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Not very long ago I realized that most of today’s youth considers the music genre ‘emo’ to be something completely different then what it was when I was all over the punk battlefield (the good old days as I refer to them) and I think It’s time we set the record straight.


I’m pretty sure this is a dude.
The image on the left is what the average ‘emo’ kid looked like years ago. A button up short sleeve shirt, a pair of Vans, and the Long Island gel head. The image on the right is what most people today consider to be an emo kid. Emo was a genre of music and that’s it. As you can see in the pic, there was no fashion trends and it wasn’t used to describe a type of troubled youth. It was just mid-tempo punk music.


So how did we get here? The chart below sums it up best.



Emo was basically pop-punk slowed down with some post-hardcore influence and that’s it! It wasn’t dark music, had nothing to do with cutting yourself, and had zero fashion sense. I think it’s time this new generation of emo gets it’s own genre name. What about Nu-Glam? or Golamyth?
In a recent Rolling Stone interview James Suptic, one of the founding members of the Get Up Kids apologizes for the current state of emo. “Honestly, I don’t often think about the state of ‘emo’. The punk scene we came out of and the punk scene now are completely different. It’s like glam rock now,” Suptic told DiS. “We played the Bamboozle fests this year and we felt really out of place. I could name maybe three bands we played with. It was just a sea of neon shirts to us. If this is the world we helped create, then I apologize.” According to Andy Greenwald (senior contributing writer at Spin Magazine), “This was the period (mid-nineties) when emo earned many, if not all, of the stereotypes that have lasted to this day: boy-driven, glasses-wearing, overly sensitive, overly brainy, chiming-guitar-driven college music.” Andy’s description is pretty dead on, at least I thought it was until my recent revelation.
Look, kids will follow the trends, try and push it farther then the guy before to get noticed, then look back years later and try and cover up the evidence. I’m perfectly okay with that. I don’t care about the goth look or if it has become impossible to tell the boys from the girls. It was a very similar environment when I grew up with the Poisons and Wingers. Just don’t call what you’re doing fucking emo or punk. When your main motivation to become a band is to be a rockstar or you go to the shows to ‘be seen’ rather then listen to the music, then you have nothing to do with what ‘emo’ was originally about.
Finally, lets close with some emo music. While it was hard to tell the difference from an indie, punk, or emo band (and I know a lot of bands hated being tagged emo even back then), here are some selections that I considered emo and think you should give a listen.