In writing to a person who calls herself “Suicide is Painless”, who identifies
herself as a person into “emo”, which is a huge youth subculture and musical
genre with an emphasis on being very open about emotions, often sad ones, I
find I get stuck on form. “Dear Suicide” sounds as if I am making fun of
her, Dear Miss Painless sounds overly formal. When I finally settle on Miss
SIP, which looks horribly like RIP without my specs on, I ask her, pardon
me, but what it is this EMO thing? She doesn’t write back. Hardly any of
them do. But this one bugs me, because it’s hard to tell if she is just a
fan of the M*A*S*H theme tune, which includes the line “suicide is
painless”, or if she has possibly decided to find out if it really is, the
hard way.
Despite admonishments from emo music fans — that if I am writing an article to
explain emo to grown-ups, to parents — to not link emo with depressed kids,
unhealthy introspection, the semi glorification of self-harm and a host of
other serious adolescent neuroses, I am drawn to explore this angle because
almost every young person I talk to about emo tells me the apocryphal
MySpace suicide note story, which is a story different from my unanswered
note to Miss SIP.
An emo boy based in Orange County, California, writes a suicide note and posts
it on his MySpace website. MySpace (owned by News Corporation, the parent
company of The Times) seems to be the virtual centre of emo world —
the way that the music gets spread, the way that the lyrics are dissected,
the way that emo kids link up with other emo kids in other towns, suburbs or
countries. The boy shoots himself and very soon hundreds of messages are
posted on the notice boards in various chat rooms, some which say how sad it
is, how sorry they feel for his family, and others — ranting, raving,
sarcastic and scathing — more or less say hooray, the only good emo is a
dead emo, if he is into that awful music he deserves to die. And it is more
than music snobbery-induced bravado. There is real vitriol in a message such
as: “What a f****** piece of shit he is. Look at all the people that are
all, ‘boo hoo, I miss you, I love you,’ . . . he f****** deserved death.”
Maybe you won’t have noticed this unless you’re a teenager, or the parent of
one, but emo as a teen phenomenon is the Next Big Thing, bigger than Goth.
What is it about emo — a term used broadly to describe pop music bands
specialising in confessional lyrics, or to describe a style of dress that is
a pick-and-mix variety of postcard punk, Goth, nerdy indy kids in vintage
too-tight jumpers, boys wearing “ guyliner”, or to describe the kids who
follow the emo bands or dress in an “alternative” way — that inspires such
venomous hatred at worst, and black-humoured caricature at best?
My nine-year-old nephew, who lives in suburban Long Island, New York, which
some consider to be the capital of emo, says of the MySpace suicide: “It was
a hoax. They know because the guy logged on the next day, after he was
supposedly dead, to see what everyone had written.” He says this with a big
grin, and then tells me a couple of emo jokes. One is based on a cereal
advert that goes: Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids. My nephew says: “Silly
emo, razors are for shaving.”
Then he tells the one about emo grass, which cuts itself. I find a mock-emo
blog entitled “My Life is an Abysmal Piece of Shit” and then a more gentle
and hilarious mickeytaking video called Mighty Moshin Emo Rangers,
super heroes with powers such as weepy tears, introspection and bleeding
hearts.
My niece, who works in a pharmacy, chirrups in that the official emo drug is
Zoloft, a prescription antidepressant, and she should know, she says, she
fills the prescriptions. Well if emo kids are really that depressed, I say,
then clearly the drugs aren’t working.
So who are the typical emo kids? The answer depends entirely on the person I
am asking, and on which side of the pond they are based. Samantha, a
no-nonsense Long Island-based 20-year-old college student who works
part-time, lives at home, and thinks emo is for losers, says: “They are
middle-class suburban kids with all the opportunities everyone else has, but
they take the littlest thing and get all devastated over it in a very
melodramatic way. Every little problem is like a gigantic deal and they are
creating these devastating scenarios for themselves. I’m not sure if they
actually hurt themselves but the girls wear fat rubber bracelets supposedly
to cover up their cutting scars and the boys wear make-up and kiss each
other on stage. Being gay or pretending to be gay is very emo.”
Dan Silver, associate editor of NME, was a fan of “emocore”, which
was a hardcore forerunner of the genre that has morphed into “music for
wusses”. He tells me that there is an emo scene in England, with pockets of
obsessive fans seeing obscure bands, but that the term emo has been misused
to the point of signifying nothing but its caricature. “If you are outside
the emo scene here, it is really shorthand for rubbish bedwetters, wearing
broken spectacles held together by tape and whingeing about their
girlfriends dumping them.”
But with the UK-based Mighty Moshin emo kids, who are, they say, the genuine
emo article, only self-deprecating with it, there appears to be a postmodern
spin. Nick Pittom, co-director with Chris Phillips of the Mighty Moshin
Emo Rangers video, says: “There is a certain irony to it; we take
ourselves less seriously over here.”
But this is just a theory, because when I ask him to introduce me to an ironic
English emo kid, as I ask all my music-biz friends to introduce me to real
live funny English emo kids, the first thing they all say is that no one
will admit to being emo.
Jon Hatfield, a 20-year-old guitarist in a metal band called Never Means
Maybe, says right away: “We are not an emo band but we do have the odd song
that would appeal to the emo crowd. I think emo is an extreme style and the
kids who dress it, like chavs, are used to being mocked so they don’t really
care. But generally, people who are emo will deny that they are emo, though
you get some who are emo and proud.”
Leaving me to ponder if it is a really nasty thing to “out” a closet emo. I
ring Andy Greenwald, author and emo champion, whose book Nothing Feels
Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers and Emo is an emo bible/primer for diehard
fans and novices such as myself. He has a great line on emo lyrics capturing
the marriage of sixth-form poetry, “no one really understands me” angst with
the shopping mall-based social lives of suburban emo fans: “It tends to come
off like Rimbaud relocated to the food court.”
Greenwald, who has toured with many emo bands, says that the emo lifestyle is
generally clean cut. “It is a way of living that comes from the bands
themselves. I could not have picked a duller genre in terms of spending time
on tour buses and not being able to get a beer. These guys don’t drink or
smoke or do drugs. They like comics and video games and art. And the kids
‘hang out’ in MySpace. If you live in the suburbs and don’t have a car, here
is this place where life goes on 24/7 and you are plugged into a community
immediately, and you have the freedom online to have a second, heroic
version of yourself.”
But that is not specific to emo, I argue, but to life online in general. What
is specific to it has grown from a subculture to something approaching
American mainstream, from little bands playing little clubs to giant emo
success stories — the band Dashboard Confessional is one, My Chemical
Romance is another — playing sellout arena tours because of the word on the
web.
“It is different from other movements such as punk because of the
egalitarian nature of it. It is a perfect storm of music that is comforting,
welcoming and wants to draw you in and make you feel better — and then the
great democratisation of subculture by the internet.”
Just how web-driven is emo? “One hundred per cent,” says Trevor Kelly,
co-author, with Leslie Simon, of an emo guide provisionally titled I
Second That Emotion. “These kids live online. They spend more time
online than they do at shows and record stores. There is an incredibly
popular band in the US called Panic! At The Disco. They got their big break
from posting an MP3 on Peter Wenz from his Fall Out Boys (another emo band)
blog. Within 18 months they had sold 500,000 records and were on MTV. This
would have never happened if emo types didn’t spend the majority of their
free time online.” But that doesn’t mean that emo kids sit in their room all
day on their own, crying, says Kelly. “The music is cathartic and all emo
fans seek out that very release. So does listening to emo music and going to
emo web chats encourage fans to wallow in self pity and despair, or cheer
them up in a strange ‘safety in numbers’ sort of way? That is, if this many
kids feel this bad, it must be ‘normal’.”
Leslie Simon says: “I think that the media has portrayed the fans as a bunch
of depressed misfits who worship a bunch of depressed cry-babies. That
couldn’t be further from the truth. Those who have spearheaded the movement
— mostly musicians and reluctant actors — have simply urged their followers
to express their emotions just as they have through words, art and music.”
When Michelle Malkin, an American conservative syndicated columnist, wrote
that emo is “associated with promoting the cutting culture” (cutting as in
wrists, not as in edgy) there was as a predicable pro-emo backlash.
Brendan Joel Kelly, a Phoenix-based music writer, says: “Emo, by definition,
is about pouring your emotions out. Cutters, I’ve learnt from talking to
some experts, don’t have an outlet for their emotions, an outlet like music,
like emo. So Malkin’s argument just doesn’t make sense.”
The night I fly out to New York to find out about emo, a friend’s band, My
Life Story, is playing a reunion gig in London. My Life Story are not emo,
per se, but my pals tell me that people were crying, really crying, en
masse, at the gig. Not angsty teens, but people in their thirties and
forties.
The singer Jake Shillingford does not find this unbearably weird. “Maybe they
were crying tears of joy?” he says. “But if you make emotive music and then
give it back to people for one night, and these songs are personal and
autobiographical, it’s like going through your shoebox of girlfriends’ old
letters: people will get emotional.”
Suddenly it all makes sense. I do buy the line — as suggested by pro-emo
people — that there is no causal relationship between emo and depression, or
cutting, or suicidal tendencies, but the really worrying thing is that more
kids in general are experiencing these things and some emo kids are perhaps
just a bit more open about it. It’s Oprah with power chords,
tight black jeans and piercings. Heaven knows they are miserable now, but I
suspect, like the overcoated Manchester miserablists of the 1980s, they will
get over it.
Emo girl
I became an emo because I like the fashion. We wear T-shirts with emo band
names or leopard-print tops and short denim skirts with coloured cropped
tights or drainpipe jeans. The shoes are either Converse, Vans, little dolly
shoes, pumps or leopard-print. Accessories would be hair bows or coloured
studded belts with big buckles. We also wear large beads on our wrists and
necks. The music we listen to is emo/screamo. They tend to scream down the
microphone rather than singing. I would not say I was depressed or
over-emotional but I am shy, so it is a way of expressing myself through my
clothes and make-up. It upsets me that other teenagers (chavs) will pick on
us for being different. It’s like the 1960s mods and rockers — now it’s emos
and chavs. There can be a lot of friction. I’m not sure why we’re such a
problem to those who aren’t emo. Perhaps they don’t understand us, but then
I am a teenager — who does?
Lauren Dixon, 15
Emo music — the forerunners
Gloomy Sunday
(1936)
Also known as the Hungarian suicide song. Recorded by a litany of gloomsters.
When It Rains, It Really Pours
Elvis Presley (1957)
Teenage heartache from Elvis.
Last Kiss
J. Frank Wilson (1964), Pearl Jam (1999)
Anguished car crash song based on a true story about a teenage girl who
died in a car accident on her first date.
My Generation
The Who (1965)
The original frustrated teenagers.
Paint It Black
Rolling Stones (1966)
Archetypal homage to being depressed.
Goodbye to Love
The Carpenters (1972)
A song once described as “Less a song than a suicide note with a musical
score”.
I Don’t Care
Ramones (1976)
“I don’t care about this world, I don’t care about that girl, I don’t
care.” Perhaps the most emo song . . . ever.
Love Will Tear Us Apart
Joy Division (1980)
A song about the breakdown of the lead singer's marriage, it came out a
few weeks before he killed himself.
Suffer Little Children
The Smiths (1982)
Emo-favourite Morrissey imagines himself as a Moors murder victim.
Current emo groups include:
Fall Out Boys, Panic! At the Disco, Funeral for a Friend. Taking Back Sunday,
Dashboard Confessional, Death Cab for Cutie, Bright Eyes, My Chemical
Romance, Simple Plan, Jimmy Eat World, The Get Up Kids.
FREE DOWNLOAD To hear a track from Fall Out Boys click here
How to spot an emo
- Make-up-stained eyes hiding behind thick gelled-down black hair.
- Black depressing clothes. Girls wear polka dots and ultra-tight, jet-black jeans.
Boys wear dark-coloured T-shirts with band names on them.
- Emos seem to like mutilating their bodies. Lip piercing is common, with
other facial and body piercings.
- Jet-black cheap hair extensions are often stuck on the back of girls’
hair.
- Black, thick-rimmed glasses frame the already eyeliner-drenched eyes.
- Leopard print is big on the emo scene. Leopard and zebra-print shoes and
bags.
- They tend to wander around with pained looks on their faces.
ROSIE PROWSE
