2 posts tagged “emo”
I was in the gym the other day, sitting on one of the cycling machines and reading a music magazine I found in the pile of atrociously bad publications my local sweat parlour provides me with, and came across an article defending emos. This is not something you find very often; emos are considered dirty and silly by most non-emos excluding Suz and I - here's why. Emos, the article I read claimed, are the modern punks - they're different, "original," they write songs about their feelings, wear drainpipes belted under their bottoms and have large asymmetrical fringes across their faces and lip piercings. They have lots of bracelets and jewelery of the plastic fantastic variety, and studded belts. They listen to bands like My Chemical Romance and Panic! At the Disco, who have abnormally long song titles and sing about sex and feelings in a punk rock sort of way.
Anyway, emos, according to this article, should be forgiven for their need to be different and the outcasts of society. This Myspace born generation of the modern punk clique of emos should be allowed to do what they want because teenagers need a way of rebelling, of showing how different they are and how much they just don't care.
The difference, however, between being a punk and an emo is that to be emo you must be middle class. I understand that punks could be anyone, as long as they wanted to rebel. Emos have to be middle class, because they have to have enough money for the things which you just have to own and wear to be emo: drainpipes, plastic jewelery, wristbands, hair dye (it's got to be black, neon, or bright blonde or you're just not emo enough), and gig tickets to the aforementioned emo bands. This is not, in short, a low-wage clique, you have to put in the time and hours. You must also congregate outside music shops in threatening looking bunches, turning up your noses at the other cliques, bringing in the essential English snobbery.
Having just returned from a visit to Birmingham, reformed rough city now claiming to be the European centre of culture (in England? you must be joking) and between my grandparent's flat and the station, roughly a 20 minute walk, I spotted 24 emos on the way there at midday and about 10 on the way back. This is a reoccuring pattern - Birmingham is emo central for England. The Bullring shopping centre is full of them, which is strange as there are no piercing parlours/independant punk shops/emo music gigs/places of a non-wholesome atmosphere within the centre. Yet left right and centre throughout the Bullring there are black fringes, studded belts (my mother admired these, she's going through a silver disco-wear phase. I embraced it by buying her silver Converse-style trainers and a sparkly cardi for Christmas) and stupid drainpipes-belted-under-bottomness. I highly disapprove of the latter (can you tell?) because it's January; it's flippin' cold out, that is no reason to get your bums on show, and at 15 and 16, emo boys have little in the bottom department to bring to the world. Yet it's bum-city in Birmingham, and not the homeless kind.
So what do we think? Forgive the emos, as they just want to rebel and be crazy and youthful? Or turn up our noses at them, and mock them at every opportunity? Me personally, I like asymmetrical fringes and Panic! At The Disco, but I dislike threatening groups of people outside music shops, which I occasionally like to wander in to and find cheapy DVDs while I power shop and hair in crazy colours. No sir, you may keep your emos as far as I am concerned. Middle class extreme cliques do nothing for me, and I like my trousers above my bottom.
This is an article I wrote in April, and so is quite dated- I now own skinny jeans and a decent amount of playground-chic jewellery, but I decided I would post it anyway.
There comes a time in everyone's life when
they are pressured to act/dress/think/speak/look on life in a certain
way. This comes to me every time I reveal to some people some of the
music I like. Most merely toss a nonchalant comment or a polite remark
my way, but some say 'wow, I mean, that's quite surprising, you don't
really dress like those bands do you!?'.
Having spent many an hour
surfing the delightful pages of myspace I can indeed reveal that a lot
of the truly very emo people in the youth of today do indeed like bands
such as straylight run, matchbook romance, and all of the stuff, among
many other genres, that i like. Although a lot of these people dress
and seem to act (in cyber world anyhow) very strangely, I am never
closed to new ideas and I did see some stuff on them that I liked, and
so began to look around when I went shopping for some of the things i
had seen and liked, however it went a bit wrong.
Scenario one: 'cheap jewellery'
Location: Oxford shops, 5th April 2006
I was in DNA, a shop that I do rather like, when I saw some plastic sort of playground-chic jewellery around the counter that i had seen displayed on various emo-mullet-girls in the past. Although an extreme hater of the mullet, I was rather fond of the bold colourfulness of the jewellery. I headed over to the counter, and picked up a big, shiny, red and yellow plastic brooch thing in the shape of a flower, with a button as the middle. A little garish but rather good, I looked at the price tag on the back: £7.50 it read. I threw it back down on the counter (well actually put it down very gently and politely so as not to cause a scene, but in my mind I slammed it with a vengeance) and walked out of the shop. Normally I would not shudder at that price but for a hunk of plastic I must draw the line. I instead went to Primark and bought a pair of shorts, an underwear set and a wallet, altogether spending £9.50, much better.
Scenario two: 'drainpipe jeans'
Location: H&M, Paris, 13th April 2006
Drainpipe trousers are another scenester trend that I am not set against, partly because everyone is wearing them anyway, so, spotting a pair of black ones for about 20 euros it didn't seem like a bad idea to try them on. Unfortunately, the actual putting them on part was rather hard. A sudden oncoming of leg cramp in all my wiggling and stretching meant that I was sitting on the stool in the changing cubicle, in extreme pain, for about ten minutes. When I emerged, Sophie (my French seventh cousin twice removed, yes really) looked a bit puzzled at my long trying on session and at my mild limp on my left leg. Obviously all that Jack Daniels makes those emo girls immune to leg cramp.
Scenario three: 'lip piercing'
Location: the Eurostar, 14th April 2006
Me: 'mum, what would you say if I got my lip pierced?'
Mum: *looks at me in a very worried way* 'why?'
Obviously I am just not cut out to be emo after all.
