Apparently I Don't Know What Emo Is
There is an old joke (sort of joke, actually) applied to numerous people: "If you put two
That's a deep philosophical start to what is actually a shockingly banal topic: emo. I could generalize and talk about any genre of music (or indeed thought) but I'm talking about emo because I'm tired of hearing about it. I don't know what the hell it is. People bandy about the term like Web 2.0 and I think no one really knows, which is how it differs from other points of view.
See, there are universal questions to which most people have answers, and none of these answers agree. Why are we here? Where did we come from? What the hell is going on in Washington (if you're not from the USA, insert your own capital here; it's fun and interactive)? There is no universal answer to these universal questions, but each person has at least some idea of their own answer, even if that answer is, "None of the above."
But there are universal qualities, like "emo-ness" which are applied to various things and I don't think anyone really knows what the hell they're talking about. People who use terminology that they don't really understand, buzzwords that they heard in the elevator, are destined for a particularly bleak sector of Hell, probably including fire-breathing maggots that eat your eyeballs.
So I'm no longer going to use the term, "emo," because I haven't the faintest idea what it means, and I don't really want to know. There are a lot of crappy bands out there who appear, upon cursory inspection, to fall under the emo umbrella, and I'm better off without them.
I am also not going to use any subset of the genre, "Metal," because I don't know what that is either. Not even the record executives who make up these stupid buzzwords know what they really mean, and that's pretty scary. If buzzwords could come to life and destroy major cities, we'd be more concerned about their reckless proliferation. As it is, they can stuff it.
And Blogger doesn't know how to spell, "emo."
1 comment:
You don't want to know what it means. A fairly popular and socially prominent "emo" kid in college alienated my friend's roommate by telling her he could never be friends with her because of the way she dressed (in my extremely liberal and Emo/Punk-ey school, she dressed more like a chic So-Calian with an artist flair). The story disgusted me because the alientator considered himself an emo kid and the point of emo is whining about your personal situation. The idea (of course not a surprising one) that such a music enthusiast would deliberately impose the same repression - one his own culture claims to feel - on an innocent other person is proof of the fact that a tightly knit musical subculture has the potential to do more harm to outside parties than to simply exist to nourish its own members. And emo, of all genres. You're supposed to be the beginning of the word "emotional". Is it just me, or do you need a hell of a spellchecker to set you straight?
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