The 'Emo' Fad

It just came to me like the word 'Haller'. It instantly became a term for those profiles depicting the darkest of their being. Usually designed with black or gothic appearance, they propose an appeal which effectively channels the intended aura. Seeing gothic is not a new thing to me, I've seen them ever since I discovered my way into the internet. But the emo thing, usually written as a caption or comment in their pages to tell everyone what they are portraying, intrigued me. I really wonder how they arrived at the word emo to described their artistic display of negativity?

Well, emo is obviously a short term for emotional. And when you say emotional, it usually connotes misery rather than gaiety. Why is it so?? It's because that word (emo) is not actually new. So I traced back its roots.

I heard of music termed as emo. Usually defined by my sister as those music she got hooked with. The music that they usually can relate to, those music that echoes the sadness of their hearts, their longing for love, their need for romantic yearning, are what they can tell as emo. I might be generalizing, so I'll describe how emo sounds like to teens nowadays (or how they defined emo music nowadays). They... uhh, you know Fall Out Boy and Coheed and Cambria? They're good examples.

Emo is a rock genre. So there's the origin. It started in the '80s. So, it was indeed created to describe another deviation of rock. I heard some of its music. And I don't like it, personally. They really are emotional, but very different to the emo music teens are telling me today. Somewhat hardcore but sings in an intense emotional fashion (shouting, haha) along with melodic delivery in some parts. Usually the emotion came out of hatred or angst. And the lyrics are designed to be abstract and difficult to decipher. They indeed give a unique sense of poetry. But I admit, like the common rock, the vocals gets overpowered (or rather, gets fired up) with the instrumentals, resulting in a song with a not-so-comprehensible lyrics. They don't have the good harmonics my ears needed to get pleased. But they are designed to be that way, so I won't treat that as a fault of their music.

Just recently the emo suddenly broadened in its definition. Thanks to media and the teens who used the term, now new waves of bands are categorized by their fans as such even though the bands themselves don't agree. And they used the term to define gloomy poses of themselves, in the hope of complementing their favorite emo songs with the proper expression. Well, it became a fad, created by fans themselves, and we can't help it. As long as there are lonely teens able to browse the web and hear mp3s of bands they can relate to, the emo will remain embedded to this kind of fashion. Perhaps it will take time before the real emo genre will be known to them.

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Endnote: If it wasn't for this post I saw on Ask Yahoo!, I wouldn't know much about the real origin of emo. (What is 'emo'?) Also, thanks for the link there pointing to a site answering all questions about emo. The feedback part was indeed funny, as his site rallied some anti-emo people and the punks alike, against his article. I wonder if I would get the same reaction from this post. Even though my post just revealed a tiny bit of info about the subject.