How does one define the genre of emo music?

So, what is emo? It’s a good question. One could do a quick Google to find the definition on Wikipedia. It would be easy, and the results would read thusly:

Emo is a style of rock music characterized by melodic musicianship and expressive, often confessional lyrics. It originated in the mid-1980s hardcore punk movement of Washington, D.C., where it was known as "emotional hardcore" or "emocore" and pioneered by bands such as Rites of Spring and Embrace.

One could also read through Andy Greenwald’s “Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo” which is a terrific book of the genre of emo. One passage about Mineral’s “If I Could” provides an apt definition, and perhaps some depth and clarity on the topic:

“In many ways, ‘If I Could’ is the ultimate expression of mid-nineties emo. The song’s short synopsis — she is beautiful, I am weak, dumb, and shy; I am alone but am surprisingly poetic when left alone — sums up everything that emo’s adherents admired and its detractors detested.”

Either of those definitions works just fine. But, here I will provide another snippet of information that I once found scrawled onto the side of a bathroom stall just outside of Ruidoso, New Mexico on the topic of 2000s emo music. It went like this:

“One day in 1997, the members of Promise Ring met in secret after the release of ‘Nothing Feels Good.’ They each decided that emo was good, and decided its legacy should in fact carry on. They each cut out one of their testicles and decided to plant each of those testicles in various locations around the country. One of those testicles was planted in the greater Phoenix area, quickly growing into a full-grown man named Jim Adkins. Adkins became sentient, immediately wrote ‘Clarity’ in full, and that’s the real history of modern emo.”

That last one is more than a little bizarre, so for the purpose of this exercise feel free to stick to the first two definitions of emo. In addition to Greenwald’s book, it’s also worth checking out “From The Basement: A History of Emo Music and How it Changed Society” by Taylor Markarian. Thanks for being here.

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