Yes, we all hate Emo. The whiny vocals, guitar-lite riffs and ridiculous fashion. Oh, and it's massively popular. Just like Hair Metal.
In the 80s, Metal heads - true Metal heads - hated Hair Metal, Glam, Sleaze and all it stood for; which wasn't much of any substance - drugs, girls and looking good, all the trappings of narcissism and hedonism. While bands like Britny Fox and Pretty Boy Floyd sang about the "Girlschool" and the "Gangster Of Love" Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Iron Maiden were singing about war, the occult and society. Hair Metal borrowed much of what Metal had found for itself - from the music to the fashion - and appropriated it for millions of "Rock tourists" who needed something to pose to. A generation of metallers hated their younger brother, the skinny androgynous air-head sibling with lipstick on.
Likewise 25 years on Hardcore, Punk and Metal created a monster. This time it was Emo. The story of "emotional Hardcore" is much told, and remains as convoluted and contentious in its detail as that of Hair Metal (for whom we can variously blame Van Halen and/or Motley Crue and/or Aerosmith and so on…). Emo filled the same gap that Hair Metal did in the late 80s: deemed cool by the cooler end of the Mainstream - ie: not very. While its lyrics are less about sex, drugs and partying, the sentiments of Emo feel just as hollow and certainly vicarious: "I'm sad", "misunderstood", "things are bad (I hear)" etc etc. But the music speaks to the X generation kids (you will be, as many of us at GALA are) who, with their liberal parents of the 60s, had to strive harder to self-define and rebel: "a lip piercing? That's cool son".
We Metal heads are - as humans - complex in our emotions, and while we want the world to love Metal and understand our music, we kind of still want it for ourselves. We are by definition underdogs and Annotations Of An Autopsy on Radio 1 would ruin that. It is a statement, opting out of Mainstream culture its gods and its mores. So Emo was an unwelcome sibling the moment it was born.
Most things only become uncool and hated soon after the fact. Electro seemed so cool until 1986, as The Prodigy did in 1993 and Limp Bizkit in 2000. We just didn't talk about it for ten years afterwards. But Hair Metal and Emo were/are hated at their zenith.
So to recap, the similarities of Emo and Hair Metal are:
real Metal fans hate the music
real Metal fans hate the fashion
And they hate it at the time, not afterwards
I also predict that just as no one mentioned Hair Metal in the 90s (not even the Hair bands stuck up for it - Def Leppard to Skid Row, they all tried to convince the world they were relevant and never used hairspray) and made a massive comeback in the 00s, so Emo will be a cool, ironic/non-ironic influence in ten or 15 years. And mark my words, it's happening to Nu-Metal as we speak: old bands will make comebacks and new bands will inject Nu-Metal bounce. In retrospect things feel more fun and less threatening than when the thing you hate is/was a monkey on your back. I am reminded of Robb Flynn and I talking about the difference between "good Hair Metal and bad Hair Metal" while having a wee at the Golden Gods aftershow some years back. I wonder if we'd have had the same conversation in 1996? Sure Kerry King won't be extolling the virtues of Pretty Boy Floyd, but when asked for their guilty pleasures, bands like DevilDriver and Five Finger Death Punch are happy to cite Fall Out Boy.
And it's not just the Mainstream and the Crossover that does it - Thrash and Hardcore anyone?
So get ready for an Emo-comeback in 15 years or so. While it'll be ironic to like the awfulness of Madina Lake and All Time Low you may find yourself discovering genuine treats that were tarred with the same brush. For every Nitro there's a Motley Crue. So for every Hawthorne Heights there's a… well, you'll have to wait and see.
Text: James Gill
