Excuse Me If I Get Emo For a Moment

As you may know if you used to read this blog back in the days when it was simply an "Internet column", I spent a lot of my time in those days bashing the current music scene and hoping for something new to come along. In those days, it was all "boy bands" and rap-metal, so you can see why I was desperate for change. Then I got to be a radio station music director for 15 months and I got to hear the "next big thing" as it was hitting.

Emo.

You may as well call the 2000s (is that what we're calling this decade? 6 years in and I still don't know...) the "Emo Decade". I first heard about emo back in college in the late 1990s, when we were playing Jimmy Eat World's early stuff. I liked it, but it was naturally out of place in a format where everyone wanted to sound like Kid Rock or Limp Bizkit. In 1999, if you asked people what Emo was, 95% of them would say, "He's that annoying red Muppet from 'Sesame Street'..."

Actually, "emo" is short for "emotional", which reflects the lyrical content of the songs, real heart-on-your-sleeve stuff. In recent years, a harder-edged version of this style has emerged called "screamo", which is what you'd figure it to be... like emo, only the bands have lead singers who prefer screaming the lyrics at the top of their lungs rather than singing. I'm not as big a fan of stuff like that.

This music was hanging around the fringes of the popular scene for a few years, and even won some crossover appeal with Jimmy Eat World's self-titled album and Dashboard Confessional's breakthrough in 2002. The punk scene adopted emo bands and they wound up on the Warped Tour playing to growing audiences. Bands like Good Charlotte and Simple Plan who weren't really emo but more glossy pop-punk got the mainstream into the Warped Tour scene, and soon enough, the "mall punks" discovered emo, and by 2005, it exploded, mostly due to how accessible the music is, through places like MySpace. It still hasn't really gotten a lot of airplay, but Fall Out Boy is on pop stations every 2 hours, thus proving there may be some hope for the format after all. Now if they'd just stop playing Nick Lachey every 10 minutes, we'd be fine... what's that new song of his? "What's Left of My Career?"

For me, my tastes changed as a result of 3 albums. The first was Blink-182's self-titled album in late 2003. I had been a fan for the past couple of albums, and on this one, they went in a more emo direction, and I loved the change. Unfortunately, it was their last album, but Tom DeLonge has continued moving in new directions with his later projects, Box Car Racer and now Angels and Airwaves. The second album was Green Day's "American Idiot". While this really isn't an emo record, it got me back into punk and it married two of my favorite musical genres, punk and the concept album. The third album was Weezer's "Make Believe". Weezer is widely acknowledged as the key influence in many emo bands, and if this really was their last album, they went out in top form.

So now I'm running out to buy stuff like Death Cab For Cutie, listening to Something Corporate, Hawthorne Heights, and AFI, and watching Fuse on a pretty regular basis because they play a TON of emo and punk bands. I'm happy to say I have finally found a musical scene to "belong to". I'm sure many would make the same argument about emo that I used to say about "boy bands" and rap-metal, that all the bands sound the same, and to some extent, that's the case with any trend in music. Someone finds the sound that everyone loves, and everyone else tries to copy that in the attempt to be successful. I'm very discriminating in the music I listen to. If I say, "Okay, this is a decent song, but I've heard it 7 times before from 7 other bands," I won't like it.

The music has become so popular that "emo" has become an adjective, as in "Don't get emo on me now." As someone who will readily admit that I wear my heart on my sleeve sometimes, I have no problem being called "emo". In fact, I embrace it.