Mr Sensitive

Oh wait, I stumbled on a nice explaination of emo kids in general, it explains some of their confusing answers in this thread.

Indentification

To refer to emo as an entire subculture centered on being vain, melodramatic, pathetic, self-absorbed, and emotionally histrionic would be unfair. There’s more to it than that. There’s also all the terrible music, stupid haircuts, and fantastically complex MySpace profiles. While we can all conjure up a mental image of a stereotypical Emo kid, with a tight sweater, hair dyed black, tiny jeans, and converse with “deep” lyrics Sharpied on, it can be difficult these days to tell emo kids from any other scenester morons. Asking vanilla hipsters and emo kids to list their favorite bands would net similar results: a list of bands you’ve never heard of. However, an emo kid’s band list would contain telltale patterns. First of all, watch out for bands with melodramatic, complete-sentence names, like “I Die in Agony” or “His Heart is Sour.” Secondly, the list of bands will quickly transmogrify into a diatribe about how the emo kid doesn’t really want to be there because he or she is feeling very depressed over a girl/boy and Hawthorne Heights really helped him or her out during tough times and maybe you’d like to go back to his/her place and see his/her zines and maybe make out a little bit, no big deal. The great thing about emo kids is that they’re both promiscuous and emotionally crippled (except for the weird Christian ones).

Musical Taste

A broad banquet of crap. Some emo kids hate the other emo kids because they listen to new fake mall emo instead of the “good” stuff which was by bands from twenty years ago who never actually released any albums but were quite good nonetheless, according to third-hand recollection. Other emo kids listen to the fake mall emo and love it. I’ve met quite a few who never actually admit that they listen to emo: “oh, they sort of used to be emo, but they’re basically just indie pop now; oh, that’s not emo, it’s just sort of slightly emo-ish hardcore.” Jesus, you idiot, if you listen to six hundred bands that skirt the borders of emo, you basically just listen to emo. F*ck.

How to Tame an Emo Kid

Leave them flattering comments on MySpace. Listen to their problems. Be a member of the opposite sex and reject them (they love unrequited love more than most people love sex, so they’ll hang around you for-ev-er).

Benefits of Friendship

They’ll listen to your problems (for about three minutes, before turning the conversation back to their own problems). They’ll write you really bad poetry if they fall in love with you, which you can share with your sane friends for a classic chortle.

Drawbacks of Friendship

They are really, really into the terrible music they listen to. This is true of any hipster subculture, but a lot of emo kids have absurd tunnel-vision taste: they listen to only their ****ty little niche of emo, and you’ll never get a moment’s respite from it. Regular hipsters will turn off the Wolf Parade once in a while and throw on some David Bowie, but emo kids will offer no such breaks: it’ll be straight from His Dying Words to She is Cruelly Dying to This is My Pain Area to He Cuts Me Deep.

http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=3375

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Urban Hat€monger ?

That one post answered more of my questions than most of what was said in this thread

I`m kidding

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DontRunMeOver

Wikipedia says Emo is short for Emotional Hardcore.
Urban dictionary says Emo is short for Emotive Hardcore.
BungalowBill's link says that Emo is shorthand for Emotional.
Yourencyclopedia says that Emo is short for Emotional.

Half the links say that it stands for emotional, half for emotional/emotive hardcore. To me, this says that nobody really knows the truth and everybody who is making bold statements is making claims on nothing. The points that people have made that it couldn't possibly mean 'emotional' because other music is emotional is a silly argument. Its just a name.

Last night I met a girl named Verity. Her name means truth. Just because that is the meaning of her name, it doesn't mean that other people can't tell the truth or be true.

Drum'n'bass is called drum'n'bass despite the fact that other music styles contain drum and bass sounds. Rhythm and blues is so named, despite the fact that other musical styles have rhythms and blue notes.

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Urban Hat€monger ?

So everybody makes it up as they go along to suit their own answer

Hooray , we`ve cracked it now we can close the thread

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DontRunMeOver

Please no. I've been a science/engineering student for the last 5 years and its been a long time since I've seen a load of waffly types argue about something they actually don't know the answer to. From what I can see, nobody really knows what happened, but I love watching people pretend they do.

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sleepy jack

Christ Don, give up. I trust someone who was around during the 80s hardcore scene, more then some fat old scholar who wrote a definition based on whoever would agree with it. Emo = emotional music? Thats just stupid, that covers too many artists and bands that have no link other then being "emotional". Atmosphere emo? I think that statement alone shows how brilliant this article is.

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littleknowitall

so your bombarding the poor boy with insults because he can't fully identify what bands are and aren't emo??:S

sleepy jack

Its better then spamming the thread with useless posts about kids that really don't listen to emo or making posts like "worst thread ever".

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littleknowitall

oh yes i can see now why that would justify it...god i hate arguing online, in person, we could all just kick each other in the face or well...i haven't really contributed so i could just sit round and laugh at you all...would be great

sleepy jack

You said emo is short for emotional music, thats complete bullshit. Everyone should forget what MTV has been trying to market for the last few years. Emo isn't about razorblades, bleeding, lost relationship, tight pants and boys singing like girls. Its not about "my wrists are like grass and the knife is the lawnmower". Quit trying to pass off all these false pretences as fact. Because honestly, with your ridiculous definitions, Beethoven, Eminem, Backstreet Boys, Mae, Led Zeppelin, The Queers, Dragonforce and Britney Spears are/was "emo bands. You need to learn when to give up, perfection said in another thread you need to learn you're not always right. Emo comes from the 80s hardcore punk movement, and it always will because the genre is emotionally driven hardcore. In the summer of 85 alot of bands started coming about playing this version of hardcor (Nation of Ulysses, Dag Nasty, Moss Icon, Ignition etc..). These bands played a more melodic hardcore and stuff along that line. Alot of the emo sound standards. Alot of the bands are considered post-hardcore, but theres a difference. Post-hardcore typically has more vocal control and singing is less common in emo. Theres usually more structure to post-hardcore (ex. chorus/verse/verse/breakdown/bridge/interlude.) Emo doesn't really have any choruses. So by the 90s it was appearing in alot of places (example: gravity records in california). It broke off into two branches mainly. indie-emo, which was more commercially sucessful and had post-hardcore influences and tended to be more soft and poppy and screamo which had faster guitar riffs melodic/softer breakdowns and more screaming. Then pop-rock groups had some influence from indie-emo (now keep in mind, indie emo was entirely emo it was already an altered version, so if you took some influences from that what makes you so sure they only took the emo influences?) and it basically became entirely altered to where it lost too many hardcore elements, to where it could really be considered emotionally driven hardcore. Now we have tons of bands like taking back sunday, dashboard confessional, paramore and all thousand of their clones. Most likely some stupid music scholar wrote an article and went "well hell since no one knows what emo is i'll just slap the title onto them sounds more attractive then pop-rock" and then it went from their into the current wave of mediocre pop groups that MTV and other such companies have labelled "emo". Similar to what they've labelled punk, good charlotte and simple plan? Or how about what they've done with gangsta rap, fifty cent and all his clones? Emo meaning emotional music, would mean that anything from opera to rap would be emo seeing as nearly all music has some form of emotion in it. Seeing as the whole thing is based on how its "emotional music", I don't see a point in continuing with this arguement. But if Don insists i'm wrong I will. Also another thing, Don if you're going to counter this please use factual information as opposed to "no you're wrong stfu" or "well the scholary journal says you're wrong". I'd like something to reply to other then some fat old music profressional.

http://fourfa.com/
http://www.musicbanter.com/showthread.php?t=13388
http://www.musicbanter.com/showthread.php?t=7002
http://www.musicianforums.com/forums...2&postcount=16

Some of the stuff I disagree with (fourfa mainly has some errors), but for the most part thats where I obtained all my info from.

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