A kung fu fighter in a disco

Great rant, Kat!

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katstevens.livejournal.com

I don't listen to the Today programme much anymore.

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I swear we've had this discussion somewhere else, probably the Other Place. I seem to recall going on about Bright Eyes at great length. XD

My basic reason for not expecting girl emo is that I think of emo as male-hysteric music, which by definition can't be made by gurlz.

(I'm kind of uncomfortable with p'mists talking about emo because none of us are actually in the scene at all, we really don't know anything about what it's like on the ground and seem to be discussing our shared imagination of the emo kid and what he/se/it 'surely must like', not the emo kids themselves. We're all in older cultural generations than the emo kids and are supposed to find it absurd, if we didn't there'd be no point to it.)

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It got taken offline by the evil white supremacist pressure groups that conspire to make Jessica "Hero of the Oppressed Minorities" Hopper's life a living hell.

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Now that you mention this, I remember seeing reference to it in several places.

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I had a similar thought just as I finished the post: "Is this really the place for this discussion?" And it probably isn't (although I do think there are quite a few people in their early 20s. And I had better expectations for the level of discourse here than I would on ILM, where such a thead would probably die a quick snarky death.

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katstevens.livejournal.com

early 20s = way too old for emo!

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freakytigger.livejournal.com

I think appreciating stuff as "pop" tho involves, or can involve, coming to an understanding of it that includes an imperfect understanding of the scene. One of the things that happens to music - willingly or not - when it becomes "pop" is that the imagined-scene becomes as or even more important than the real scene. This is one of the key reasons why fans and musicians hate pop.

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I wonder if this is a classic example of a specifically male-gendered 'appropriation' of traits and behaviours (e.g. being 'emotional') more often attributed to women. I put 'appropriation' in scare-quotes to suggest that since these traits don't belong to anyone in the first place, this is more like a colonising of a discursive space into which women have already been restricted. A parallel example is the way male 'romantic' writing pushes out the predominantly female-authored sentimental poetry at the end of the eighteenth century. But those women were already adapting and using and playing with modes of feeling attributed to them in the immensely popular novels of Rousseau, Fielding etc. rather than reflecting some 'natural' fact. But this suggests that the correlation between male band and female audience need not be some terrible piece of oppression (although it excludes women as performers, women are unlikely to be internalising the 'women are evil' message, and more likely to identify with the male performer than the object of his disgust, esp. since the 'emo' artist is masquerading as a woman THIS IS ALL A BIG GUESS!), and that since rock inherits romantic values wholesale, it's merely a more refined example of a predominat trait. And given that hardcore (I guess but don't know) and indie (for sure), out of which emo seems to come, seem to me really misogynist (I've discussed this elsewhere -- 'I can't get a date because I'm shy and sensitive' becomes 'why won't you date me you bitch!') I'm hardly surprised that this is the case with emo.

I have read the Hopper essay. If I get a chance I'll look it up on my shelf and report back.

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Is this why indie kids hate emo (see FT, obv.)? i.e. they see emo as a 'pop' version of rock.

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Yes.

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If that's true -- and I don't dispute it -- it is quite interesting, because it means that emo is actually a substitue for, say, the Spice Girls and those pure pop bands who occupied that segment of the market in the 90s. That will make sense to Koganbot, who I think lumps a lot of teen girl pop in with emo. But I'm thinking of the "genre" in narrower terms.

(Someone tell me to stop if I am just saying things that everyone else here already knows?)

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My inner indie is on display, no doubt, when I say that emo seems a) conformist (admittedly to a particular subgroup) and b) hypocrtical -- in theory it's all about earnest emotion but somehow seems dishonest.

Now I really am making things up. Because I'm Old.

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'Why don't you date me, you bitch?' also implying the very dishonesty I mention above.

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It's theater-kid music, I think? in the imaginary american high school we can all recognise, boys who are excluded from the male mainstream due to being geeky and effeminate.

There is something very satisfying in someone else being unhappy and unreasonable for you. For good or ill, it's generally assumed that women are more emotionally vulnerable than men, so the sound of a men being irrationally emotional can have more impact if you assume it's had to break through more layers of socially-expecetd repression.

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And the artifice - this is the theater-kid thing, it's very consciously histrionic, literally "acting up". Pantomime, melodrama, tragicomedy (P!ATD sometimes do this kind of semi-brechtian thing they totally learnt in drama class). Taking what you're given to the extreme: if I'm supposed to be effeminate i'll go androgyne and wear eyeliner, if I'm suposed to be angry i'll be incoherently spitting rage, if I'm supposed to be sad i'll be the saddest person in the world.

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freakytigger.livejournal.com

You can see this happening a bit in the comments box to the Popular write-up of "San Francisco", which is a really blatant dragging of a scene into a pop context. The pop context plainly one and it's only the dwindling band of hippies who 'were there' that would claim otherwise.

(i.e. "history" bears little or no relation to "memory" shocker)

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What's dishonest, there? Surely that's more human! A song in which someone lies to themself is surely as emotionally honest as a song in which someone expresses what it going on - more honest, even, because it represents a human emotional state which is flawed and confused and self-deluding rather than someone who's detached enough to see things in a sensible light.

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The indie kid in me sez: "If you really were shy and sensitive, it would never occur to you to think 'Why won't you date me you bitch?' You are just another jock/cool kid playing at something and usurping MY position as 'shy and sensitive.' And I, unlike you, don't have any other alternatives."

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to which the emo kid responds: "oh, you're shy and sensitive all the time, are you? never angry, always resigned, getting meeker by the minute - you've never resented someone you had a crush on, only mooned poetically and perfectly over them from an appropriate distance, keeping your thoughts pure and loverlike? You're a paragon? You're not real."

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'In those bands [Jawbox, Jawbreaker, Sunny Day Real Estate], there were songs about women, girls who weren't exclusively defined by their absence or lensed through romantic-spectre [sic.]. [...] In Jawbreaker songs women had leverage, had life, had animus and agency to them. Sometimes they were friends, or a siste, not always girl to be bedded or pursued or dumped by. They were accurate, and touched by reality. [...]'

ok: Hopper sees this as a change within emo culture rather than a defining attribute of it (when she started going to punk rock shows she could see Bikini Kill, or Babes in Toyland). She doesn't do much to try and explain it, except to say that this is music by adolescent boys for adolescent boys and none of them KNOW very much about 'real' women. She worries about all the young girls crowding down to the front of emo shows ("won't somebody think of the children!") who don't have the reference points she does which allow her to call out the emo boys. (Of course the two trends may be directly related, but she doesn't consider this, or the contempt that rock has always had for its audience (c.f. koganbot, on this).)

'I wonder if this does it for them, if seeing these bands, these dudes on stage resonates and inspires them to want to pick up a guitar or drum sticks. Or if they just see this as something dudes do, because there are no girls, there is no them up there. I wonder if they are being thwarted by the fact that there is no presentation of girls as participants, but rather only as consumers--or if we reference the songs directly--the consumed. I wonder if this is where music will begin and end for them. If they can be radicalized in spite of this.'

She recognises that much of what punk rock promises (i.e. difference, being outside the norm, something different from the mainstream) is largely a hollow sham, but that this is still what attracts young people seeking to express their anger / alienation. She thinks there's still a space for some kind of connection through this, but not for women if there are no 'real' women onstage or in the songs.

So she doesn't say much, really. I don't know if she thinks that punk rock is the only place where this good stuff can happen.

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whalefish.livejournal.com

There's at least one emo-ish band fronted by a girl - Paramore, I think they're called. They aren't that good, but then, not many of them are.

Though there seems to be quite a few more biggish indie bands with girls in than there were a few years ago, and more females in metal, so perhaps emo will follow.

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chezghost.livejournal.com

I'm glad there aren't more girl emo bands because the fewer emo bands the better generally (sorry to go all Lexy here).

This is just distraction from the more pressing need for more girls to make cyberpop, bosh etc. (and i don't mean just fronting it) plus running the labels, websites etc.

actually maybe Ada's wonderful 'Cool My Fire' is an emo song really...

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Ellen Allien is totally emo!

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