Emo, no longer rock music's dirtiest word

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/13/emo-american-football-braid-fall-out-boy

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For a period in the 2000s there was no dirtier word in music than “emo”. The genre encouraged an endless conveyor belt of boys with floppy fringes, howling about how horrible their comfortable suburban lives were. Along with its more irate cousin screamo, it launched bands such as My Chemical Romance, Hawthorne Heights and Fall Out Boy. Critics loathed it, and the right-wing press treated it like a modern folk devil. “Why No Child Is Safe From The Sinister Cult Of Emo”, thundered one Daily Mail article, linking the scene to instances of suicide and self-harm.

Such hysteria must have seemed downright bizarre to anyone who followed the music in the 90s. Back then, emo was very different. Drawn from the 80s emotional hardcore of Rites Of Spring and Ian McKaye’s pre-Fugazi outfit Embrace, the scene was largely clustered around a few bands from the US midwest. They were a diverse crowd, encompassing everything from the driving, cathartic rock of Mineral to the goofier, mathier Cap’n Jazz. Lyrically these bands bore little relation to the solipsistic whining of what followed. Their lyrics were emotional, sure, but they were also self-effacing, thoughtful and funny.

While mainstream emo fizzled after its mid-00s peak, this earlier form has continued undaunted, spearheaded both by members of that late 90s scene and those who grew up listening to it. In the veterans corner sit the re-formed likes of Braid and American Football. In the newcomers corner are the Hotelier, Into It Over It and the extravagantly named The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die.

“Bands like American Football didn’t play shows for hundreds of people back [in the 90s], but they played music that resonated with a devoted pocket of people and it gradually spread”, explains Kevin Duquette, who runs Topshelf Records, the indie label which is home to Braid and TWIABP. “People picked up instruments and wanted to continue that sound.”

These two generations frequently run in the same circles. They tour together, release split singles and, in the case of Cap’n Jazz/American Football man Mike Kinsella and Into It Over It’s Evan Weiss, collaborate with each other (in self-consciously clever indie band Their / They’re / There).

For the old hands, the attention of a new generation has proved fruitful. American Football, for example, now play venues far larger than the ones they played in their heyday. And the younger bands, able to make use of an online community far more developed than in days of 90s emo, are attracting a sizeable following of their own: both TWIABP and Pennsylvania-based band Tigers Jaw have appeared in the Billboard top 200 in recent years.

Their success has sparked debate over whether we’re in the midst of an emo revival, complicated by arguments over what emo is. Like their 90s forefathers, many in the current scene are reluctant to embrace the term. Certainly, the music many of them are making takes in a wider range of genres: TWIABP hint at the emotive indie of the Decemberists, while Weiss’s latest project, Pet Symmetry, has more in common with crunchy alt-rock. Sheffield band Nai Harvest, meanwhile, used to play twiddly emo in the American Football mould, but on their recent album have ditched that sound for anthemic lo-fi.

Perhaps, then, this new scene is less of a revival than a mutation, steering emo into a new direction. Thankfully, it’s one that’s unlikely to worry the Daily Mail any time soon.

American Football tour the UK from Wednesday 13 to Sunday 17 May; the Hotelier play in the UK on Thursday 14 , Friday 15 & Tuesday 21 May