Republican Music Police
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Q: Are we not men? A: We are EMO!
by Chris Wong
I don't know what bothers me more: people who don't understand that the genre of "emo" goes way beyond the punk pop that "pop"ulates the radio waves these days, or the people who are too entrenched in their emotional maturity to admit how goddamned good this so-called "emo" music is.
Let's get this out of the way: Fallout Boy is an objectively good band. There's no three ways around it. There's so much good music coming out of this L.I.E.S. scene today that I have to admit it takes even myself a long time to catch up with it. But I'll tell you straight away that Brand New and Taking Back Sunday are making music that's every bit as good as the stuff the Descendents and Braid were putting out in the 90's and the Ataris were putting out circa Blue Skies, Broken Hearts.
Why is this an issue? Well the other night my friend Kevin and I were at a bar talking about music and Kevin raised the question: "How on earth did we get to Fallout Boy selling out arenas? How did we get from the Promise Ring to this?"
Well, no matter what the Marxist critics say, all art is organic. We don't have sedimentary movements, we have atmospheric conflations. That is to say, all music along a certain descendency runs together. And what's more it is plain to see that Fallout Boy is the necessary result of Husker Du.
Are you knocked flat on your ass from that last sentence? You should be. It really doesn't make a whole lot of sense, unless you actually think about it with the musical understanding that only people like me can possess.
Look - we need to establish the history of emo music. Most people think the roots of it began with Zen Arcade. That is, Husker Du's not-that-good album (New Day and Warehouse are probably both better...as is, most likely, Candy Apple Gray) struck a chord with the punk scenesters. Before this, hardcore punkers didn't sing about breaking up, troubled childhoods, etc. It was TV parties, and falling into the arms of Venus DeMilo. But Christ: the target demographic of punk rock - look: what they SHOULD have been singing about all along was impossible love. Imaginary love, as Rufus Wainright would put it.
And there it was...Bob Mould singing over acoustic guitar, predating Dashboard by nearly 20 years, "There are things that I'd like to say but I'm never talking to you again." Yes, yes. But emo didn't begin in earnest until the early-mid 80's when the DC scene was fucking knocking everyone's ass off. There were two bands floating around called Rites of Spring and Embrace. You may have heard of the frontmen of these bands if you know shit about punk rock (you probably don't). Rites of Spring was headed by a skinny, potchy guy named Guy Picciotto. Embrace was fronted by a skinny, short, bald, angry guy named Ian MacKaye. These bands were like Ian's former band Minor Threat in most ways musically, but their lyrics were bordering on the poetic. Don't get me wrong. They were not poetry. Examine Guy's lyrics to the song "Deeper than Inside."
"I'm going down," he begins, "going down, deeper than inside. The world. Is. My. Fuse."
Interesting sentiments, but far from canonical. The point is, though, that these lyrics were introspective, and, to many of the DC scenesters, a little wimpy. Hardliners couldn't stomp the shit out of meat-eaters or sex-havers to the strains lyrics like those. So they gave it a jokey name: Emocore.,
Well if you know the apocryphal story of "Yankee Doodle Dandy" (as in, the revolutionary war song...yes I'm busting that out) you'll know that epithets like emocore often get appropriated and championed by their targets. That sort of happened with the term "emo"...although no one ever really got comfortable with it. At any rate, somewhere along the line, emo started growing away from the underground punk scene and into the main stream, toward the grunge scene in the heyday of Nirvana, and then along the punk-pop scene as bands like Green Day and Weezer rose to prominence.
Ok. Back to how Husker Du terminates in Fallout Boy. Well it's like I told Kevin. We'll have to work backward.
Fallout Boy, despite being from Chi-town, is a clear disciple of the L.I.E.S. scene (Long Island Emo and Screaming). You can't possibly hear a song like Sugar We're Going Down (a great song. I don't care what anyone says) without thinking immediately of basically any Taking Back Sunday song, although specifically "You Know How I Do," should come immediately to mind. It's no broad leap to jump back to Saves the Day from there...it's an almost given. Let's leave Brand New out of the equation. They're a red herring in my opinion. Let's just go straight to STD. From STD you can go back to Lifetime, but that's a dead end. A better direction is to look at the power-pop of the Get Up Kids. That's not a stretch - the vocals, the guitar work. The only thing lacking is the hardcore influence. But that obviously came from a tangential source (and of course Lifetime is emo...it just is a tangent that can only lead to endless hemming and hawing and therefore should be avoided.). The point is, songs like Red Letter Day, or even more similarly Don't Hate Me or Anne Arbour share all the qualities that exemplify Saves the Day: distorted guitars, hard riffing, whiney vocals, the inevitable breakdown bridge. It's eerie.
Get Up Kids go directly back to the Promise Ring. It's as simple as that - the lispy vocals, the riffs are almost lifted. And we HAVE to go right back from there to Sunny Day Real Estate - yes Jeremy Enigk's vocals are nothing like Davey VonBohlen's...but SDRE is such a clear forebear for the Promise Ring (yes, and Cap'n Jazz...but once again, a tangential connection) and when you hear the Horse Latitudes you realize that TPR began its career as SDRE without a good singer. SDRE goes right back through Fugazi to Embrace and Rites of Spring. And we've already established that those bands go back to Husker Du.
So there you have it. Husker Du to Fallout Boy.
In case you missed it, here's the progression:
Husker Du-->Embrace-->Fugazi-->Sunny Day Real Estate-->The Promise Ring-->The Get Up Kids-->Saves The Day-->Taking Back Sunday-->Fallout Boy
Tell me that doesn't make perfect sense!
You can call it revisionist history if you want, but I'm so postmodern I know that revisionist history is the only kind of history there is.
Truckin',
cw
I don't know what bothers me more: people who don't understand that the genre of "emo" goes way beyond the punk pop that "pop"ulates the radio waves these days, or the people who are too entrenched in their emotional maturity to admit how goddamned good this so-called "emo" music is.
Let's get this out of the way: Fallout Boy is an objectively good band. There's no three ways around it. There's so much good music coming out of this L.I.E.S. scene today that I have to admit it takes even myself a long time to catch up with it. But I'll tell you straight away that Brand New and Taking Back Sunday are making music that's every bit as good as the stuff the Descendents and Braid were putting out in the 90's and the Ataris were putting out circa Blue Skies, Broken Hearts.
Why is this an issue? Well the other night my friend Kevin and I were at a bar talking about music and Kevin raised the question: "How on earth did we get to Fallout Boy selling out arenas? How did we get from the Promise Ring to this?"
Well, no matter what the Marxist critics say, all art is organic. We don't have sedimentary movements, we have atmospheric conflations. That is to say, all music along a certain descendency runs together. And what's more it is plain to see that Fallout Boy is the necessary result of Husker Du.
Are you knocked flat on your ass from that last sentence? You should be. It really doesn't make a whole lot of sense, unless you actually think about it with the musical understanding that only people like me can possess.
Look - we need to establish the history of emo music. Most people think the roots of it began with Zen Arcade. That is, Husker Du's not-that-good album (New Day and Warehouse are probably both better...as is, most likely, Candy Apple Gray) struck a chord with the punk scenesters. Before this, hardcore punkers didn't sing about breaking up, troubled childhoods, etc. It was TV parties, and falling into the arms of Venus DeMilo. But Christ: the target demographic of punk rock - look: what they SHOULD have been singing about all along was impossible love. Imaginary love, as Rufus Wainright would put it.
And there it was...Bob Mould singing over acoustic guitar, predating Dashboard by nearly 20 years, "There are things that I'd like to say but I'm never talking to you again." Yes, yes. But emo didn't begin in earnest until the early-mid 80's when the DC scene was fucking knocking everyone's ass off. There were two bands floating around called Rites of Spring and Embrace. You may have heard of the frontmen of these bands if you know shit about punk rock (you probably don't). Rites of Spring was headed by a skinny, potchy guy named Guy Picciotto. Embrace was fronted by a skinny, short, bald, angry guy named Ian MacKaye. These bands were like Ian's former band Minor Threat in most ways musically, but their lyrics were bordering on the poetic. Don't get me wrong. They were not poetry. Examine Guy's lyrics to the song "Deeper than Inside."
"I'm going down," he begins, "going down, deeper than inside. The world. Is. My. Fuse."
Interesting sentiments, but far from canonical. The point is, though, that these lyrics were introspective, and, to many of the DC scenesters, a little wimpy. Hardliners couldn't stomp the shit out of meat-eaters or sex-havers to the strains lyrics like those. So they gave it a jokey name: Emocore.,
Well if you know the apocryphal story of "Yankee Doodle Dandy" (as in, the revolutionary war song...yes I'm busting that out) you'll know that epithets like emocore often get appropriated and championed by their targets. That sort of happened with the term "emo"...although no one ever really got comfortable with it. At any rate, somewhere along the line, emo started growing away from the underground punk scene and into the main stream, toward the grunge scene in the heyday of Nirvana, and then along the punk-pop scene as bands like Green Day and Weezer rose to prominence.
Ok. Back to how Husker Du terminates in Fallout Boy. Well it's like I told Kevin. We'll have to work backward.
Fallout Boy, despite being from Chi-town, is a clear disciple of the L.I.E.S. scene (Long Island Emo and Screaming). You can't possibly hear a song like Sugar We're Going Down (a great song. I don't care what anyone says) without thinking immediately of basically any Taking Back Sunday song, although specifically "You Know How I Do," should come immediately to mind. It's no broad leap to jump back to Saves the Day from there...it's an almost given. Let's leave Brand New out of the equation. They're a red herring in my opinion. Let's just go straight to STD. From STD you can go back to Lifetime, but that's a dead end. A better direction is to look at the power-pop of the Get Up Kids. That's not a stretch - the vocals, the guitar work. The only thing lacking is the hardcore influence. But that obviously came from a tangential source (and of course Lifetime is emo...it just is a tangent that can only lead to endless hemming and hawing and therefore should be avoided.). The point is, songs like Red Letter Day, or even more similarly Don't Hate Me or Anne Arbour share all the qualities that exemplify Saves the Day: distorted guitars, hard riffing, whiney vocals, the inevitable breakdown bridge. It's eerie.
Get Up Kids go directly back to the Promise Ring. It's as simple as that - the lispy vocals, the riffs are almost lifted. And we HAVE to go right back from there to Sunny Day Real Estate - yes Jeremy Enigk's vocals are nothing like Davey VonBohlen's...but SDRE is such a clear forebear for the Promise Ring (yes, and Cap'n Jazz...but once again, a tangential connection) and when you hear the Horse Latitudes you realize that TPR began its career as SDRE without a good singer. SDRE goes right back through Fugazi to Embrace and Rites of Spring. And we've already established that those bands go back to Husker Du.
So there you have it. Husker Du to Fallout Boy.
In case you missed it, here's the progression:
Husker Du-->Embrace-->Fugazi-->Sunny Day Real Estate-->The Promise Ring-->The Get Up Kids-->Saves The Day-->Taking Back Sunday-->Fallout Boy
Tell me that doesn't make perfect sense!
You can call it revisionist history if you want, but I'm so postmodern I know that revisionist history is the only kind of history there is.
Truckin',
cw
posted by Chris W # 4:41 PM 
Comments:
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Ok I thought about it more & emo makes my soul hurt--& not in some wussy emo "good way"
IT IS A PLAGUE; ONLY IN DEATH CAN WE ESCAPE IT
IT IS A PLAGUE; ONLY IN DEATH CAN WE ESCAPE IT
haven't you been paying attention? if we aren't operating under the assumption that i have an intrinsic appreciation of objectively good music then what's the point?
If you MUST know, Fall Out Boy's best songs have complicated instrumentation, interesting lyrics, and very memorable hooks. If you don't like Fall Out Boy it don't mean there's a problem with them..it MEANS there's a problem w/ you
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If you MUST know, Fall Out Boy's best songs have complicated instrumentation, interesting lyrics, and very memorable hooks. If you don't like Fall Out Boy it don't mean there's a problem with them..it MEANS there's a problem w/ you
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