The Young Turks

I crawled home from work, feeble from my annual dose of Japanese school teacher's flu only to find three people whom I normally respect blathering on about "emo."  As that old saying goes, fellas, "If you don't know, you better ask somebody."  And as you are putting your show out over the airwaves(?)  I naturally take it to mean that you are asking me, because you clearly don't know.  "Emo" was an ocassinaly tounge in cheek term used to describe bands mainly coming out of the DC scene in the mid to late '80s and spreading over the early to mid '90s.  All though I would call REM's "Document" the first emo album, the common wisdom has it that that title goes to Rites of Spring (Whose members would later go on to form Fugazi.)

The early '90s brought such bands as Policy of Three, Mineral and Cap'N Jazz.  Some would extend the circle outward to Sunny Day Real Estate, but that is about as far as I would take it. The definition was rather flexible around the U.S. however.  Many New York punks referred to bands like J Church as "emo."

 Why this is important:

When the record industry, in the wake of Nirvana and the Greenday signing, saw the record sales that "emo" bands were getting on independent labels they scrambled to sign them.  Not being able to sign any real bands from the scene they snapped up the Get-Up Kids, who were a fairly popular pop-punk band.  From then on they applied he name "Emo" to the marketing associated with them, thereby co-opting the name and wrecking the genre altogether.  Now people use the word freely to describe anything from glam-rock to commercial boy-bands with guitars.  What was once so beautiful now lays in shambles.  This may not seem like politics, but the principals are the same.  If they Republicans say "We support the soldiers."  and no one bothers to look at the history and context of that statement,  if no one bothers to see that they say things like that while cutting VA funding and giving people unending tours that it simply becomes the language the public uses; "Republicans support soldiers."  If we refer to "tax relief", meaning kick-back for rich people, than we lose any context of what 'relief' might really mean. 

Please, for god's sake, Weezer isn't emo.  My Chemical Romance isn't emo. You're puttin the pain on me.  Recognize.