Theoretically Speaking: S6:E3 – What Makes Emo,  Emo ? 

A certain conversation has been recurring in my house for over twenty years.

The lovely Ms. Virgindog will hear a song and ask, “Is this Emo?”

Then she’ll say, “I still don’t know what Emo is.” And I’ll shrug again.

A lot of people share our confusion.

Fortunately, there’s a handy website called Is This Band Emo? You can type in any band’s name and it will tell you if it considers that band to be Emo or not.

But if you try to get cute, they’ll also shrug:

We can trace the history of what some people call Emo, but many of the musicians involved disavowed – and really hated the label. Others welcomed it.

“Emo” is short for “Emocore,” which in turn is short for “Emotional Hardcore.”

Emo came from Hardcore Punk, and specifically from the Hardcore scene in Washington DC.

Though Hardcore itself started in Los Angeles with bands like Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and The Minutemen, Washington DC was full of early adopters.

We’ll focus on DC for now because the first two bands to be called Emo, Rites Of Spring and Embrace, were from there.

Parenthetically, some people say that Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys is the first Emo album. With songs like “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times” and “I Know There’s An Answer,” Pet Sounds is as introspective as anything in the Rock canon.

But Emo? Without jangly or distorted guitars, and without the influence of Punk – which hadn’t been invented yet, I don’t think it fits the bill.

So the self-titled Rites Of Spring album is considered Emo’s first. Rites Of Spring and Embrace, however, didn’t like being called Emo.

It’s not that Emo is emotional. Most music is emotional.

It’s that Emo is vulnerable about emotions.

In what might seem like a contradiction, an individual revealing the deeply personal builds community. If listeners recognize a singer’s personal emotions as feelings they’ve had, too, especially if those feelings aren’t usually discussed in public, they’ll be drawn together around the singer.

It’s intimacy in a group setting. With loud guitars.

Guy Picciotto had been a fan of the DC Hardcore bands, especially Minor Threat.

What is Post-Hardcore and how is it different from Emo? It’s a very fine distinction. They both evolved from Hardcore, both are melodic with raw instrumentation, and both are emotionally expressive and introspective. 

I’d say that Emo was a part of Post-Hardcore, limited to personal, self-searching subject matter and Punk-based instruments.

Bands like Rites of Spring, Embrace, and Fugazi incorporated elements of Punk with inward-looking, emotionally charged lyrics. Whether Picciotto or MacKaye like it or not, their bands are the foundation for Emo.

By the mid-90s, Emo had spread outward from DC.

Bands like American Football, Mineral, and The Promise Ring slowed the tempo and emphasized intricate arrangements, odd time signatures, expressive but untrained vocals, and confessional lyrics.

This became known as Midwest Emo because most of these bands were from the Midwest, though Mineral was from Texas, and Texas Is The Reason was from New York City.

All of this was going on in the underground as Grunge was becoming mainstream.

They both come from Punk, but Grunge includes a lot of Heavy Metal and Classic Rock. Emo has more Indie and Alternative. 

Beyond the sound, both Grunge and Emo embrace people who don’t feel like they belong anywhere else.

After the 80s, with Reagan-era yuppies and hair band decadence, a lot of people felt left out.

Grunge’s popularity got mainstream listeners curious about what else was happening in the underground. Emo was unintentionally ready for wider popularity. Bands like Weezer are, at the very least, Emo-adjacent with their melodic, ironic tunes and sensitive, nerdy, heroic loser vibes. Their first album went platinum twice over,

Their second album, Pinkerton, was considered a failure. It didn’t sell well, and some critical reviews were harsh. Singer/songwriter Rivers Cuomo was thoroughly embarrassed that he had revealed too much of himself in the lyrics, and in a way that listeners didn’t understand.

Many now consider it to be Weezer’s best record.

Among the first of these Midwest Emo bands was Cap’n Jazz from Chicago. Their only album has a title that is 28 words long, so it’s more commonly known as Shmap’n Shmazz. They didn’t set out to be Emo — singer Tim Kinsella called it “weirdo punk” — but all the pieces of Midwest Emo are there. It’s fast but not too fast, it’s catchy, and its vocals are passionate if somewhat amateurish. Its Punk roots showed.

Cap’n Jazz went on tour shortly after the album’s release but a few days into it, the band’s drug use caught up with them.

They broke up, canceled the rest of the tour, and returned home. Shmap’n Shmazz went out of print but is now seen as one of the foundational records of Emo, particularly Midwest Emo.

Tim Kinsella’s brother Mike played drums in Cap’n Jazz but switched to guitar and started a new band called American Football.

But it’s the first album that earns them a high position in the Emo world. It abandoned Hardcore’s adrenaline fueled tempos and brought in Math Rock timings. Many of their songs are slow and dreamy but the odd time signatures make them a little off-kilter. Kinsella’s twinkly guitar sound would influence a lot of Emo bands.

At the same time, meaning through the 90s, a subgenre called Screamo formed. Its distinguishing characteristic, as the name implies, is screamed vocals. The music is also more aggressive to match those vocals, bringing back the Hardcore sound that Emo started with but Screamo is even more dissonant.

Other Emo groups had Pop Punk sensibilities, and these are the ones that major labels signed starting around the turn of the century as Grunge and Nü-Metal faded out. Fall Out Boy, AFI, and Panic! At The Disco all had hits.

In 2006, My Chemical Romance released The Black Parade:

A Rock Opera that’s closer to the Classic Rock of Queen or the Pop Punk of Green Day than it is to the Hardcore of Rites Of Spring.

This is when, farthest from its Hardcore origins, Emo was at its most popular.

No one likes to be the butt of jokes. So in the 2010s, some of the more successful Emo bands basically abandoned Emo.

• Fall Out Boy went pure Pop Punk.
• Panic! At The Disco went Synthpop.
• Paramore went New Wave.
• My Chemical Romance broke up.

Even so, Emo still had its fans, and the resurgence of interest in Emo music is sometimes referred to as the “Emo Revival” or “Post-Emo.”

This interest in turn led to Pop Punk getting back into the mainstream.

Machine Gun Kelly, Demi Lavato, and Olivia Rodrigo all have the Emo Revival to thank. So do new underground Emo bands, like Pool Kids, Hot Mulligan, Spanish Love Song, Ben Quad, Future Teens, Farseek, and Oso Oso.

While Emo experienced commercial success and mainstream recognition in the 2000s, it also faced criticism and backlash, with some associating the genre with stereotypes of teenage angst and melodrama. However, Emo continues to evolve and inspire new generations of musicians and fans who connect with its emotional sincerity and cathartic energy.

Earlier, I called The Black Parade Emo’s crowning achievement, but I missed my own point.

Emo isn’t just about the music. It’s a platform for musicians to explore their innermost thoughts and feelings in a raw and honest way, and that resonates with listeners who identify with their emotional sincerity.

It fosters a sense of emotional connection and authenticity between artists and fans. Addressing heartbreak, ennui, questions of identity, and existential angst, Emo’s crowning achievement may be its ability to create a space for individuals to embrace their emotions, find solace in shared experiences, and build meaningful connections with others, both within and outside of the music scene.

And if that’s not a crowning achievement, I don’t know what is.

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