emo

The tradition & historical record

Emo ( EE-moh) is a genre of rock music that combines musical characteristics of hardcore punk with emotional, often confessional lyrics. It emerged as a style of hardcore punk and post-hardcore from the mid-1980s Washington, D.C., hardcore scene, where it was known as emotional hardcore or emocore. The bands Rites of Spring and Embrace, among others, pioneered the genre. In the late 1980s, Maryland bands Moss Icon and the Hated adopted and reinvented this sound, putting less influence on its punk roots. In the early-to-mid 1990s, their influence led emo to be adopted by alternative rock, indie rock, and pop-punk bands, including Sunny Day Real Estate, Jawbreaker, Cap'n Jazz, Mineral, and Jimmy Eat World. By the mid-1990s, Braid, the Promise Ring, American Football, and the Get Up Kids emerged from Midwest emo, and several independent record labels began to specialize in the genre. Meanwhile, screamo, a more aggressive style of emo using screamed vocals, also emerged, pioneered by the San Diego bands Heroin and Antioch Arrow. Its derivative form pop screamo achieved mainstream success in the 2000s with bands like Hawthorne Heights, Silverstein, Story of the Year, Thursday, the Used, and Underoath. The emo subculture signifies a specific relationship between fans and artists and certain aspects of fashion, culture, and behavior. Emo fashion includes skinny jeans, black eyeliner, tight t-shirts with band names, studded belts, and flat, straight, jet-black hair with long bangs. ¹

Emo originated in hardcore punk and is considered a form of post-hardcore. Early emo bands used melody and emotional or introspective lyrics and that were less structured than regular hardcore punk, differentiating them from the aggression, anger, and verse-chorus-verse structures of traditional hardcore punk. According to Ryan De Freitas of Kerrang: "Emo in the '90s was about scrappy, emotionally fuelled imperfection." According to Chris Payne, author of Where Are Your Boys Tonight?: The Oral History of Emo's Mainstream Explosion, emo is "often more melodic, more vulnerable [than traditional hardcore] — and often really over the top. [There are also] really performative aspects in emo." Sandra Song of CNN describes emo as a "softer approach to hardcore punk, with warbly vocals and evocative lyrics that have other bands derisively calling it the sound of 'teen angst.'" Em Casalena of American Songwriter stated that the genre is characterized by an "angsty yet kind of miserable vibe". Despite being rooted in hardcore punk, emo has also been associated with other related genres, such as alternative rock, indie rock, punk rock, and pop-punk. During the 2000s, it became common for bands to fuse emo with harder styles such as heavy metal and metalcore to varying degrees by incorporating metallic riffs, guitar solos and breakdowns into their songwriting. Bands who have released songs in this style include From First To Last, Bullet for My Valentine, Escape the Fate, Underoath and My Chemical Romance. Andrew Sacher of Brooklyn Vegan has expressed his belief that the year 2001 was a "crossroads" of sorts for the genre, stating that "emo came in a lot of different varieties" during that year. ¹

According to music writer Luke Britton, "it's generally accepted that the genre's pioneers" came in the late 1980s. During the decade, many hardcore punk and post-hardcore bands formed in Washington, D.C. Post-hardcore, an experimental offshoot of hardcore punk, was inspired by post-punk. Hardcore punk bands and post-hardcore bands who influenced early emo bands include Minor Threat, Black Flag and Hüsker Dü. ¹

Emo, which began as a post-hardcore subgenre, was part of the 1980s hardcore punk scene in Washington, D.C., as something different from the violent part of the Washington, D.C., hardcore scene. Rites of Spring formed in 1983, using the musical style of hardcore punk and combining the musical style with melodic guitars, varied rhythms, and personal, emotional lyrics. Many of the band's themes, including nostalgia, romantic bitterness and poetic desperation, became familiar tropes of later emo music. Its performances were public, emotional purges where audience members sometimes wept. Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat became a Rites of Spring fan (recording their only album and being their roadie) and formed the emo band Embrace, which explored similar themes of self-searching and emotional release. Similar bands followed in connection with the "Revolution Summer" of 1985, an attempt by members of the Washington scene to break from the usual characteristics of hardcore punk to a hardcore punk style with different characteristics. Bands such as Gray Matter, Beefeater, Fire Party, Dag Nasty, and Soulside were associated with the movement. ¹

The Washington, D.C., emo scene lasted only a few years, and by 1986, most of emo's major bands (including Rites of Spring, Embrace, Gray Matter and Beefeater) had broken up. However, its ideas and aesthetics spread quickly across the country through a network of homemade zines, vinyl records and hearsay. According to Greenwald, the Washington, D.C., scene laid the groundwork for emo's subsequent incarnations: ¹

What had happened in D.C. ¹

As the Washington, D.C., emo movement spread across the United States, local bands began to emulate its style. Emo combined the fatalism, theatricality and isolation of the Smiths with hardcore punk's uncompromising, dramatic worldview. Despite the number of bands and the variety of locales, emocore's late-1980s aesthetics remained more-or-less the same: "over-the-top lyrics about feelings wedded to dramatic but decidedly punk music." During the early–mid 1990s, several new bands reinvented emo, making emo expand by becoming a subgenre of genres like indie rock and pop punk. Chief among them were Jawbreaker and Sunny Day Real Estate, who inspired cult followings, redefined emo and brought it a step closer to the mainstream. In the wake of the 1991 success of Nirvana's Nevermind and the associated rise of grunge, underground music and subcultures were widely noticed in the United States, with record labels seeking to find the next big rock subgenre. New distribution networks emerged, touring routes were codified, and regional and independent acts accessed the national stage. Young people across the country became fans of independent music, and punk culture became mainstream. ¹

Emerging from the late 1980s and early 1990s San Francisco punk rock scene and forming in New York City, Jawbreaker combined pop punk with emotional and personal lyrics. Singer-guitarist Blake Schwarzenbach focused his lyrics on personal, immediate topics often taken from his journal. Often obscure and cloaked in metaphors, their relationship to Schwarzenbach's concerns gave his words a bitterness and frustration which made them universal and attractive to audiences. Schwarzenbach became emo's first idol, as listeners related to the singer even more than to his songs. ¹

The American punk and indie… ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Emo”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

emo is derivative of post hardcore rock music with emotional, introspective lyrics, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 21 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²