angst rock vs techno rave

[wangcomputers]

This is my attempt to dispel the evil that ihaman (raver dude) has cast upon us.
I cover what has plagued us for years and i make wild sweeping statements of self-righteousness. Just like my friend, ihaman.

Music:
“angst rock.”
So why does it suck? perhaps the bland riff-based song structures.
Not enough variation?

“techno rave”
practically no variation.
200 bpm + synth = what exactly?
and no such identification. Pure and simple.. Or empty?
I’ve had an attempt at making both types of music. One was far easier.

People:
(broad generalisation time.)
You can imagine it being the difference between pill-poppers and dope smokers.
I’ve had the opportunity to socialise with both.. ravers don’t seem as intelligent, but it’s not surprising. Making a choice of music for pure reasons of quick fix satisfaction over substance and content is a natural consequence.

And “fashion” is pretty subjective.. ties, spike studded wrist bands vs whistles and fluorescent wristbands? I guess it’s a draw.
But the ‘emo’ look, as ihaman ridiculed, has to be preferable to both of those two.


Content:
maybe it's the mere notion that lyrics are written for the sole purpose of relating to teenagers. I envisage written on a Linkin Park website somewhere, "i love you! you helped me get through my parents divorce with that 'Somewhere I Belong' song.", just as billy helped you. http://forums.netphoria.org/wwwboard/icons/icon10.gif

“angst”
-a feeling of anxiety, apprehension, or insecurity

we get annoyed with people and their bleeding hearts, acting like drama queens. But in fact, there’s nothing wrong with angst. It’s a fundamental expression of emotion conveyed in the most acclaimed artistic and literary works created.
A contrast with rave music, which is devoid of any real subject matter or emotion..unless superficial expressions of happiness count.
But I wonder if that superficiality is any greater than that of angst rock..
Perhaps this comparison is more akin to a happiness vs sadness debate.
Over time, i think you will agree that depression has attached a greater symbolism. Shakespeare’s tragic tales an epitomic example. There is no substantial artistic integrity in happiness. Perhaps agent smith was right about beings defining their reality through misery suffering.
Happiness seems shallow.

Maybe it’s as simple as the fact that we don’t like being jealous of people having more fun than us.
We’d rather listen to someone who’s in more pain than ourselves to make us feel better.


But y’know,
Ultimately while these things are bad, and i’m not really a spokesman for emo, I still submit that it has more musical and artistic merit than anything you'll hear in Ihaman’s music of choice: 200 bpm + fruity loops.

Shit, i think it’s live journal time.

[Toby]

Well put!

[noyen]

Songs about girls sung by boys (and vice versa) with the need to purge - it's an idea about as old as music itself. Or so I thought. Apparently not, according to the way some folks foist such virtues onto a brand of music that is referred to as ‘emo,’ or ‘emotional-core’ if you're not into shorthand.
Jimmy Eat World, Get Up Kids and Samiam are labelled as emo these days. Indian Summer, Native Nod, Navio Forge, Rites of Spring and Fugazi are also labelled as emo. The former group of bands can be vaguely gathered underneath an umbrella of melodic punk with pop hooks. The latter group of bands have sounds that build to momentous walls of guitar and voice. Where do the two groups meet? Nowhere, as far as I can tell.


When and where?

If one is to go in search of where the emo aesthetic sprung from, one can find groups and artists from fields as diverse as stadium rock and twee pop experimenting with pushing up the emotional content of music and lyrics. Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska is one of the most intensely personal records in history and is, thus, regarded by some as a forebear to the emo aesthetic. A friend also suggested to me recently that Jackson Browne and David Johansen both released albums and songs that come under a pre-emo emo categorisation. In the same line, Kiss' inclusion of piano ballad "Beth" on their Destroyer album of 1976 was a bold move for a stadium rock band.

Moving closer to the era, however, emo as a genre term can be traced back to the mid-1980’s. Husker Du released a sprawling 23-track album in 1984, Zen Arcade, which falls under the proto-emo tag. That album delivered personal lyrics with an eclectic, but always melodic, punk backing and intense vocals. Husker Du had nailed the sound of pure adolescent angst.

According to spiralling myths, Rites of Spring, the band known for being a pre-Fugazi project of Guy Piccioto, were playing a show in the same year, during which an audience member shouted 'emo' (although, another branch of the emo etymology suggests that the term was first used in an interview with Ian MacKaye). While this audience shout is a dubious root from which to spawn an entire genre term, it was, to some extent, an accurate description of what was taking place on the stage before him/her. Rites of Spring are the proto-emo band: purveyors of a sound combination that was intensely emotional. Even now, when the term has been cheapened by commercial and critical appropriation, it is an apt description of Rites of Spring's combination of the surging and turbulent maelstrom of D.C. punk and hardcore with the intensely personal adolescent lyrical musings of Guy Piccioto. At times ("Drink Deep," "All Through A Life"), the band took the bold move to slow down to standard rock pace, leaving behind the punk rhythms of the scene that they had grown from. More than anything, this allowed their songs more room to breathe: the music became less urgent and the impassioned howl of the vocals came to the fore.

From the very start, however, there was a rift between the D.C. hardcore scene and the burgeoning emo scene. Where the hardcore scene prided itself on outward looking lyrics, emo was looking inward to focus on affairs of the heart or the personal situations that propelled self-pity and melancholy (loneliness, relationship problems and friendship problems). Nevertheless, these early emo bands became central to what became known as the "DC Sound" - an equally contentious term.

From the hard-edged but melodic sound of Rites of Spring (who still sound exciting and surprisingly accessible today), a harsher form of emo was spawned. This first split within the genre became one of the primary arguments against the use of the emo term - the two sounds were quite different, and yet they retained the same term for their description. Some have suggested that the early style with its obscured pop hooks, smoother vocals and mid-tempo rhythms - Rites of Spring, Embrace and Hot Water Music, for example - should be termed "emocore."

The music that "emocore" eventually turned out is to be called "emo". Confused yet? This harsher "emo" is a lot darker with more extreme dynamics - shifting from lilting, quiet, arpeggio guitar picking to blood-pumping climaxes that crash and flail like the world is about to end and all the band need is one more cathartic musical orgasm. When done well, there is no doubting that this form of music is brutally powerful. The better proponents of this emo branch are groups like Indian Summer, Moss Icon, Native Nod, Hoover, Navio Forge, Shotmaker and Unwound.

From here, the hardcore and emo scenes collided for "hardcore emo". Starting in the early 90s, this is a chaotic and cathartic ride through some of the most extreme emotions that the human spirit can conjure. As the hardcore name suggests, this is emo pushed to the limit - faster, harder, louder. The result? An intense, sometimes bordering on unlistenable, wall-of-sound that would shock Phil Spector. Guitars are at times atonal, the rhythms are too fast to be discernible and the vocals can sound like an approximation of the primal, untempered yelp one would give when being mutilated without anaesthetic. Some of the better bands that 'played' this style *******: Swing Kids, Heroin, Antioch Arrow and Mohinder.

Beyond this there are 'post-emo' bands like Mineral and Sunny Day Real Estate. These bands basically withdrew the punky elements of the early emocore and gave emo an expansive, epic scope with dizzying climaxes and walls of melodic, affecting guitar. Interestingly, these bands take in elements of indie rock as much as they do the elements of emo. Early and influential indie groups like Sebadoh and Buffalo Tom can be heard in most of this post-emo music (check out Deep Elm's roster for a whole swathe of the indie-inspired emo stuff). We're even reaching the point now of ridiculous hyphenation: post-post-emo could well be upon us, with bands like The Gloria Record and recent Appleseed Cast using some elements of indie, post-emo and shoegazer to bring together an evermore accessible sound.


Case Studies

As with all genres, some groups take on significance beyond what would have seemed like their natural tenure. For emo, it's Indian Summer (and I don't mean the 1970’s dandies) - a band that have grown in stature and regard after their premature break-up in 1994. Releasing only a few seven-inch vinyl singles (compiled posthumously onto a discography CD) and a rare CD version of a live-on-the-radio set during their brief career, it undoubtedly seemed like 'just another band' for the members at the time - and I can't comment fully as I too came in late for the full Indian Summer experience - but their influence and audience have grown greatly since their split. The live record shows the splintered, fractured beauty that such music can be the captain of - steering quiet, frail, angular guitar lines to relentless masses of power chord noise and primal vocal cacophony for towering climaxes. The lyrics are indecipherable, but you get the feeling there is a lot of pain behind these songs. It's not just the kind about the cute boy-girl couple that watch videos with each other on the weekend - it's more the kind of deep psychological pain that could push them in other bizarre directions without musical catharsis.

Compare and contrast this with Get Up Kids. They play accessible and catchy punky-pop music with lyrics that make you go "aww" or uplift you or, if they're being particularly sappy, may make you want to vomit. I'm not diminishing Get Up Kids worth merely because they're sloppily labelled emo by a daft bunch of folks. Far from that, Get Up Kids helped me through a period in my life when cutesy lyrics and fuzzy feelings were appreciated a lot of the time. Their live show too was an amazing experience purely for their physicality and liveliness. My contention: are Get Up Kids any more emotional than say, Nirvana? Not particularly - but for some reason it appears that they became poster children for the late rush of emodom. Their pop-punk stylings have now influenced an innumerable number of new, young bands to let go of the immature humor associated with the Fat Wreck label and focus on more personal issues. While it's admirable to have driven some bands to a slightly deeper lyrical level, a lot of these bands are embarrassing rehashings of what are now emo cliches: octave chords; an acoustic song; 'ironic,' cheesy keyboard lines; moody photography and cover designs overloaded with 'abstract,' purely arbitrary lines and circles.


But Why?

There is an obvious question to ask here - why did this musical form resonate and grip those who listen to it? As with all art, people find different things in a composition, but emo seemed to resonate via the lyrics, angst and anguish that speaks to teenagers (and any other willing listeners) around the world. That's not to say that without this outlet or form of expression these teens would have been bottled up balls of hormonal rage - but it is to say that there's a certain warmth and comfort in recognizing that folks have experienced similar circumstances to what you are feeling. Whether it's the self-conscious kids who attend the shows forming a supportive pseudo-community or the loner pouring over lyrics in their bedroom, there's an unmistakably human edge to some emo.

That said, tales of woe in love and life are the lyrical fodder for artists the world over and, as has been said many times before, some emo lyrics could easily pass for bad Celine Dion impersonators ("stars are out tonight / and you're the brightest one shining in my sky / it's like every wish I ever made came true / the day I woke up lying next to you") or - worse yet - angsty, obtuse bedroom-drawer teen-poetry wisdom ("I could write you a song, send you a note, or empty out your trash and buy a bucket full of diamonds but even the most beautiful of all roses must someday crumble and turn to dust" [note: yes, that is one lyric line]). Clearly then, music plays some part of the attraction to this music. The many flavours of emo make it hard to pin down a definition of The Emo Sound. In the most vague terms, however, emo music has a spiralling structure that relies on large, crescendo-ish climaxes that usually play off against a quieter and more reflective passage - a juxtaposition that, in the most rudimentary and reductive analysis imaginable, is suggestive of the fickle and fraught nature of humanity. Again though, this structure is paralleled in the very same tearjerkers of Celine Dion.


Now it gets personal

This is why I believe it becomes important to delineate emo as a genre - so as to dispel and remove it from the midst of such clichéd, heart-tugging dross as that of top 40 balladeering. At its core, I believe emo to be about extremes of emotion and the expression of that emotion via musical forms. For this reason, I wish to displace latter-day attempts to bring bands like Saves The Day, Get Up Kids, Promise Ring and Jimmy Eat World into the emo fold. Some of those bands' early work reached the musical extremes I spoke about, but all these groups are now mere imitations of the genre. They are pop-punk bands with lyrics about cute girls or friends. That is not emo. It never was emo, and to label those bands as such is to give entirely the wrong impression. Emo is Indian Summer. Emo is Navio Forge. Emo is Rites of Spring. If you want a grasp of the genre, listen to these bands and notice why they are not Celine-Dion-for-the-'underground.' Celine wouldn't let out primal, guttural yelps like Guy does for Rites of Spring. Celine would do an acoustic ballad like Get Up Kids or Saves The Day. This is the difference.


But what about the children?

Of course, I shed a tear for the unwitting; the folks who've come along late and missed all the early classes informing us hardened indie rock professionals about the perils of emo, how the genre formed, how it played out and how it died.

That's right, died. Emo is dead. See for yourself - hold your fingers up to the neck of the corpse and check the pulse. Nary raising a flutter. Like all good, once innovative genres - punk, blues, country - there are but a few struggling bastions today.

There is an emerging trend in emo now for the teaming up of math-rock dynamics (shifting time signatures and rhythms) with the melodic guitar and vocal work of previous emo. The better bands pushing such a sound are the Casket Lottery and Hey Mercedes - At The Drive In were, to some extent, doing similar things on this level. That said though, a lot of this mathy noodling does come out like toned down Don Caballero or Drive Like Jehu, and fails to really take advantage of these interesting dynamics.

For the most part, however, emo is now a sad and frail representation of what it once was. Today it has degenerated into a vile and vapid scene of vacuous individuals, more worried about the tightness of overpriced 'punk rock' t-shirts than it is about musical innovation and new forms of expression. When music becomes fashion (see 'emo' articles in various U.S. teen-girl magazines), music has lost its worth and power. More than that, critics are to blame for going into emo overdrive. Any song with an affecting use of octave chords was emo and any band on an indie label (like Vagrant, or Emotaph as Buddyhead call it) with cute boys singing about cute girls was emo. It's almost laughable.

Of course the real meaning behind words and genre names are always contentious and misleading - the R&B of 40 years ago was a long way from the R&B of today - but emo, the undeniably vague term that it is, is now being appropriated for all the wrong purposes. Like most things, it's better to know your history before you go throwing terms about the place with abandon. Think about it first, folks.


Post-mortem

Emo was exciting once, but now it's a rotting corpse. The swarm of corporate major-label vultures have come to pick at the bones and for the new bands it's as easy as following the formula for punk-pop emo. In the words of Refused, it's time for new noise.

[Thoughtless]

those are both good reads

[wangcomputers]

Originally posted by noyen

nice article.

but emo's dead? that sucks, i bet it was ihaman's fault.

actually, I hadn't even heard of that term till I came to this messageboard.

[Ihaman]

the new angst rock, and why it sucks.
I remember being in the age range of the target market for this type of music, i dressed dark or black clothing, dyed my hair, and expressed a general introvert attitude towards life in general. Not saying those things are bad i go on to catch a memory of the music i listened to during that era.
Mostly the smashing pumpkins, who's powerful lyrics and melodies not only drove me to help realize who i am today, but found out that i knew i could relate to the music on a superficial level, and also relate to it on a deep, spiritual level.
Fast foward a couple of years, my love for nine inch nails soon sprouted into a love for other electronically influenced music. Portishead, God Lives Underwater, Air, Massive Attack, etc etc etc. which...lacked what the music beforehand had (a lot of the time real instruments) they did have what the othe bands didnt have, and that was a genuine, original atmosphere behind them, with subjects of music i've yet to be exposed to..things like one man poisoning an entire population, or hearing the vibrations coming out of someone's mouth, despite the fact they were deaf, taught me that music could not only be related to on a level, but also tell an incredible story with it's own setting and outcome to be determined by the listener. This excited me for a very long time and i delved deeper inside of it and soon got introduced to the rave scene....which, to say the least, sucked. The music being played at these things was unoriginal and mind-bendingly-retarded. So i took some drugs! (acid) and danced around for a bit....which i found to be generally unproductive.
so i wandered off from the main dancefloor into the "jungle room". and what i heard then has made a dramatic impact on the type of music i still abide by.
Inside of this jungle room there was an amazing track being played by the dj, an atmospheric rumbling who's melody seemed to travel at a very fast rate through spacetime. While all of this happened, an MC got on the microphone and begin to freestyle, singing about the vibe and the people, jungle, dancing, and the beat. I was hooked.
This opened up my mind into new and greater genres of music...i later veered away from rumbling or "dark" jungle and found happiness in a place named "atmospheric" jungle, which was greatly influenced by a popping jazz movement (see journey inwards - ltj bukem) and instead of taking away classic intrumentation with electronic music, amplified it and turned it into things it couldnt possibly be without the help of digitally altering it. things like complex drum patterns mixed with air instruments and scat-jazz...all while mainting a very deep psychedelic feel....allowing me to infiltrate my mind and come up with more than a "feeling emulator" that i was so used to being exposed to in modern music. This was pure unadultrated emotion being put into this music, with a dj taking everyone on a very concievable non-stop journey allowing people to translate the wordless music into soulful body movements.

now, going back to the music i had previously enjoyed before this all happened, it all seemed very shallow. Words like "nothingness" mixed with "pain, anger, sorrow, resentment" and "bitterness" all seemed very fabricated, how could someone feel like this when there is so much to be found in the world that is good? without the need to rely on others to obtain it.
the people who were dwelling on these myths of life, that they were stuck with these superficial feelings, as opposed to the deep and meaningful ones i was being exposed to last time i checked into this genre...these were the ones the artists didnt need to say because i already knew...through the music and the cries of the artist, that he was feeling these things.
why hadn't they expressed them on a deeper level, like the artists of before? what is that dj? the shepherd of another amazing culture, doing in that band? HE should know....what's going on?
i ignorned it, until i saw the people who listened to it and finally understood that they hadn't discovered music on a deep and spiritual level, they were the ones who were emotion factories with no hope...how could they relate to this music? how come when i ask them if they like the smashing pumpkins, or soundgarden, or stone temple pilots they laughed in my face?
was i just as bad then, as they are now?
i dont think i was.

*shrugs*

[Ihaman]

Originally posted by wangcomputers
“techno rave”
practically no variation.
200 bpm + synth = what exactly?
and no such identification. Pure and simple.. Or empty?
I’ve had an attempt at making both types of music. One was far easier.

i have no idea what genre "techno rave" is, but im assuming you're casting in on the general area of "NRG" which i dont listen to, mijito.

i'd LOVE to see you try and produce a song that is better than any dj shadow, or ltj bukem (journey inwards) song.

and as far as your "no emotion" part, i'd like to see you say the same about jazz. "happy" and "sad" are pretty much the only explanations of the music you're going to get....does that make it a less valid genre of music?

[wangcomputers]

hey my ignorance and generalisations of techno were only meant to compete with your own ones regarding angst and emo.

i explained that at the beginning.

i actually like a lot of intelligent dance music, but i just had a problem with your recent slating of emo culture and angst music when your own rave culture and music is definitely no better.

[Ihaman]

Originally posted by wangcomputers
hey my ignorance and generalisations of techno were only meant to compete with your own ones regarding angst and emo.

i explained that at the beginning.

i actually like a lot of intelligent dance music, but i just had a problem with your recent slating of emo culture and angst music when your own rave culture and music is definitely no better.

i never made fun of emo music, just the funny people who live by it, and the only angsty bands i was making fun of were linkin park and disturbed...which is very obvious why.

[plastic haircut]

ok first both you guys are idiots (wang and ihaman).

in ihaman's defense his "rave" music is far more innovative than emo or "angst" music. emo as, stated in the very detailed essay by the dude who wrote practically a book, is essentiatally derivative pop punk or hardcore (which is metal, sorry). basically just changed lyrically and slightly (very slightly) musically.

"rave" music while i'm not sure if your talking about trance, jungle, idm (the stupidest term ever just say experimental please), electro (don't say clash), house, acid jazz, and i guess nrg (never heard that one before) at least are more daring in their sonic pallettes. while these have there roots in krautrock, kraftwerk, and even donna summer ("i feel love" is regarded as the first trance song). it's still something relatively new in the scope of musical history. yes most of the beats are pretty generic, but generic in the terms of overdone, just like the four four, but the sounds and the bpm are a lot fresher (timeline wise) than the drum tracks of emo or "angst". there is also endless possiblility for sound alteration when composing music on a computer instead of a guitar (there's only so many pedals). yes it's often cold, yes it's often boring, yes it's often mindless, but not always. people like matmos and aphex twin still try. there's also occasionally fresh spins on things (herbert's "bodily functions" for example uses all body sounds in the compostion of house music, also checkout afuken's "my way" which uses micro sampling to compose house music and other electronic music).

now to ihaman to say jungle is anymore exciting than say trance or house is a bit dumb. were you peaking on you "trip" when you entered the life altering tent. while jungle does have neat drum patterns, like trance or house it takes about ten songs with the basically the same pattern to get sick of it. i also don't see how this can be any more emotional to you. pretty much all electronic music is cold. i listen to it to take a break and escape the world of same chord changes that exist in rock music. i've never felt anything really listening to this music except occasional excitement when something tickles my ear in a new way. rock's where the warmth is. also if you consider stone temple pilot's a good band, or for that matter soundgarden, i'm sorry. i think all that acid's messing you up man.

essentially all music sucks, because as soon as a "genre" is born it gets fed past midnight and a bunch of shitty bastards are spawned that ruin everything.

eveything semi-worthwhile is co-opted by ad agency's who sand of the edges and send it via our monopolistic media outlets to sell us crap we didn't know we wanted.

meanwhile you can't help but to feel a little angry if you were on the forefront because, like with music for example, something you hold dear is stirpped, raped, and beaten and left in a dark alley after the pseudo-culture vultures have picked the corpse clean.

not that i'm a "trendsetter", but i've seen this happen very many times to things i was into and took shit for being into because at that moment it wasn't cool. skateboarding for instance. it gets old when your in high school and people think your weird because you skate because that's "something that kid's do". now thanks to skateboarding totino's pizza roll sales are probably through the roof (mr. hawk did bust his ass for a long time though so i don't blame him for trying to make a buck).

eventually you have to get to the point where you laugh at it all, getting mad really solves nothing. so i see the kids in the flourescent garb, trash bag size pants, pacifier in mouth, vaseline on there face, x tab dissolving into their nervous system and laugh. i see the kid who needs a haircut, with his tight jeans, and thursday t-shirt and laugh. i see the kid with his skate shoes average size jeans, and linkin park t-shirt and laugh. that's all you can do. don't roll your eyes you probably were that kid back in the day, you thought you were cool because mtv said so. i was that kid (especially when skateboarding was in it's hip hop face, man did i look the fool). american culture sucks, modern music sucks pretty bad, emo sucks, "rave" music sucks, "angst" music sucks. so your attempts at my dad can be up your dad musical arguments are fruiltess. delve deeper into the creases (spelling?) eat what meats still left on the bones of the corpse. i'll see you next saturday at hot topic.

don't believe the hype.

[plastic haircut]

Originally posted by noyen
Songs about girls sung by boys (and vice versa) with the need to purge - it's an idea about as old as music itself. Or so I thought. Apparently not, according to the way some folks foist such virtues onto a brand of music that is referred to as ‘emo,’ or ‘emotional-core’ if you're not into shorthand.
Jimmy Eat World, Get Up Kids and Samiam are labelled as emo these days. Indian Summer, Native Nod, Navio Forge, Rites of Spring and Fugazi are also labelled as emo. The former group of bands can be vaguely gathered underneath an umbrella of melodic punk with pop hooks. The latter group of bands have sounds that build to momentous walls of guitar and voice. Where do the two groups meet? Nowhere, as far as I can tell.


When and where?

If one is to go in search of where the emo aesthetic sprung from, one can find groups and artists from fields as diverse as stadium rock and twee pop experimenting with pushing up the emotional content of music and lyrics. Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska is one of the most intensely personal records in history and is, thus, regarded by some as a forebear to the emo aesthetic. A friend also suggested to me recently that Jackson Browne and David Johansen both released albums and songs that come under a pre-emo emo categorisation. In the same line, Kiss' inclusion of piano ballad "Beth" on their Destroyer album of 1976 was a bold move for a stadium rock band.

Moving closer to the era, however, emo as a genre term can be traced back to the mid-1980’s. Husker Du released a sprawling 23-track album in 1984, Zen Arcade, which falls under the proto-emo tag. That album delivered personal lyrics with an eclectic, but always melodic, punk backing and intense vocals. Husker Du had nailed the sound of pure adolescent angst.

According to spiralling myths, Rites of Spring, the band known for being a pre-Fugazi project of Guy Piccioto, were playing a show in the same year, during which an audience member shouted 'emo' (although, another branch of the emo etymology suggests that the term was first used in an interview with Ian MacKaye). While this audience shout is a dubious root from which to spawn an entire genre term, it was, to some extent, an accurate description of what was taking place on the stage before him/her. Rites of Spring are the proto-emo band: purveyors of a sound combination that was intensely emotional. Even now, when the term has been cheapened by commercial and critical appropriation, it is an apt description of Rites of Spring's combination of the surging and turbulent maelstrom of D.C. punk and hardcore with the intensely personal adolescent lyrical musings of Guy Piccioto. At times ("Drink Deep," "All Through A Life"), the band took the bold move to slow down to standard rock pace, leaving behind the punk rhythms of the scene that they had grown from. More than anything, this allowed their songs more room to breathe: the music became less urgent and the impassioned howl of the vocals came to the fore.

From the very start, however, there was a rift between the D.C. hardcore scene and the burgeoning emo scene. Where the hardcore scene prided itself on outward looking lyrics, emo was looking inward to focus on affairs of the heart or the personal situations that propelled self-pity and melancholy (loneliness, relationship problems and friendship problems). Nevertheless, these early emo bands became central to what became known as the "DC Sound" - an equally contentious term.

From the hard-edged but melodic sound of Rites of Spring (who still sound exciting and surprisingly accessible today), a harsher form of emo was spawned. This first split within the genre became one of the primary arguments against the use of the emo term - the two sounds were quite different, and yet they retained the same term for their description. Some have suggested that the early style with its obscured pop hooks, smoother vocals and mid-tempo rhythms - Rites of Spring, Embrace and Hot Water Music, for example - should be termed "emocore."

The music that "emocore" eventually turned out is to be called "emo". Confused yet? This harsher "emo" is a lot darker with more extreme dynamics - shifting from lilting, quiet, arpeggio guitar picking to blood-pumping climaxes that crash and flail like the world is about to end and all the band need is one more cathartic musical orgasm. When done well, there is no doubting that this form of music is brutally powerful. The better proponents of this emo branch are groups like Indian Summer, Moss Icon, Native Nod, Hoover, Navio Forge, Shotmaker and Unwound.

From here, the hardcore and emo scenes collided for "hardcore emo". Starting in the early 90s, this is a chaotic and cathartic ride through some of the most extreme emotions that the human spirit can conjure. As the hardcore name suggests, this is emo pushed to the limit - faster, harder, louder. The result? An intense, sometimes bordering on unlistenable, wall-of-sound that would shock Phil Spector. Guitars are at times atonal, the rhythms are too fast to be discernible and the vocals can sound like an approximation of the primal, untempered yelp one would give when being mutilated without anaesthetic. Some of the better bands that 'played' this style *******: Swing Kids, Heroin, Antioch Arrow and Mohinder.

Beyond this there are 'post-emo' bands like Mineral and Sunny Day Real Estate. These bands basically withdrew the punky elements of the early emocore and gave emo an expansive, epic scope with dizzying climaxes and walls of melodic, affecting guitar. Interestingly, these bands take in elements of indie rock as much as they do the elements of emo. Early and influential indie groups like Sebadoh and Buffalo Tom can be heard in most of this post-emo music (check out Deep Elm's roster for a whole swathe of the indie-inspired emo stuff). We're even reaching the point now of ridiculous hyphenation: post-post-emo could well be upon us, with bands like The Gloria Record and recent Appleseed Cast using some elements of indie, post-emo and shoegazer to bring together an evermore accessible sound.


Case Studies

As with all genres, some groups take on significance beyond what would have seemed like their natural tenure. For emo, it's Indian Summer (and I don't mean the 1970’s dandies) - a band that have grown in stature and regard after their premature break-up in 1994. Releasing only a few seven-inch vinyl singles (compiled posthumously onto a discography CD) and a rare CD version of a live-on-the-radio set during their brief career, it undoubtedly seemed like 'just another band' for the members at the time - and I can't comment fully as I too came in late for the full Indian Summer experience - but their influence and audience have grown greatly since their split. The live record shows the splintered, fractured beauty that such music can be the captain of - steering quiet, frail, angular guitar lines to relentless masses of power chord noise and primal vocal cacophony for towering climaxes. The lyrics are indecipherable, but you get the feeling there is a lot of pain behind these songs. It's not just the kind about the cute boy-girl couple that watch videos with each other on the weekend - it's more the kind of deep psychological pain that could push them in other bizarre directions without musical catharsis.

Compare and contrast this with Get Up Kids. They play accessible and catchy punky-pop music with lyrics that make you go "aww" or uplift you or, if they're being particularly sappy, may make you want to vomit. I'm not diminishing Get Up Kids worth merely because they're sloppily labelled emo by a daft bunch of folks. Far from that, Get Up Kids helped me through a period in my life when cutesy lyrics and fuzzy feelings were appreciated a lot of the time. Their live show too was an amazing experience purely for their physicality and liveliness. My contention: are Get Up Kids any more emotional than say, Nirvana? Not particularly - but for some reason it appears that they became poster children for the late rush of emodom. Their pop-punk stylings have now influenced an innumerable number of new, young bands to let go of the immature humor associated with the Fat Wreck label and focus on more personal issues. While it's admirable to have driven some bands to a slightly deeper lyrical level, a lot of these bands are embarrassing rehashings of what are now emo cliches: octave chords; an acoustic song; 'ironic,' cheesy keyboard lines; moody photography and cover designs overloaded with 'abstract,' purely arbitrary lines and circles.


But Why?

There is an obvious question to ask here - why did this musical form resonate and grip those who listen to it? As with all art, people find different things in a composition, but emo seemed to resonate via the lyrics, angst and anguish that speaks to teenagers (and any other willing listeners) around the world. That's not to say that without this outlet or form of expression these teens would have been bottled up balls of hormonal rage - but it is to say that there's a certain warmth and comfort in recognizing that folks have experienced similar circumstances to what you are feeling. Whether it's the self-conscious kids who attend the shows forming a supportive pseudo-community or the loner pouring over lyrics in their bedroom, there's an unmistakably human edge to some emo.

That said, tales of woe in love and life are the lyrical fodder for artists the world over and, as has been said many times before, some emo lyrics could easily pass for bad Celine Dion impersonators ("stars are out tonight / and you're the brightest one shining in my sky / it's like every wish I ever made came true / the day I woke up lying next to you") or - worse yet - angsty, obtuse bedroom-drawer teen-poetry wisdom ("I could write you a song, send you a note, or empty out your trash and buy a bucket full of diamonds but even the most beautiful of all roses must someday crumble and turn to dust" [note: yes, that is one lyric line]). Clearly then, music plays some part of the attraction to this music. The many flavours of emo make it hard to pin down a definition of The Emo Sound. In the most vague terms, however, emo music has a spiralling structure that relies on large, crescendo-ish climaxes that usually play off against a quieter and more reflective passage - a juxtaposition that, in the most rudimentary and reductive analysis imaginable, is suggestive of the fickle and fraught nature of humanity. Again though, this structure is paralleled in the very same tearjerkers of Celine Dion.


Now it gets personal

This is why I believe it becomes important to delineate emo as a genre - so as to dispel and remove it from the midst of such clichéd, heart-tugging dross as that of top 40 balladeering. At its core, I believe emo to be about extremes of emotion and the expression of that emotion via musical forms. For this reason, I wish to displace latter-day attempts to bring bands like Saves The Day, Get Up Kids, Promise Ring and Jimmy Eat World into the emo fold. Some of those bands' early work reached the musical extremes I spoke about, but all these groups are now mere imitations of the genre. They are pop-punk bands with lyrics about cute girls or friends. That is not emo. It never was emo, and to label those bands as such is to give entirely the wrong impression. Emo is Indian Summer. Emo is Navio Forge. Emo is Rites of Spring. If you want a grasp of the genre, listen to these bands and notice why they are not Celine-Dion-for-the-'underground.' Celine wouldn't let out primal, guttural yelps like Guy does for Rites of Spring. Celine would do an acoustic ballad like Get Up Kids or Saves The Day. This is the difference.


But what about the children?

Of course, I shed a tear for the unwitting; the folks who've come along late and missed all the early classes informing us hardened indie rock professionals about the perils of emo, how the genre formed, how it played out and how it died.

That's right, died. Emo is dead. See for yourself - hold your fingers up to the neck of the corpse and check the pulse. Nary raising a flutter. Like all good, once innovative genres - punk, blues, country - there are but a few struggling bastions today.

There is an emerging trend in emo now for the teaming up of math-rock dynamics (shifting time signatures and rhythms) with the melodic guitar and vocal work of previous emo. The better bands pushing such a sound are the Casket Lottery and Hey Mercedes - At The Drive In were, to some extent, doing similar things on this level. That said though, a lot of this mathy noodling does come out like toned down Don Caballero or Drive Like Jehu, and fails to really take advantage of these interesting dynamics.

For the most part, however, emo is now a sad and frail representation of what it once was. Today it has degenerated into a vile and vapid scene of vacuous individuals, more worried about the tightness of overpriced 'punk rock' t-shirts than it is about musical innovation and new forms of expression. When music becomes fashion (see 'emo' articles in various U.S. teen-girl magazines), music has lost its worth and power. More than that, critics are to blame for going into emo overdrive. Any song with an affecting use of octave chords was emo and any band on an indie label (like Vagrant, or Emotaph as Buddyhead call it) with cute boys singing about cute girls was emo. It's almost laughable.

Of course the real meaning behind words and genre names are always contentious and misleading - the R&B of 40 years ago was a long way from the R&B of today - but emo, the undeniably vague term that it is, is now being appropriated for all the wrong purposes. Like most things, it's better to know your history before you go throwing terms about the place with abandon. Think about it first, folks.


Post-mortem

Emo was exciting once, but now it's a rotting corpse. The swarm of corporate major-label vultures have come to pick at the bones and for the new bands it's as easy as following the formula for punk-pop emo. In the words of Refused, it's time for new noise.

well written and researched article. emo still sucks though.

[sppunk]

Originally posted by plastic haircut


well written and researched article. emo still sucks though.

But dawg, how was that Jets To Brazil show a few weeks back?

[Ihaman]

Originally posted by plastic haircut
i've never felt anything really listening to this music except occasional excitement when something tickles my ear in a new way.

How many fucking times did i say listen to journey inwards?
FUCKING LISTEN TO IT, your opinions about whether or not emotion can exist in drum and bass will change.
marky, patife can also do this.

idiot.

[Ihaman]

you dont even know who the hell was spinning the drum and bass tent, mr. presumptuous.

[wangcomputers]

Originally posted by plastic haircut
"rave" music while i'm not sure if your talking about trance, jungle, idm (the stupidest term ever just say experimental please), electro (don't say clash), house, acid jazz, and i guess nrg (never heard that one before) at least are more daring in their sonic pallettes. while these have there roots in krautrock, kraftwerk, and even donna summer ("i feel love" is regarded as the first trance song). it's still something relatively new in the scope of musical history. yes most of the beats are pretty generic, but generic in the terms of overdone, just like the four four, but the sounds and the bpm are a lot fresher (timeline wise) than the drum tracks of emo or "angst". there is also endless possiblility for sound alteration when composing music on a computer instead of a guitar (there's only so many pedals). yes it's often cold, yes it's often boring, yes it's often mindless, but not always. people like matmos and aphex twin still try. there's also occasionally fresh spins on things (herbert's "bodily functions" for example uses all body sounds in the compostion of house music, also checkout afuken's "my way" which uses micro sampling to compose house music and other electronic music).

hah, what? i'm an idiot for not knowing about the history and origins of dance music? thanks for clarifying that.
i made the fatal mistake of drawing my own conclusions based on my experience. heaven forbid.

You also seem to think that i was disregarding electronic music completely, but I was actually referring to 'rave' music, not intelligent dance. (hence the 200bpm reference).
Personally, i find most acid-house, jungle and d&b to be monotonous. It's music designed to meet one end, and ravers will freely admit to this. It's hardly artistic.
I have much more respect for other forms of dance music, which i agree has very much potential.

This thread was more about the perceptions of angst and content, rather than an attempt to depreciate electronic music. But I'm sure you must have realised that, y'know, being a non-idiot and all.

[plastic haircut]

Originally posted by sppunk


But dawg, how was that Jets To Brazil show a few weeks back?

way to prove that guys point about the over use of the word emo. jets to brazil (especially now) is a rock band. that's it.

it seems like that guy would have mentioned jawbreaker though. that's more like emo.