retarded or nonsensical to everyone else except those "in the scene", but it totally doesn't matter because they're too nonconformistXcore for anyone to truly understand their "scene".

They couldn't name a Sunny Day Real Estate or Rites of Spring song if it came up and bit them on their Gap Jeans-clad asses, and they claim to like the Smiths because Jesse Lacey of Brand New said they were cool.

Sure, they listen to some new "hardcore" bands, but they're all pretty much the same five bands:
1. Taking Back Sunday
2. Senses Fail
3. Thrice
4. Hawthorne Heights
5. Story of the Year
To these promising young firecrackers, music takes a backseat to fashion in their scene of choice.