Thursday, May 28, 2009
Wow 3oh!3 at Rocketown: What the Kids Are Into These Days
Posted by D Patrick Rodgers on Thu, May 28, 2009 at 9:56 AM
Here's some footage shot onstage by Vimeo user allister ann at 3oh!3's Rocketown performance last month. As you can plainly see, the kids love it. At the risk of provoking scores of angry, asymmetrically-coiffed 15-year-olds, I have to say: I don't get it. Sounds like a perfectly mainstream pop song to me (there's nothing wrong with a good pop song), but the dudes are dressed like this so it's somehow vaguely counter-culture? I should back off. No need to take swings at low-hanging fruit. I'd just like to guide these kids down a different path, or at least see them enjoy "hip-hop/electro" that's outside their aesthetic comfort zone (i.e. fashion safety net). I mean, I truly wish I could take a time machine to 2001 and knock the copy of Thursday's Full Collapse out of my then-16-year-old hand in order to replace it with Marquee Moon. But what can you do? Makes me think of this excerpt I came across from Andy Greenwald's book Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo:
The media business, so desperate for its self-obsessed, post-9/11 predictions of a return to austerity and the death of irony to come true, had found its next big thing. But it was barely a "thing," because no one had heard of it, and those who had couldn't define it. Despite the fact that the hedonistic, materialistic hip-hop of Nelly was still dominating the charts, magazine readers in the summer of '02 were informed that the nation was deep in an introverted healing process, and the way it was healing was by wearing thick black glasses and vintage striped shirts. Emo, we were told, would heal us all through fashion.
And now we're left with a beast that permeates music but has nothing to do with the music itself. That's what happened with punk, right? And grunge? They became such parodies of themselves that the people dressed like Sex Pistols and The Ramones or Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth didn't make music anything like that. Being perplexed and mildly angered by trends: Isn't that the first step in becoming a total sad grampa? Might not be so bad. I already listen to Wilco a lot.
Comments (21)
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You make a lot of good points here, PatRod (except I still think Full Collapse is a great record).
Even as a 28-year-old who still listens to a lot of emo, it pains me as to what passes these days as "emo" - which has always been kind of hard to define anyway. Like you said, a lot of these bands are making perfectly decent pop songs, but are getting labeled as emo because of the way they look. I hate being one of those "it was better when I was younger" guys.
To that point though, Greenwald makes a point in that book - which is excellent - that each cohort of teenagers defines what emo is to them. While The Promise Ring or Get Up Kids or Thursday or Taking Back Sunday may have resonated with people our age, that's not to say that Boys Against Girls or Cute Is What We Aim For don't resonate in the same way with the young'uns, even if those bands don't fit our construct of what "emo" is (was). To expand that further, watch concert footage of Taylor Swift, listen to what she is singing about, and compare that to what Dashboard Confessional was like at its zenith. Same age kids (just a lot more of them), same basic lyrical ideas.
FWIW, my favorite emo song from the past five years or so is Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone."
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Good god, I listened to a ton of Get Up Kids and Promise Ring. Seems to me like "emo" was this vague, formless sub-movement that was in precisely the wrong place at the wrong time, and the zeitgeist shaped it into something else. I know this type of thing is cyclical and I shouldn't be quite so perplexed by it. It's just funny to see something that started with bands like Rites of Spring and Jawbreaker spin off stuff like Sunny Day Real Estate and Mineral, then that creates shit like Taking Back Sunday and then Panic! at the Disco. It's literally gotten as far away from its origins as possible.
If the kid in his basement in Omaha listening to The Power of Failing and 30 Degrees Everywhere circa 1997 could have foreseen what was going to happen in the new millenium, he probably would have just killed himself then and there...instead of killing himself a couple years later.
And funny you should mention that Clarkson song. Guy I used to know bought the record that single was on when it came out, and when I asked him why, he said, "Cause it sounds like Juliana Theory with a chick singer. Fuckin' awesome."
A girl I was seeing bought me Rites of Springs self-titled '85 studio album on vinyl for my birthday in 2007. It's a great gift; I rewarded her by ignoring her phone calls. I'm quite a catch.
Your point about RoS and Jawbreaker leading to Mineral and Promise Ring and all the way down to Panic! At The Disco is taken, but isn't that true of all musical forms?
Could somebody have predicted that Big Daddy Kane would lead to Tupac would lead to Nelly? Or that The Beatles would lead to Nickelback?
It's probably truer of emo, though, because it doesn'(and maybe never has) existed as something easily definable, something that, rather, is more definable by the audience it reaches, rather than the musical nature of it.
Hmm good post that lead to even better discussion. I remember back in '01 when I was in my full on punk swing and gave anyone that even breathed the name Dashboard Confessional complete and utter hell. Man I couldn't stand that 'emo' stuff back then.
Now, nearly a decade later I've been going back and retracing 'emo's' steps trying to figure out where it started, and also doing a little listening along the way.
Colonel - I definitely recommend the Greenwald book if you are interested in tracing the history. What's funny is that book is relatively new, but is already dated. The second big explosion of emo in the middle part of this decade is not included. It was written in the context of a time where the closest thing to emo on the radio was Weezer or Blink-182. Now Fall Out Boy and Panic! and other bands of their ilk are ubiquitous.
I read "Everybody Hurts" by Leslie Simon and Trevor Kelley. It was sorta interesting but I already knew most of the culture. I have no idea why I bought and read it.
I'll check out "Nothing Feels Good."
Anybody else remember the big kerfuffle when Maximum Rock N Roll decided to stop reviewing "emo" because bands like Anitoch Arrow and Rains Like The Sound of A Train veered too far from their definition of punk? Can you imagine what Tim Yohanon would think of these kids?
man. things were so much more cut and dry back in the day.
it also doesn't help that with the rising popularity of Urban Outfitters and American Apparel, you can't really tell who the "cool" kids are anyway. hipster fashion is the norm now. most everything we used to consider counterculture is just regular ass culture now.
just a guy is sporting a mohawk and a spikey, doesn't mean he's ever even heard of The Exploited. he's probably just a frat dude who's feeling "edgy"
i mean. now you gotta all "get to know" someone before you decide if they're cool or not. wtf is up with that?
I like Wilson Phillips...they're probably my favorite pre-emo-core cunt-rock group influenced by Brian Wilson's jizz and Big Mama Cass' fat. I don't know though, I like Thursday too.
Also, watching that many people enjoy 3OH!3's "music" was like watching 2,000 fecalphiliacs get their fetish party on.
Does anyone remember the bands Still Life or Indian Summer? Those were the bands I understood to be emo when I started college, then I learned that people also called Dashboard Confessional emo, which never made sense to me. That said, I did love the shit out of some Jimmy Eat World's Clarity when I was 17.
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