“What I Talk About When I Talk About Emo” by David Demark

What I Talk About When I Talk About Emo

An Essay by

If you read my article on Fuck Your Emotional Bullshit last year, are aware of my internet presence, or have had a conversation about music (or really anything else) with me in the last twenty months or so, you’re probably all-too-aware of my affinity for emo. More often than not, the utterance of that word is an invitation for a confused or incredulous response, be it verbal or in facial expression. Thanks in part to the associations attached to that word in the early years of the current millennium and in part to an American cultural disdain for emotional openness, emo has become somewhat of a dirty word. If this piece distances the music from the stigma, that would be a positive outcome, but it would be a mistake to view that objective as this piece’s singular mission. Rather, it should be thought of as a burden, a prerequisite to a real discussion of what makes emo what it is. Join me reader, as we ride the angst-train to sad-town and explore what makes emo as powerful as it is to those who connect to it. There’s no way around it: this is inherently at least partially a conversation about genre. Genre is a nebulous fucking concept, with any attempt at discussion about it marred by shifting definitions, assertions of subjective observation as fact, and attempts to segment music into neat boxes of congruence. In essence, genre is a one-dimensional concept poorly fitted to analyze an infinite-dimensional space. However, considering that this piece is on the surface about a specific genre of music, it is a concept that is impossible to avoid. I’m not really interested in the question of whether My Chemical Romance or Mayday Parade or [insert popular poppunk or pop-metal band] is emo, but inevita-

David Demark

bly, that question will come up (to answer in brief: they aren’t emo as I define it but other people probably would call it that and I don’t fuckin own the word, shit). And of course, as long as the topic of genre is inescapable, my conception of emo is certainly shaped by musical trends that could be said to constitute a self-contained genre. For the most part, what I know as emo comes from the Midwestern emo movement of the mid-to-late 1990’s and the music that movement inspired. That said, my knowledge of the genre is very much incomplete, and this should not be seen as a survey but rather an exploration.

The album that kick-started both the movement as well as my love of emo, Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary, serves as a fantastic example of the most basic, fundamental component that all music under the emo label shares: the bleeding heart. Through each song (with the exception of the momentously tedious “Pheurton Skeurto,” a song I generally try to pretend does not exist), the pain in singer Jeremy Enigk’s voice is almost tangible in its visceral spirit. The lyrics are largely fragments of thought rather than coherent expressions of narrative or exposition, bits of sentiment left in a blender. Through all, Enigk makes no attempt to hide his feelings, he bares all. Without that complete openness, that refusal to sugarcoat or ignore emotion, “emo” or “emotional music” would not be emo. The album title Diary works as a piece of foreshadowing of what would come from those associated with and inspired by Sunny Day Real Estate’s output. Emo is inherently extremely personal to those creating it, and more often than not the music and lyrics come off as written more for the artist than the audience. “Diary” is also a descriptive term for the structure the music often takes. While ironically not the case on most songs from Diary itself, much of emo is near-structureless, abandoning the traditional verse-chorus-verse format in favor of long meandering song-manifestos. This meandering aspect is also often reflected in the instrumental component of the music: a large part of emo is often referred to as “twinklecore” for the winding, noodling paths the guitar takes. This lends an aesthetic of narrative: in the guitar parts there is a story, one that is often non-repetitive and follows the song down its road. However, it would be a mistake to assume that the story has an end. Emo is questions without answers, stories with no endings. That’s because of the other fundamental, underlying component of the “spirit of emo”: a focus on the experience of feeling itself rather than the events that caused that feeling. To illustrate this, let’s take a look at the lyrics to Penfold’s “Travelling Theory” off their beautiful debut EP Amateurs and Professionals:

I can still remember the picture on the postcard (that you sent me) of green fields and silos And I used to pretend that I could see you just like you were watching me and every move I made Every step I took Every train I rode Every time I looked for you but could never find you So I put you on my wall and spent the days waiting for you there Is it cold out where you live? Is it so far where you live? If silence breaks and I let go, I’ll put my ear up to hear if you’ve finally come to save me If I’ve been wrong to care so much then what am I to do now What am I to do now I hung it on my wall and looked for you there every night to see if you were waiting to wave

Rarely is an emo song directly about a break-up; instead they usually talk around them, describing the experience of the artist since then. In the example above, note the questions the song centers around: “Is it cold out where you live? Is it so far where you live?” He doesn’t ask these questions in hopes of finding out if it really is cold where the “you” in question is, but rather to express the emotion behind that. This is a story not grounded in fantasy or anger, but rather in reality and self-reflection. That self-reflection is necessary; it isn’t enough just to tell the world that you feel sad. For it to be an effective piece of emo, there must be subtlety and depth to that sadness. Otherwise, how can the listener be expected to experience it for you? When I say communicating the emotion itself, I don’t just mean stating its presence, I mean drawing up the empathy necessary in the listener for them to feel it with you. It is that direct transfer of sentimental energy that makes emo so appealing to me in the first place, that desperate reaching out to be understood. In listening, not only is the audience benefitting from the music, they are playing a vital role in the process of expression and healing for the artist.

It makes a lot of sense that quite a bit of emo has romantic relationships and their ends as its lyrical bread and butter. As turbulent, traumatic, and abrupt as they often are, they are a natural beacon for charged or aimless emotion. However, emo’s scope is not limited to the romantic. Take Merchant Ships’ EP For Cameron. Rather than romantic relationships, For Cameron is an album about family, friendship and the eventuality of death. The album drifts through metaphor and memory, expressing raw regret and sorrow over a family falling apart and the friends the narrator will never see again. On its spoken-word centerpiece “Sleep Patterns”, the narrator describes being forced to confront death and turbulence alongside a younger relative (little brother?) named Gary at levels both isolated and intimate (seeing a corpse carried out of an ambulance) and immense (the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center towers), before recounting a dream in which the next and last few years of his life are laid out in front of him, terminating with his death in a violent car crash. It ends with his trembling voice uttering “I have no idea... I am afraid.” It’s a moment of brutal rawness and honesty, to the point of being uncomfortable for the listener. It’s that discomfort that makes emo inherently unpopular music. To achieve popularity in this music landscape, one must appeal to some sort of common denominator, and considering the aforementioned fear of emotion in today’s America, nothing that revealing could possibly rise to the top of the charts. Emo is music for those with emotion to spare, those who need direction to tie their angst to, and while that is a small subset of the American population, there’s a damned good reason it resonates so hard with those it resonates with.