Popular Music
Feb 18th, 2008 by Micah Tillman | 2 Comments |
I heard a song today by an artist of whom I’d never heard. And evidently the song has been #1 (on some chart or other) for 8 weeks. It was “Low” by Flo Rida.
Deciding that not having heard of a song that’s been #1 for two months does not bode well for my ability to continue using relevant pop culture references in my classes, I went to music.yahoo.com and started to listen.
And I was struck by something. I still can’t tell the difference between most emo bands. I never liked emo much anyway (I like the bands whose sound gave rise to emo, like the Goo Goo Dolls and Poor Old Lu), but it doesn’t help that there’s so much of it which sounds exactly like what I don’t like.
And I often find myself unable to enjoy things until I understand them. Once I get a handle for a thing’s structure, for what’s going on in it, I can begin to appreciate it.
But I find that not being able to tell one band from another makes this impossible with emo. I can’t tell who’s responding to whom, what ideas are being worked out in the genre, who’s taking it to “the next level,” etc.
Emo is a kind of chimerical combination of the grunge attitude and metal’s virtuosity. The two shouldn’t be able to coexist within a singe genre (you shouldn’t be able to be down, and yet be awesome at the same time), but they try in emo.
I suspect that this is made possible by the fact that the grunge attitude has, in emo, been severely contracted down to a single existential issue: “She doesn’t like me/cheated on me.”
It’s not so much that I’m depressed because I’m worthless/terrible (as in grunge) but because I have rights which have been violated by someone else.
Wait. So emo’s attitude only looks like grunge’s. Hmmm . . . .
(This has been another episode in Tillman Thinks Things Through: Music Edition.)
It seems to me that Emo has a third parent, in addition to metal and grunge. (Kind-of fitting, considering the alternative lifestyle vibe that can flow through the subculture, that’d be the apparent result of a menage a trois. (SP?))
I think the mid 80’s depressed synth pop thing has an equal role in terms of musical heritage; early Cure, early Smiths, Joy Division middle era Depeche Mode… If you follow the role these play in the more commercialized strains of Industrial Rock (I’m thinking early Nine Inch Nails, maybe Ministry here) you could almost suggest that it gets the metal from this parent, too, via folks like Trent Rezner.
I think this is where the self-loathing comes from… I remember how we’d sit around doing our best Stoned-out Robert Smith impressions, “I wear black on the outside… because I feel black on the inside.”
It’s an interesting thing, this loathing. It’s like the self is hated only slightly less than the whole world around them.
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