Emo on the March!, Major news outlets have their finger on the pulse

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Thunderclap

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It's Emo Armageddon, gentlemen. We all knew this day would come.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7425450.stm
They're outraged over their portrayal in newspapers and are planning to march on one tabloid's headquarters this weekend. But are emos a weird rock cult or as pleasant a group of teenagers as you're likely to meet?
You must have seen them, often clad in black, some in skinny jeans and converses, some in make-up - boys and girls alike.
These are emos, a gloomy if essentially non-violent youth tribe who revel in their outsider status and a particularly angst-laden brand of punk-pop.
While previous generation of bands, like the Smiths and Nirvana, may have also stood accused of wallowing in gloom, to the critics at least, the emo scene specialises in the kind of morbid lyrics that make Leonard Cohen sound like Sinitta.
Here is a passage from Dead! by emo superstars My Chemical Romance (MCR): "Have you heard the news that you're dead?/No-one ever had much nice to say/I think they never liked you anyway/Oh take me from the hospital bed."
Young Hearts Run Free it is not.
But emos have never gathered on Brighton Beach to ruck with mods or rockers. Emo fans instead emphasise their sensitivity and thoughtfulness - as one might expect with the "emotional" etymology of their name. Many belong to the "straight edge" sub-scene whose followers forsake drink and drugs.

Emo march
But the focus of bands like MCR, Dashboard Confessional and Fall Out Boy on inner torment and alienation from one's peers has unsettled many parents. The movement has provoked a flurry of press condemnation rarely seen since Johnny Rotten first publicly expressed his views on the British constitution.
On Saturday, hundreds of emos are planning to march on the Daily Mail's headquarters in protest at the newspaper's coverage of their subculture. The tabloid has labelled emo a "suicide cult" which glorifies self-harm and "romanticises death" - a charge vociferously denied by most emos.
As she knuckles down to prepare for her A-level exams, Kate Ashford, 17, from Tunbridge Wells in Kent, offers a less sinister explanation for the appeal of MCR.
The theatrical angst and drama of emo is, she suggests, no more than an outlet for a generation creaking under the weight of social expectation.
"Being a teenager has got to be so much more difficult these days," Kate says. "There's a lot more exams and pressure to get into university.
"Listening to a band like MCR is a cathartic thing. And I suppose emo style is meant to be about standing out, looking different - even if all the other emo kids are dressed the same as you."
Matthew Hirons, a 22-year-old web developer from Stourport-on-Severn, is even more phlegmatic. He suggests that the critics take the music far more seriously than the fans.
"People say emo is all about depression and suicide," he says. "But I'm a happy person. I've got a girlfriend and a good job. I just like the music and the fashion.
"I think anyone over 25 will find it hard to understand what it's all about. Even I'm a bit past it for an emo, to be honest."
Click to expand...

Check out this handy guide to the Emo wardrobe too.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7425450.stm#clothes
 
Spoiled Emo Brat said:
"Being a teenager has got to be so much more difficult these days," Kate says. "There's a lot more exams and pressure to get into university."
Click to expand...
So much worse that toiling away for more than 12 hours a day in a dangerous, unventelated factory and being paid next to nothing for it like during the industrial revolution.
 
didnt this come soon after the recent stabbing deaths of 2 emos? seems pretty shitty of them focusing the spotlight on the sub culture in light of these stabbings ..almost as if they're saying the oddball nature of the subculture brought about the stabbings ..although I could be barking up the wrong tree and the two events are unrelated
 
Emos vs Daily Mail?


Whoever wins, we win.
 
This thread made me realize how miserable my life is.
 
Neither of these outfits seems to have a clue. Maybe they'll cancel each other out, like division by zero. Also, this is an invitation for some emo-cide. Where are all the hicks when you need 'em?
 
Ten thousand spoons and all that.

I guess the real question is which side is the lesser evil here.

Maybe I'll make a placard and attend the march:
EMOS: I don't really like you very much but that is an aesthetic judgement which matters far less than the moral and political grudges I have against the Daily Mail. Right on
Click to expand...
 
WHEN I WAS

lol

See, I actually kind of like MCR tunewise but I honestly cringe at a fair plenty of their lyrics. Plus for me the dude's voice is almost too clear, and too pale, as if his lungs were not trying their hardest...back in my day there was none of this, when emo was actually a recent thing, you damn kids aren't doing anything new, do you know where the term even came from, grumble grumble grumble...

arms.gif


Wait. I'm getting nostalgic over a teenage phase that I never even liked, let alone contributed to? By damn. Where's me anti-wrinkle.

EDIT: His hair is also really bad. SCREW GERARD WAY'S HAIR.
 
''And I suppose emo style is meant to be about standing out, looking different - even if all the other emo kids are dressed the same as you."

There is something very, very wrong with this sentence.

BVIUDBVHBEFHVJBFDSKVBWDV

Emo was never about looking like anything! Different, the same... ****s sake, it was music! Back then there wasn't ANY pussyfooting around image, it was just music music music and christ on a bike do I wish I could of been born 20 years earlier sometimes.

It was a lite hardcore punk in the 80's/early 90's and hasn't had anything good to say for itself since. It's dead, and now a ****ing pleathoria of kids are lapping up what the media has claimed to be emo and are parading around using a good genres name as a clothing brand.

Feck off. Fugazi hates your face.
 
I seem to remember that the term itself began with a musical classification applying to softly-softly bands like Dashboard Confessional and suchlike. And then it got extrapolated into a slightly changed form of the grunge that was around back then (eg Finch). And then...well, etc.

EDIT: Oh lol. I'm watching the video for 'Famous Last Words', and...hey...hey Gerard. You can't look like a skull if you've got a fat face.

I should know.

- Fatface McMuggins
 
See, that's the thing that confuses me - emo was never softly-softly. I'm listening to Fugazi right now and it's like being sandpapered. Sandpapered by AWESOME, but it's gritty, rough and angry stuff that makes me struggle to see how anyone could lump what they were doing with the genre to what the supposed ''emo'' bands of today are doing.

Basically, it's no one has heard of the old emo bands or heard any of their music, which is really dissapointing and annoying, and in turn, they're throwing this word about like it's something new.

Frustrating, but what can you do, huh? Guess I'll just pretend I'm at a Funersl Diner concert and kick the shit out of my room.

;(
 
I just did some research, which is to say that I looked on wikipedia, and I guess in a sense we're both right. Because 'emo' as it is understood nowadays - and come, when the Fugazi dude himself has disowned the term, why define it in the past sense? - is a brand, partly created in the same spontaeneous social-osmosis way that all genre and fashion classifications are created, but also constituted, more than ever, as a marketing device, as a popularly recognised (thus vague) category, and subsequently as a fashion sense, even, somewhat absurdly, a 'movement'. To an extent it's melded with 'Pop Punk', which apparently these days means the popular post-grunge stuff of my early teenage years.

Although the term 'emo' was used early, it seems I was on the money when it came to the roots of its modern usage - it got reapplied to a sort of newer "Confessional" brand of post-pop-grunge-punk-rock-whatever, supplanting the "whatever!" brattiness and skate sensibilities that had prevailed with what was perceived to be a more honest, and indeed more self-absorbed, style. I think that's important, the transition from bratty irreverence, even spite, to an almost painful earnestness. It's the difference between United States of Whatever and I'm Not Okay. That's how 'emo' got to apply to bands that might not actually share much with the bands that used to be called that. Although maybe it makes sense to draw a parallel with the mid-80s transition from hardcore to emocore.

This must incense you, me attempting a genealogy of Sum 41, Jimmy Eats World and Dashboard. :p

EDIT: I REQUEST VALIDATION OF MY CONCLUSIONS> SUCH CONTENTIOUS JUDGEMENTS REQUIRE INFORMAL PEER REVIEW
 
/shrug

Honestly, what angers me most is everyone that just walks around claiming their ''emo'' because of the clothes they wear. How the term emo has progressed over the last 20 years is questionable - on the one hand, it's changed so much over that amount of time that I struggle to see how it remains named the same, but on the other hand, the bands in the 'middle ground', like Finch and Dashboard, were pretty powerful in terms of expression and song-writing, and I can sort of see how they can be slipped under the genre name, but still...

But then I listen to Fallout Boy and MCR and I just hear garbage with **** all heart to it and even less power or energy, and those, to me, are what make an emo band.

Eh.
 
I actually kinda like MCR. They're fun sometimes. But I cannot regard them as much more than that.
 
To me, they haven't got that raw kick to them that I've always regarded emo to be all about which is why the whole thing puzzles me so. Instead, they've got a horrible rich and far-too-polished feel to them that hasn't got energy to it at all. It feels like it was all made over a long peroid of time with a lot of practising and a lot of editing gone towards it which I wouldn't class as emotional at all as it doesn't sound from the heart. It's prefrences, though, and obviously some people will think it does sound like such and such but I'm going to stay in my box and continue to rant at passerbys who think otherwise.
 
Well, what you said right there is why I can't find 'em anything more than "fun sometimes". There's just no immediacy. :p
 
Yeah, I got what you meant. :p Admittidly, the amount of times I've half-sang/half-mocked Fallout Boy whilst drunk in a club... it can be fun, aye, just something I could never listen to straight faced.
 
Perhaps they just died out at mine. I live in a district that is really small, so maybe that's why.
 
I'm not a fan of the emo subculture.
Though bashing them just makes the 'movement' stronger (only in the metaphorical sense as they are typically physically weak :D)

Everyone is quick to point out the irony of them all claiming to be outsiders but all being the same, it is a psychological need to feel socially accepted and so they all use the fact that societey looks down on them to generate a 'us and them' mentality.


NeptuneUK says: Stop being arseholes to the emos, they ****ing feed off it! The day the world stops paying attention to them is the day they become obsolete.
Let's hope this demise will be swift in order to replace the emo subculture with one that uses less shitty music as an outlet.
















PS

MCR don't have shit on nirvana - 90s forever!





(Born in the wrong decade :() Seriously mainstream music progressively gets worse as time continues, and so do the associated cultures. Next decade we will have teenagers listening to even WORSE music and being pains in the ass - we will miss the emos of our time! If I thought I was going to live to grow old, I'd save this post, look back on it and chuckle at how right I was! Haha
 
musiclc0.jpg




For someone who is names Van Halen, note the graph.
Neptune science FTW!
 
^^wrong you just listen to shit music. Also emos are more so a style of clothing rather than actually emo. Some of them might be but the majority of emo kids only dress that way. This thread further proves their point that people really don't understand them and make ingorant sweeping generalizations that simply aren't true and puts them in bad light.

Also neptune if you know anything about the "emo" culture a lot of them listen to underground music and also hate mainstream music.
 
The irony and hypocrisy!
Anyone who, for the most part, dislikes most mainstream music must be an emo?? Or were you not suggesting that?
Emo is a mainstream subculture now, and 'emo' music that the 'emos' listen to isn't actually emo music at all. I am very aware of this.


Emo's tend to listen to whiny pop-punk bands. Let's re-name them to something more appropriate (use some imagination)
These whiny pop-punk bands are all too mainstream, along with whatever style pop music is trying to be these days. 99% of it is utter shite.
 
Graph is wrong and full of hysteria.

Glirk Dient said:
Also neptune if you know anything about the "emo" culture a lot of them listen to underground music
Click to expand...
Like what? When I was younger I thought I was being anti-music-establishment by listening to Sum 41. Problem: I wasn't.
 
neptuneuk said:
For someone who is names Van Halen, note the graph.
Neptune science FTW!
Click to expand...

K... not sure exactly what that's supposed to mean, but if you're dissing van halen, all I have to say is **** you. It's my belief that van halen rules, and I never criticized your beliefs, but if you want my humble opinion, I think that Emos need to grow the **** up. Life sucks, but we all have to live it. Crying about how much it sucks just keys people into the fact that you're a lifeless tw*t.

and if you're not dissing music then that chart is incredibly stupid, and you still have no clue wtf you are talking about. With the exception of Hair metal, music in the 80's was top par. If you ever heard of Van halen's 1984, 5150, and OU812 you would know that.

Ohh, btw, I said all this as lightly as I could.
 
The 'let's take everything too seriously and look like a complete muppet' award goes to?
The graph was made before you even posted, I was cheekily referring to the dip in music awesomeness coinciding with the 80s you tool!


If I was a randomer on the internets and saw a graph ending in a scribbled explosion going 'oshit!!1' I would be very unlikely to take it seriously.



This leads me to my next scientific observation:
(The graph begins on the day 4chan is introduced)

36835922gq8.jpg




Back on topic:

Emo!!! Boo-hiss *generalisation!*
*Stereotype!!*
 
neptuneuk said:
The 'let's take everything too seriously and look like a complete muppet' award goes to?
The graph was made before you even posted, I was cheekily referring to the dip in music awesomeness coinciding with the 80s you tool!


If I was a randomer on the internets and saw a graph ending in a scribbled explosion going 'oshit!!1' I would be very unlikely to take it seriously.
Click to expand...

...k... That makes perfect sense? What do you want me to say? You were obviously referring to me...

And I did take it seriously because I wasn't thinking and I didn't realize that nobody is lifeless enough to make a chart insulting someone's post...

Anyways, I understood what the chart meant, i may take things too seriously, but I'm not an idiot. ;)
 
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