This is an archived page. Images and links on this page may not work. Please visit the main page for the latest updates.

 
 
 
Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Friday, February 11, 2005

emo



“It could indicate a generation raised with no pain, too sensitive to experience life, or too ignorant of the real horrors of the world,” writes Brian Becker, an old student of UD’s, about emo music and culture. UD sent him some questions about emo [see UD, 1/29/05], and Becker, a member of a group called Emocapella, wrote her back.

“Really the only criteria” for emo music are “charged emotional content” conveyed by “high, whiney singers” who express “the crying quality of the music.”

Becker cites the emo soundtrack of the film Garden State, whose hero has for years been kept on emotion-flattening, or emotion-distancing, psychotropics by his psychiatrist father. The key moment in the film features the hero rejecting the pills and assuming his own emotions again.

“But we’ve got to ask ourselves,” writes a Berkeley student in The Daily Californian, “what is so fundamentally absent from our culture that could make premeditations on pain and alienation so … attractive?” She’s inquiring into the popularity of emo music and culture as well, and she mentions the cult film Napoleon Dynamite, whose slack-jawed hopelessness “brings together an aimless generation of people searching for meaning and definition.”

Her essay uses the words “bittersweet,” “tender,” “solace,” “forlorn,” “weep,” “tear-streaked,” “disillusionment,” and “futile,” to evoke the emo sensibility, which also involves a rejection of the material comforts in which the emo generation has been raised.

A certain shabby asceticism, for instance, is very emo. It’s “a girl in Converse with short dark hair hanging just so over her tear-streaked cheek.” Becker describes “black-rim glasses, button-down shirts, bags with diagonal straps across one’s chest, rolled-up jeans.” The aesthetic, writes the Berkeley student, is “androgynous,” with “jeans from the women’s department regardless of [your] gender.” “Short, dark, and asymmetrical haircuts, tight pants and forlorn thrift store sweaters are all mandatory.”



Becker’s initial comment, about a “generation raised with no pain, too sensitive to experience life, or too ignorant of the real horrors of the world,” maybe goes to the bleeding heart of emo. Knowing still very little about it, UD thinks emo sounds more promising than comfortably numb or vacuously punk. Couldn’t it represent a healthy instinct on the part of reflective, privileged people, to move in the direction of the reality of human suffering?