Matt Pryor: “The term ‘punk’ was derogatory initially, too. It’s an evolution of language, but it is very much a case of outsiders.”
Shane Told (Silverstein): “The main [movement] I’d say I would compare [emo] to is the goth movement. Really, the emo thing was an extension of that, repackaged and repurposed. Now, ‘goth’ made sense because ‘goth’ stood for ‘gothic,’ which everyone thinks of as dark and black. But ‘emo’ is such an easy-to-make-fun-of word. ‘Oh, you’re emo.’ So I think it was really easy for somebody who had no association with it […] to poke fun at it. You could poke fun at it based on a guy like me, up there borderline crying on stage. Or, you could poke fun at some girl who has her hair fourteen different colors and piercings in her face.”
Tom Mullen (Washed Up Emo): “After 150 plus interviews for my podcast, the tag ‘emo’ still has weight to this day and has survived while being the most hated word to describe a genre. [It] is pretty remarkable.”
Chris Simpson (Mineral): “I don’t love it, as terms go. To me, it doesn’t feel useful in the sense that such a large amount of things have that term slapped on it; a lot of different sounding bands, to my ears. It seems to be more of an aesthetic than a sound. I don’t know what it means, really.”
Steve Lamos (American Football): “I don’t know why people associate us with [emo]. I guess ‘cause of Mike [Kinsella]. Nobody really cared about American Football when we existed the first time. I think there’s been some interesting revision of history as people have picked up on that first record, and now they associate us with that music in a way that I certainly don’t think they did at the time. I thought of The Promise Ring or Grade or Cap’n Jazz as that genre. But I have no idea why American Football is necessarily included in that, other than the Mike connection. But if that’s the kind of music that attracts the weirdos and the people who feel like a square peg in a round hole, then I’m fine with it. Nobody really seems to want to claim this title for themselves, but maybe that’s what emo means.”
Ian MacKaye: “Thursday…are they an emo band? The Promise Ring? Jets to Brazil? So, anything that Blake [Schwarzenbach] was in…Huh. I don’t want to dismiss emo. It’s such an obscure form and so hard to define. I don’t know what the criteria is to be emo.”
Kenny Vasoli (The Starting Line): “If you sing about relationships and you have kind of a high voice, you might be in an emo band.”
Eddie Reyes (Taking Back Sunday): “People always said that we were emo, and we never ever thought we were. To us, the real emo bands died out in the late ‘90s. For some strange reason, someone in some big magazine decided to attach that name to the music that came out of the punk rock scene. It was just instant—everyone’s emo. My Chem never thought they were emo; they thought they were punk rock kids from Jersey. It’s kind of like when you watch Dave Grohl talk about the Seattle punk scene and all of a sudden they were grunge, and they were like, ‘What the fuck is grunge?’ ”
Chris Conley (Saves The Day): “It kind of depends on who you’re asking. I think it’s amazing, because I first heard the word ‘emo’ when it was about Sunny Day Real Estate and Embrace.”
Ethan Fixell: “The first time I ever heard the word ‘emo’ was while recording an EP with my high school band at Mike Watts’s Vu Du Studios in Long Island, New York. An engineer named Sean Hanney told me that our music shared a lot of similarities with a movement that was happening at the time: this ‘emo’ thing. He played me Saves The Day’s Through Being Cool, and I was totally into it. Shortly after, I read a piece in a 1999 issue of Guitar World by Jim DeRogatis that was titled, ‘Emo (The Genre That Dare Not Speak Its Name).’ ”
“Emo (The Genre That Dare Not Speak Its Name)”
by Jim DeRogatis (Guitar World, 1999)
Once again there’s a hard-rocking sound galvanizing the underground. You can call it post-hardcore. You can call it post-punk. You can take a step back and just call it indie-rock. Any name you choose is bound to prompt an argument with somebody, so you might as well bite the bullet and call it the name that nobody likes: Emo.
Tom Mullen: “The words ‘emo’ and ‘emotion’ are things I would see at early shows when screamo bands would pour out everything they had on the stage, and by the end they’d all be so tired and exhausted from the set. The entire time watching it would be this feeling of the show being on the brink of breaking, but it never does. That tension, that moment of feeling like the music can go anywhere […] is what emotional means to me and what emo has always meant to me.”
Chris Conley: “Anybody [who] says they don’t like emo that was part of emo is just fronting. It’s lame.”
Eddie Reyes: “I feel like the people that hate it don’t really hate it. I think that they are truly emo kids deep down inside that just think it’s cool to hate it. I’m a fuckin’ emo kid.”
It would seem that the jury is out on whether “emo” is a good thing or a bad thing. An entire linguistics class could be dedicated to this subject for how much trouble this little three-letter word has been causing. But, if you think about it, is it really that much of a surprise? Humans have maintained pretty poor relationships with their emotions for as long as they’ve had them. Every day we are puzzled, even baffled, by them. It’s hard for many people to look their emotions square in the eyes. Many flat out ignore their emotions, even though what makes us human is our capacity to think and, most importantly, to feel. So the word “emo” is intrinsically problematic because emotions themselves are intrinsically problematic. Calling someone or something “emo” is to blatantly and singularly identify them or it as not just having emotion, but having a more emphasized relationship with emotion to the point where it needs to be commented on.
Nobody ever self-described as emo to begin with because the people who were making the music already knew they were doing it with extreme emotion—that was the point. But people who weren’t making this music and people who weren’t feeling the types of emotions that these bands were articulating were at odds with it. That’s because it’s difficult for people who haven’t suffered to understand suffering, and suffering is a large part of what these songs and records were confronting. And what generally happens when people are confronted with something outside their comfort zone? There is resistance. There is degradation. There is othering. And that’s all because, initially, there is fear.
To control that fear, people gave it a name: Emo. Once something has a name, it can be easily packaged into a neat little box and contained. But if there is one thing that none of these bands wanted to be, it was contained.
“This is not pretty,” remarks Shane Told, vocalist of Silverstein. “[It’s] in your face. I think that and the screaming that was coming into the music, too…this was not background music. This is intense music and if you’re a fan of this, then you care about this and then it was like, are you all in or not? If I’m listening to this music, then I am listening to this music. That was when it became such a thing, when people’s lives started revolving around these bands.”
Jacob Marshall, the drummer of MAE surmises, “It wasn’t trying to brag about your conquests or achieving a certain lifestyle status. It wasn’t mindless, it was mindful. It was actually reflecting deeply on the things that hurt us or healed us.”
Reflecting deeply (and out loud) about emotions like pain and love is not traditionally culturally acceptable for a male, and the bands in the emo and screamo music scenes were mostly comprised of young men. Sure, it was okay for the likes of William Shakespeare and Edgar Allan