Deconstructing Emo
By: DAN NAILEN - The Salt Lake Tribune
July 5th 2002 3:05pm
Are you emo? Is your hair dyed black and sporting bangs? Are thick, black
frames for your glasses and clunky black shoes must-haves for your
look? Is "Pinkerton" your favorite Weezer album? Did you sit down
and sing along with every lyric during the Dashboard Confessional
shows this winter? If you can answer "yes" to more than one of these questions, you
are tuned in to the latest pop-music trend -- emo. When the word "emo" started popping up a few years ago,
describing a cadre of young indie bands with growing grassroots
followings, it seemed pop music had a trend to follow in the
footsteps of grunge, electronica and teen-pop eras. Unlike those genres, emo (short for "emotional") does not
describe a sound shared by its practitioners. Musically, emo
envelops everything from the acoustic, tattooed James Taylorisms of
MTV pin-up and Dashboard Confessional frontman Chris Carrabba to,
according to some, the fiercely political jagged punk of Fugazi. Salt Lake City has welcomed all manner of bands tagged as "emo" -
- primarily to all-ages venues such as Kilby Court, X-Scape and
Bricks -- and nothing in their respective sounds would indicate
they were from the same scene. The Get Up Kids plays Replacements-meet-Beach Boys power-pop.
Jimmy Eat World is straight-up rawk. Pedro The Lion offers lo-fi
balladry with a Christian bent. Dashboard Confessional -- one of
the opening acts for Weezer at the E Center on Saturday -- is
taking the so-called emo life mainstream with its ruminations on
heartbreak and loss. Whether the New Wave/hard rock musings of Weezer qualify as emo
is a matter of debate, but its "Pinkerton" album -- a commercial
flop when it was released in 1996 -- is considered seminal among
many emo fans, who pushed the album to platinum success years after
it appeared. Like many acts who went from being standard indie-rockers to
being labeled part of the "grunge" scene a decade ago, the wise new
bands run screaming from the "emo" label as soon as someone tries to
peg them with it. Using the word "emo" to describe every melodic
rock band now is as useless as calling every loud, guitar-based band
"grunge" was back then. Even the name "emo" is overly broad. After all, all music -- no
matter how vapid -- is still emotional, even if that emotion is
greed. There are definite signs emo is getting ready for its mainstream
closeup, which is generally the death knell of any genre. Some emo
bands are already on major labels, with Jimmy Eat World enjoying
massive airplay on MTV and, of all places, VH1, and Weezer selling
millions of its four major-label albums. Time magazine devoted two
pages last month to the new, sad sounds the kids love, amusingly
headlining its article with a classic-rock reference, "Emotional
Rescue." In April, MTV made Dashboard Confessional the first non-
platinum-selling band to garner its own "Unplugged" episode. The fans are the reason a label such as "emo" exists, since the
sounds, fashions and politics are not obviously different from the
indie-rock landscape of the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps the fans needed
a name to differentiate themselves from the rap-rock kids worshiping
Korn or Limp Bizkit. Or maybe their record collections don't go back
as far as the '80s, when a diverse array of acts such as Black Flag,
The Minutemen, The Replacements, Sonic Youth, Husker Du -- even
R.E.M., Talking Heads and Blondie -- could all fall under an
existing label such as "punk" or "college rock." Like any genre, emo's hard-core fans manage to find dozens of sub-
categories within their chosen scene, and emo's history and the
credentials and merits of various bands are fodder for painstaking
debate within dozens of Web sites and fanzines. Typing "emo" or "emo
music" into a Web search engine returns hits on everything from emo
fashion sites to emo personal ads to insanely in-depth essays on emo
bands. The intense dedication of the emo kids speaks to the joy any
music fan gets when he or she discovers something "new," an
independent or underground band or genre that gives a feeling of
being in on something good before the mainstream comes along to ruin
it. Whether emo flourishes into the future or collapses in the
spotlight remains to be seen. For now, at least, there are a few
young bands worth watching and hearing. Emo at the E Center Weezer, Dashboard Confessional and Sparta play West Valley City's
E Center on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $30.50, and available at all Smith's Tix outlets. How Emo Are You? Some sample questions from the "Emo Purity Test": 1. Do you own a pair of horn-rimmed glasses? 2. Own more than five sweaters or sweater-vests? 3. Own one or more pairs of black, shiny, faux leather shoes? 4. Always wear those shoes to shows? 5. Own a 12-inch record made in the past five years? 6. Have you gone to a show and not danced? 7. Gone to a show and nodded your head and tapped your chest? 8. Gone to a show and actually sat down? 9. Gone to a show in someone's basement? 10. Do you consider Jimmy Eat World sellouts? The full 50-question test is available at www.geocities.com/
Hollywood/Chateau/5485/emotest.html.
 (C) 2002 The Salt Lake Tribune. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved
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