Finding Emo?

I began teaching English to college freshmen seven years ago; I was in my mid-twenties and young enough to understand my students’ temporal references. If I’m still teaching seven years from now, my son will be eighteen and old enough to explain those references to me. Currently, however, I teach 300 college freshmen a year, and sometimes they reference concepts or trends I’m too old and my son’s too young to recognize. Most recently, it was “emo.” Here’s the context: Last week, a student came to class wearing a t-shirt with four cartoon lambs on the front. The fourth lamb dripped cartoon blood from a cartoon stab wound, and the caption read: “Taking Back Sundays. To hell with you and all your little friends.” Because I teach in a largely conservative, Christian town, I feared the student was trying to scare folks into church attendance. I admitted, “I have no idea what your shirt means,” and another student supplied the answer, “Oh. It’s just emo.” There I stood, Miranda fresh off Prospero’s ship, wondering at creatures strange and new to her alone. Emo?

The definitions were, at first, unanimous. The word is a truncation of “emotional.” Taking Back Sundays is a band, and, musically, emo is a contemporary subgenre of punk. The sub-subgenres include hardcore emo, screamo, and emo-indie. When I asked for examples of emo music I may have heard on the radio, however, the debates began. My students argued whether Dashboard Confessional, Saves the Day, My Chemical Romance, and Death Cab for Cutie were “truly” emo bands or “just pop.” (“Death Cab” was the only band I knew, and also the band most quickly dismissed as “just pop”). As for the radio? Myspace is a more reliable supplier. Even college radio is apparently too quaint a resource for today’s college freshmen. It makes sense; entertainment conglomerates annihilated most small local stations, exiling underground music from commercial radio. The Internet, by creating public access, equalizes the underground and mainstream, the views of the studied and the unstudied, the spins of the government’s advocates and its critics. A vetted scholar and a sixth grade blogger can write whatever they wish, and can both expect to have their writing read by people other than blood relatives. My students, having always had this privilege and expectation of audience, value one another’s (and their own) expertise. When it comes to music, they’re probably right to do so. A decade ago, the “expert” on new music might have been a kid at school who discovered obscure bands by haunting god-knows-where before disseminating his discoveries, via mix-tapes, to the lucky, cool or connected. Now, these experts post the information on Myspace, accessible by cool and uncool alike.

But emo isn’t simply a musical reference. People, too, can qualify as emo. Certainly, it isn’t new for young people to emulate musicians they admire. My own contemporaries, for example, assuredly sat in homerooms with kids dressed like The Cure. And, emo, my students say, does require certain wardrobe essentials: Converse high-tops, tight pants, horn-rimmed glasses, and logo t-shirts that can be purchased at a premium online or at Hot Topic. But the emo lifestyle (like the music-inspired lifestyle trends of every generation) is about more than music and clothes. It embodies a worldview, a mood, a personality. At this point, my students’ definitions varied widely. Some students used “emo” for something I might call “clinical depression” cavalierly stating, “You know, those people who cut themselves. They’re emo.” Many others defined emo people as “whiny,” giving examples like: “Those people who say their lives are horrible, they hate their parents, they’re still upset about that break-up that happened, like, five months ago.” Those critical of emo people defined them as “posers” who use public affectations of misery to seek attention, while those who admire them defended these prophets of life’s pain and meaninglessness. I asked whether emo (as in “you’re so emo”) was a derogatory thing to say. It just depends, they answered. There was, however, a point of agreement: Good or bad, emo people display their sadness shamelessly and dramatically. I wondered: Is this ostensible exhibitionism a reaction to the relative impossibility of privacy in contemporary life? Then I noticed that, despite their description of emo people as shamelessly emotional, not one of the 90-odd students I talked to was shameless enough to call him or herself emo. At least half admitted to “having been accused of being emo” and about a quarter admitted to “listening to emo music” but all included the rebuttal, “but I’m not really emo.”

I asked, “Then who is?” The students claiming they’d been called emo bore no resemblance to one another except in terms of age. There was no overwhelming consistency in their ethnicity, social class, academic ability, clothing (even the quantity and location of their piercings), tolerance toward alternative lifestyles, affect and political leanings. More than a few said they’d’ve voted for Bush in 2004 if they’d been old enough to vote. “Emo isn’t really something you call yourself,” one student explained, but no one seemed willing to call anyone else “emo” to their face, either. Instead, they directed me far from Lakewood, Washington to a specific all-ages club in Seattle and, though I live in Seattle myself, told me how to get there.

A Spin Win for the Left

Today's left spin: Writing in his blog, Nation Magazine commentator Marc Cooper reacts to Bush's fence-straddling "immigration policy" as outlined in tonight's primetime Oval Office speech: "In short, the President has now managed to alienate himself further from his own base as well as from some of his more reluctant and expedient allies on immigration. Heckuvajob, Dubya."

Today's right spin: When asked about Bush's declining approval rating, Karl Rove explained, "The American people like this president. His personal approval ratings are in the 60s. Job approval is lower. And what that says to me is that people like him, they respect him; he's somebody they feel a connection with, but they're just sour right now on the war."

Taking pictures of everything

In 1999, I drove alone from Chicago to Seattle. It was, truly, one of my life's nicest experiences. I took the northern route, through the Badlands and all of seatbelt-optional Big Sky country, passing exit after exit simply marked, "No services available." Susan Sontag, in her essay, "On Photography," argues that lay people who take photographs do so as a way to replace genuine experience. Though she redacted that argument later (perhaps at the behest of Annie Liebowitz?), I understood what she meant as I drove. I had brought a camera on my trip, but I never used it; there was simply too much to photograph. I would have either had to take pictures of everything, so that I could re-experience the trip later in real time, or take pictures of nothing and simply pay attention. I chose the latter.

In these weeks since my last post, I've felt something similar, though certainly less nice, about blogging. Every day, some egregious happening deserves an entry, but there are simply too many egregious happenings to document while simultaneously living a life. Here's a thumbnail list of some of the things that should have had their own entries here, but didn't:

Tom Delay's resignation and the corruption it implies;
Scott McClellan's resignation and the corruption it implies;
Tony Snow's new post and the corruption it implies;
The government's shameful response to retired generals' outcry against Donald Rumsfeld;
The Campus Christians' shameful response, misnamed "Day of Truth," as a reaction to the GBLT students' Day of Silence;
The anti-Immigrantation advocates' shameful response of buying big-ticket items on May 2nd to protest the Day without Immigrants;
The US's inadequate response to Darfur;
The US's infuriating response to Iran.

And, of course, I should have posted a memorial for John Kenneth Galbraith, who died last week, at age 98. Galbraith's economics "radically" proposed that poor communities need more, and not less, government funding than wealthy communities if poverty is ever to be eradicated. Others will carry his work forward, and may they find an audience with the power to effect the changes he proposed.