Confessions of an Emo
The author, during his Emo phase, whilst he also had a full head of hair
March 29 2020
I have a confession: I am… no: I may be an Emo. Such is the shame that has long been heaped upon this label, I fear to say it without some form of qualification.
What is Emo, you say? Well that’s a loaded question, save for it being an abbreviation of Emo-core that itself is a shortening of Emotional Hardcore. In fact, many who were present during its origins from the late 80s Mid-West American Hardcore scene would say that I, who jumped on late in the early 2000s when it went really mainstream, am not at all a true Emo. Maybe; whatever.
It would be unprofessional to direct you solely to the relevant Wikipedia page, as comprehensive as it may be. So here is my best attempt, through the use of horribly generalised stereotypes: not quite angry or authentic enough to be hardcore; definitely not social minded enough to be punk; a bit too good looking (at least in their own eyes) to be indie; not quite depressed and cynical enough to be goth, and too obsessed with the opposite sex to be any of them. Except perhaps pop, but a bit too dark to be pop. And male — very male.
That last point is important, because there is much that we can learn about male-ness from Emo music. Here is one example.
While fossicking through the depths of the Emo playlists in my iTunes library, amidst the cringe lyrics, nasally vocals and cheap guitar hooks, I occasionally come across nuggets of gold.
I dare say that if you speak to any mid-2000s Emo kid, Something Corporate (self-aware and cynical band name: box ticked) would get a high hit rate. Their lead singer, Andrew McMahon, was a drug addict, recorded an album with Tommy Lee (i.e. Tommy Lee of Pamela Anderson wedding home video fame) on drums, then survived cancer, and has written many of what are still my favourite Emo songs, some of which aren’t about girls at all!
Cavanaugh Park was one of them, even if I’ll readily admit that it’s far from ground breaking: a kid who doesn’t fit in, who wants to leave this shitty town, who gets high just for a reason to get by — accompanied by McMahon’s faithful piano with support from a straight-from-the-emotional-cheap-seats string section. But it has these lyrics: a message from his father, with a short yet profoundly self-implicating editorialisation by the singer at the end:
“Son, one day you’ll be a man. And men can do terrible things.” Yes they can.
I never thought much of it until recently, until one day it suddenly hit me as one of the soundest pieces of life advice one could bestow upon a young lad today.
It is blunt yet persuasive in its core argument: on various statistical indicators you might use to measure terribleness, you could convincingly argue that, yes, men have done rather terrible things.
It is also surprisingly detached; it is not a value judgement on men themselves as terrible, but of their actions and their outcomes — men can do terrible things. It also, wisely, refrains from any comparison of the extent of men’s capacity for terrible things to those people who aren’t men. We all know that won’t end well.
Actually, from another perspective, it is a little too accurate: men can, and have, done terrible things, often with little consequence, with this capacity apparently only just starting to be curbed.
So yes: I’m going to write about abuse (again). This is, needless to say, delicate ground when you are a man. But that’s ok, because there is one fail-safe way to talk about abuse when you are male: implicate yourself! That keeps everyone happy.
I like to think I am a good person. That I have always had a fairly well grounded moral compass, and that my life has, save for some fairly normal teenage self-absorption, been orientated towards making the world a better place for other people.
However, even I would admit that I have slipped up in this regard a few times. And virtually every time, I can link it directly back to women — or as I thought about them then, girls. How I treated girls; how I treated my friends, acquaintances or strangers because of girls; and probably what I did to my soul because of girls. These instances have been increasingly hard to ignore, given someone close to me has recently experienced abuse, and I have started to open my eyes towards the nature of abuse in the world.
This is the main thing I have learned about abuse, which will be an episode of the late news for many. While physical and sexual abuse may be its most visible, easily quantified and legislated manifestations, it breeds from and exists at a much more fundamental level: abuse by and through emotion.
And this is where Emo, as its name more than hints at, comes in.
When I listen to it now, coming at it with a bit more life experience, a bit more detachment from the underlying emotions, I start to make sense of its dark, male-dominated, all round unsettling undercurrent. You could make a fair case that Emo is emotional abuse commodified as a music genre.
This is best demonstrated by teasing out some of the repeating themes, or more accurately the archetypes, that emerge. Pulled from my considerable knowledge, thanks to the decade or so that I spent in the genre (I wish I could say it only lasted my teenage years), I’ll run through a few of them. I have included links for further reading if you so choose, although that’s a rabbit hole you may want to avoid.
Some of these archetypes are complex.
There is the Despairing Emo, the Helpless Emo, with his surrender to one’s environment, its assault of temptations that overpower a weak man’s will. We are lacking. We are a slave to these feelings. There is no escape.
The Self-Destructive Emo spirals out of control under this burden. The Suffering Emo accepts it, seeks to understand it.
I can even sometimes hear, listening closely, submission to a higher power, a greater force. Religious undertones — the Religious Emo — can be found everywhere, and occasionally we do see the Spiritual Emo emerge out the other side.
On one hand, we have something close to feminism, the Woke Emo: self aware enough of his privilege to admit that for all our material accumulated status, our influence, our achievements, we are fundamentally weaker in spirit than you. This music is also an attempt at gendered absolution — we have been terrible to you, we don’t deserve you, but we need you nonetheless. Hopefully he means it, and isn’t just trying to get laid.
On the other hand, some of it is akin to men’s rights activism, the Righteous Emo: an attempt to illumine a different type of power balance, which exists not structurally, economically, and physically — but emotionally, sexually, possibly even intellectually, in the other direction.
Some of it, in the end, is pretty straightforward. Some of it, as seems glaringly obvious to me now, is nothing if not emotional abuse, disguised as a song — using your power to tell one side of a complicated story, and to make money and tour the world while objectifying and demeaning them in front of the world. A dark spectrum of archetypes can be found here — the Jealous Emo, the Callous Emo, the Vengeful Emo, the Hateful Emo — which are regrettably all too common.
The most common however, the ultimate abusive Emo archetype that pervades all of these other archetypes, is more subtle: the Boy who’s only hope, only chance for happiness, is a Girl. You know this one well: the Emotional Blackmailing Emo.
Why do they do this? Why do we do this — you better believe I’ve sung along to all of these songs in my day.
My main lesson from Emo lies, again, in the name: that this whole mess revolves around emotions. That these emotions are real, they are natural (or at least feel natural), and that Emo is used as a channel and outlet for these emotions.
These emotions are, for the most part, directed at girls — but are they really, fundamentally, caused by girls? This is the tricky part. What caused me to resonate so much with the underlying negative emotions of these songs?
Look, I was fucked around by a few girls. Who hasn’t been though. It was never bad enough to warrant a song about knowingly and shamelessly getting her drunk to sleep with her, let alone tying her down and raping her.
These are the irrational and disproportionate actions of someone with trauma. And this is my conclusion: Emo music is one of the best evidences we have for the widespread emotional trauma of a generation of boys/men.
This is trauma that reaches far beyond the proportion of males who would go to the extremes of physically assaulting or raping someone. And this clearly isn’t trauma caused by the actions of some naive, slightly self-absorbed and likely very pretty young woman. It must be deeper than that. Passed on by society, by family, or maybe, if you are so inclined to such beliefs, even carried over from a previous life. Or as I suspect: some fundamental imbalance in the way we have come to conceive and create the masculine archetype, and perhaps even the feminine one at that.
We can shame men, pass enough forms of top-down legislation, raise awareness through as many different forms of social action as we want. Until we get to the bottom of this epidemic of male emotional trauma, until these afflicted men are prepared to go deep enough inside of themselves to locate this trauma, and until the rest of society is prepared to go with them on this uncomfortable journey… well, there will be plenty more terrible things that we will all be complicit in.