|...sad girl stories: women and emo...|
This is interesting, but it's really long, so you might want to put aside a few minutes, especially you ladies...
Though they may disagree on almost everything else, one characteristic shared by Vagrant, Drive-Thru and Deep Elm is that none of the labels has a single female artist signed to its roster (as of this writing, two Jade Tree bands had females members). Though emo- and, to a certain degree, punk- has always been a typically male province, the monotony of the labels’ gender perspective can be overwhelming. If the stereotypical emo boy was tear stained and sensitive- the truly romantic and special one left alone on Friday nights because he’s too shy to ask out the most popular girl in the class who’s secretly pining for him- then the triumph of that lonely boy’s aesthetic has resulted in yet another groupthink mentality. If the sensitive boys had once quietly cursed their fate and the girls who ignored or dumped them in the privacy of their bedrooms, now that they had microphones, amplifiers, and an established nationwide network of fans, they were more than happy to scream their litany of complaints as loud as they could.
Though Vagrant and Drive-Thru’s emo acts are a long way from the naked misogyny of hair-metal or some hip-hop, there is something equally disturbing in their one-sided fury at all of the females who did them wrong. The way typical emo bands sing about women is a volatile mixture of Ian MacKaye’s strident Puritanism- as in sex equals fear, failure, weakness- and self-obsessed sexist solipsism. If mid-nineties emo was mostly about not meeting girls or running away from them, emo’s national generation dumbed it down and amped it up. Now emo songwriters were one-sided victims of heartbreak, utterly wronged and ready to sing about it, with the women having no chance to respond.
“I actually think emo today is more misogynist and macho than rap-metal or hip-hop,” says Jessica Hopper. “Ever since it was stripped of its politics, it keeps women on a pedestal or on our backs. It relegates us to the role of muse or heartbreaker, an object of either misery or desire. Emo just builds a cathedral of man pain and then celebrates its validation.”
Vagrant’s most successful artist, Chris Carrabba of Dashboard Confessional, wrote an entire album about his broken heart. His hit single is addressed to a nameless woman who has left him alone “cuddling close to blankets and sheets”, staring at strands of her hair which are “everywhere/ screaming infidelities.” The woman on the record is never named, even as she transforms from salvation (“Living in Your Letters”) to ruin (pretty much everything else). Carrabba validates our trust more than some of his labelmates because, in the end, he is just as brutal with himself as he is with the heartbreaker. But for the most part, emo is a monologue, an entire genre built on the principal of j’accuse; a kiss-off with no one returning the kiss.
“I wish that I could hate you so bad/ but I can’t,” goes one memorable lyric by Taking Back Sunday, and it best sums up the contemporary emo approach to relationships. Songs are, all at once, an admission of sadness and a celebration of that sadness. Singers revel in their misery and suffering to an almost ecstatic degree, but with limited use of subtlety or language. It tends to come off like Rimbaud relocated to the food court. Drive-Thru band Allister titled its album Dead Ends and Girlfriends, while The Starting Line dedicates a particularily bouncy number to “a girl who turned this boy to stone.” New Found Glory’s biggest hit was a song called “My Friends Over You,” an incredibly bold anthem celebrating the hoary cliché of bros before hoes:
…
Though you swear that you are true
I’d still pick my friends over you…
The song is a party and the video a wacky pep rally, but the message places all the blame on the woman in question- even though the protagonist led the woman on, it’s her fault for sleeping with him. He chooses a life of hijinks with his band over a meaningful relationship- or even sexual encounter- with the woman.
On “3,720 to 1,” The Benjamins, another young Drive-Thru band, sing about a fantastical mission to outer space that’s really a thinly veiled Dear Jean letter. The singer has chosen to abandon his girlfriend in order to save the universe. By couching their fear of commitment in the context of a juvenile space fantasy the band is not just celebrating nostalgia, it’s living it like a code. Safe in their band world from the female Scyllas and Charybdises that lurk just outside of it, The Benjamins choose to watch Star Wars again instead of doing something really risky, like, say, going to the school dance. This sort of emo with its female phobia celebrates a perpetual adolescence. (The cover of New Found Glory’s Sticks and Stones depicts a boy and a girl wrestling on the cover, and then making out on the inside.) The singers may pretend to be hanging themselves out to dry by copping to crying and being sad at night, but in the heightened emo environment, where broken hearts are badges of honor, it’s a hollow boast. Their scars are a sign of pride- you’re the one onstage bragging about how upset you are- but there’s no attempt at actual conversation or relationship building.
Some emo bands take cues from the darker end of hardcore and make songs that can be heard as virulently antiwomen, couching disturbing physically violent sentiments in sensitive, poppy clothing. Saves The Day’s Chris Conley, for one, sometimes rides his obsession with bodily pain to dangerously misogynistic conclusions. “Rocks Tonic Juice Magic” is one of the most musically engaging and addictive songs on Through Being Cool, but its lyrics counterpoint a tale of dark obsession with glimpses of juvenile romance. It begins, “Let me take this akward saw/ and run it against your thighs/ cut some flesh away/ I’ll carry this piece of you with me” and later continues the violent theme with, “I’ll take my rusty spoons/ and dig out your blue eyes.” The song is fueled by bitterness, a common punk theme, but the protagonist seems fixated on removing all agency from a girl who mistreated him- he wants to sever her legs, taking away her movement, and her eyes eliminating the messy reality of her point of view. He wants to buy her lemonade solely to throw it in her face and make her cry. And yet at the end of all the bloodshed, he’s still swooning, wishing he “could somehow” win her back, missing her long-gone “nights under ocean skies”. He’s neither grown up nor moved on. While it’s impossible to know what Conley’s intentions truly were with the song, it is more than a little disconcerting to realize that the lyrics that cause thousands of fresh-faced teens to sing along in unison are as brutal as any of Eminem’s well-publicized and pilloried revenge fantasies.
Brand New, a young emo band from Long Island, got some national exposure for their infectious single “Jude Law and a Semester Abroad.” But even the song’s why-hadn’t-anyone-thought-of-this-first subject matter is marred by spiteful fantasies:
Even if her plane crashes tonight she’ll find some way
to disappoint me
By not burning in the wreckage
Or drowning at the bottom of the sea
Brand New cop a familiar emo pose in their disappointment. Even when the evil girlfriend dies, it’s still all about the singer; she’s letting him down even in death. But even “Jude Law…” seems like a petulant, harmless venting when compared to fellow Long Islanders Glassjaw, a band that was signed to Warner Brothers Records on the strength of the emo boom, despite lyrics that would make even the Hillside Strangler blush:
you filthy whore
shut up and swallow my pride for me
…
I don’t give a fuck about your dignity
That’s the bastard in me
Thankfully, violent fantasies such as these are prevalent but not dominant. The most common treatment of women is a more insidious type of sexism, an immature vision of women that’s all-too-appealing to young people years away from having their first serious relationship. As with many other themes, emo’s standard treatment of women has been reduced to a Mobius strip- never stretching into anything new, only parroting opinions, hopes, fears, and anger that already existed in the all-too-eager crowd. From imagery lyrics, women are powerless victims- even when they’ve been proactive and ended a relationships, they’re perpetually denied the last word.
Vagrant’s Hot Rod Circuit released an album called Sorry About Tomorrow that featured a cover image of an emotionally ravaged young girl hugging herself to stop crying. The band already apologized for hurting her- even if they haven’t done anything yet. The girl is voiceless and faceless, and yet it is still possible to catch a tantalizing glimpse of cleavage. She is sexy in her bottomed-out desolation- the band’s and the consumer’s only role is as voyeur.
Something Corporate- a name either obnoxious or charming depending on your placement within the punk divide- is a young band on Drive-Thru/MCA that released its debut album in late 2002. The album, Leaving Through the Window, is actually a helpful primer of all of the above points. The record cover depicts a gorgeous, statuesque model hanging out of a window- she’s clearly distressed, but not so distressed to forget her makeup. Our glimpse is godlike and omniscient- we’re both lokking down on her and looking down her shirt. The overall effect, perhaps unintentional, is that we are on the other side of the window from which she’s leaving, that she’s running away from us.
The songs on the record take the opposite tack, presenting the band’s nineteen-year-old songwriter Andrew McMahon as the emotionally stable wise man ready and willing to aid any confused young women in his path. Leaving’s first song is an overwrought piano ballad called “I Want to Save You” and appears to be the emo boy’s wet dream writ large. There’s a sad yet beautiful girl who wakes up after another anonymous one-night stand: The girl is “messed up” (i.e., she has sex parties), but all she really needs is to be told she’s beautiful- and, since she is, that’s a selfless act McMahon is only more than happy to perform. The chorus builds to a crescendo of simplicity: “I want to save you!” McMahon sings over and over again. The swollen romantic nostalgia of emo seemingly reaches its nadir in this one song- McMahon wants to be her Romeo but he’d never, ever, like, sacrifice himself for her. He is the sun and the son; she’s just some confused chick who could use a good shoulder to cry on and then, maybe, a hickey. Dude.
“This sort of stuff is an emotional outlet with no sense of balance or responsibility,” says Jessica Hopper. “It’s incredibly self-indulgent. There’s no culpability and no personality. Women are just things that do things. Emo in 2002 is just a passive-aggressive rewrite of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Under My Thumb.’”
Despite this, the curious thing about emo is that its fans are democratically split evenly along gender lines, with some bands- Dashboard Confessional and The Starting Line chief among them -more popular with women that men, “Part of the reason for that is the same reason with everything,” says Hopper, “because the dude is cute. It’s also expressive- in its way- which automatically appeals to teenage girls. There’s also a fetishization of the emotional aspect of desire. But when I was a teenager and into Sonic Youth it was partly because [guitarist] Thurston [Moore] was cute, but I also wanted to play guitar like him. There are no role models for young women to feel they have the power to take an active role in this scene.”
The only female-fronted band that gets lumped in with the general crowd of emo groups is Florida’s The Rocking Horse Winner- it like all emo bands, dispute the claim. In this case however, it’s true. The band plays, sunny, chiming, uncomplicated guitar pop in the style of The Sundays or The Cranberries. The only reason The Rocking Horse Winner is considered emo is because lead singer Jolie Lindholm has dueted on record with her friend Chris Carrabba from Dashboard Confessional. “Personally, I don’t think there are enough women playing in bands,” says Lindholm. “I have a hard time finding bands with female singers that I’ll listen to. Maybe it’s just ‘cause girls aren’t that interested.”
“It doesn’t bother me,” says eighteen-year-old Whitney Borup from Utah. “I get sick of hearing guys complaining about their girl problems sometimes because I’m from the other point of view. I do want a girl to sing about boy problems so it would be easier to relate. I think a girl emo band is far overdue. But I think that itself is part of the appeal of emo. It’s boys saying stereotypically ‘girl’ things and being accepted for it. There’s this feeling that guys just don’t care, that they break up with girls because of ‘getting action’ and nothing else. And emo boys don’t seem to be like that. Plus boys can do raw emotion better with their voices than girls can- mostly because of anatomy. I know that when I started a band, I just didn’t like the sound of it. I couldn’t scream right.”
“No girl has ever come up to us and said, ‘Hey you guys, we want to say what we have to say with our own songs,’” says New Found Glory’s Pundik. “Our songs are about relationships, but anyone can relate to it. Even though we might say ‘girl’ in the song, girls come up to us and say that they’ve had the same problems with their boyfriends and put it into their own perspective.”
Despite emo’s purported sensitivity, many of the old gender fault lines remain. Perhaps when this generation of emo fans begins to form their own bands, a new female-voiced wave of heartbreak songs will emerge- perhaps they’ll be more articulate and nuanced, perhaps not. In the meantime, the place where the real male/female dialogue is occurring and the rules are being rewritten is not on record, but online, where the huge number of women fans have their say and assert themselves in varied and surprising ways.
It’s also possible that fearing for the ears of young female fans is presumptuous- that the unifying appeal of emo may be just that, at heart, emotional devastation knows no gender.
“It doesn’t really bother me,” says eighteen-year-old Iris Chi. “Whenever they sing out about how they hate this girl or that girl, I just change it in my head so that the ‘she’ becomes a ‘he’. Eventually a girl or a guy will break someone’s heart, so it doesn’t matter if they target a certain sex. I think all love problems are the same.”
-Andy Greenwald
Taken from Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers and Emo
Though they may disagree on almost everything else, one characteristic shared by Vagrant, Drive-Thru and Deep Elm is that none of the labels has a single female artist signed to its roster (as of this writing, two Jade Tree bands had females members). Though emo- and, to a certain degree, punk- has always been a typically male province, the monotony of the labels’ gender perspective can be overwhelming. If the stereotypical emo boy was tear stained and sensitive- the truly romantic and special one left alone on Friday nights because he’s too shy to ask out the most popular girl in the class who’s secretly pining for him- then the triumph of that lonely boy’s aesthetic has resulted in yet another groupthink mentality. If the sensitive boys had once quietly cursed their fate and the girls who ignored or dumped them in the privacy of their bedrooms, now that they had microphones, amplifiers, and an established nationwide network of fans, they were more than happy to scream their litany of complaints as loud as they could.
Though Vagrant and Drive-Thru’s emo acts are a long way from the naked misogyny of hair-metal or some hip-hop, there is something equally disturbing in their one-sided fury at all of the females who did them wrong. The way typical emo bands sing about women is a volatile mixture of Ian MacKaye’s strident Puritanism- as in sex equals fear, failure, weakness- and self-obsessed sexist solipsism. If mid-nineties emo was mostly about not meeting girls or running away from them, emo’s national generation dumbed it down and amped it up. Now emo songwriters were one-sided victims of heartbreak, utterly wronged and ready to sing about it, with the women having no chance to respond.
“I actually think emo today is more misogynist and macho than rap-metal or hip-hop,” says Jessica Hopper. “Ever since it was stripped of its politics, it keeps women on a pedestal or on our backs. It relegates us to the role of muse or heartbreaker, an object of either misery or desire. Emo just builds a cathedral of man pain and then celebrates its validation.”
Vagrant’s most successful artist, Chris Carrabba of Dashboard Confessional, wrote an entire album about his broken heart. His hit single is addressed to a nameless woman who has left him alone “cuddling close to blankets and sheets”, staring at strands of her hair which are “everywhere/ screaming infidelities.” The woman on the record is never named, even as she transforms from salvation (“Living in Your Letters”) to ruin (pretty much everything else). Carrabba validates our trust more than some of his labelmates because, in the end, he is just as brutal with himself as he is with the heartbreaker. But for the most part, emo is a monologue, an entire genre built on the principal of j’accuse; a kiss-off with no one returning the kiss.
“I wish that I could hate you so bad/ but I can’t,” goes one memorable lyric by Taking Back Sunday, and it best sums up the contemporary emo approach to relationships. Songs are, all at once, an admission of sadness and a celebration of that sadness. Singers revel in their misery and suffering to an almost ecstatic degree, but with limited use of subtlety or language. It tends to come off like Rimbaud relocated to the food court. Drive-Thru band Allister titled its album Dead Ends and Girlfriends, while The Starting Line dedicates a particularily bouncy number to “a girl who turned this boy to stone.” New Found Glory’s biggest hit was a song called “My Friends Over You,” an incredibly bold anthem celebrating the hoary cliché of bros before hoes:
…
Though you swear that you are true
I’d still pick my friends over you…
The song is a party and the video a wacky pep rally, but the message places all the blame on the woman in question- even though the protagonist led the woman on, it’s her fault for sleeping with him. He chooses a life of hijinks with his band over a meaningful relationship- or even sexual encounter- with the woman.
On “3,720 to 1,” The Benjamins, another young Drive-Thru band, sing about a fantastical mission to outer space that’s really a thinly veiled Dear Jean letter. The singer has chosen to abandon his girlfriend in order to save the universe. By couching their fear of commitment in the context of a juvenile space fantasy the band is not just celebrating nostalgia, it’s living it like a code. Safe in their band world from the female Scyllas and Charybdises that lurk just outside of it, The Benjamins choose to watch Star Wars again instead of doing something really risky, like, say, going to the school dance. This sort of emo with its female phobia celebrates a perpetual adolescence. (The cover of New Found Glory’s Sticks and Stones depicts a boy and a girl wrestling on the cover, and then making out on the inside.) The singers may pretend to be hanging themselves out to dry by copping to crying and being sad at night, but in the heightened emo environment, where broken hearts are badges of honor, it’s a hollow boast. Their scars are a sign of pride- you’re the one onstage bragging about how upset you are- but there’s no attempt at actual conversation or relationship building.
Some emo bands take cues from the darker end of hardcore and make songs that can be heard as virulently antiwomen, couching disturbing physically violent sentiments in sensitive, poppy clothing. Saves The Day’s Chris Conley, for one, sometimes rides his obsession with bodily pain to dangerously misogynistic conclusions. “Rocks Tonic Juice Magic” is one of the most musically engaging and addictive songs on Through Being Cool, but its lyrics counterpoint a tale of dark obsession with glimpses of juvenile romance. It begins, “Let me take this akward saw/ and run it against your thighs/ cut some flesh away/ I’ll carry this piece of you with me” and later continues the violent theme with, “I’ll take my rusty spoons/ and dig out your blue eyes.” The song is fueled by bitterness, a common punk theme, but the protagonist seems fixated on removing all agency from a girl who mistreated him- he wants to sever her legs, taking away her movement, and her eyes eliminating the messy reality of her point of view. He wants to buy her lemonade solely to throw it in her face and make her cry. And yet at the end of all the bloodshed, he’s still swooning, wishing he “could somehow” win her back, missing her long-gone “nights under ocean skies”. He’s neither grown up nor moved on. While it’s impossible to know what Conley’s intentions truly were with the song, it is more than a little disconcerting to realize that the lyrics that cause thousands of fresh-faced teens to sing along in unison are as brutal as any of Eminem’s well-publicized and pilloried revenge fantasies.
Brand New, a young emo band from Long Island, got some national exposure for their infectious single “Jude Law and a Semester Abroad.” But even the song’s why-hadn’t-anyone-thought-of-this-first subject matter is marred by spiteful fantasies:
Even if her plane crashes tonight she’ll find some way
to disappoint me
By not burning in the wreckage
Or drowning at the bottom of the sea
Brand New cop a familiar emo pose in their disappointment. Even when the evil girlfriend dies, it’s still all about the singer; she’s letting him down even in death. But even “Jude Law…” seems like a petulant, harmless venting when compared to fellow Long Islanders Glassjaw, a band that was signed to Warner Brothers Records on the strength of the emo boom, despite lyrics that would make even the Hillside Strangler blush:
you filthy whore
shut up and swallow my pride for me
…
I don’t give a fuck about your dignity
That’s the bastard in me
Thankfully, violent fantasies such as these are prevalent but not dominant. The most common treatment of women is a more insidious type of sexism, an immature vision of women that’s all-too-appealing to young people years away from having their first serious relationship. As with many other themes, emo’s standard treatment of women has been reduced to a Mobius strip- never stretching into anything new, only parroting opinions, hopes, fears, and anger that already existed in the all-too-eager crowd. From imagery lyrics, women are powerless victims- even when they’ve been proactive and ended a relationships, they’re perpetually denied the last word.
Vagrant’s Hot Rod Circuit released an album called Sorry About Tomorrow that featured a cover image of an emotionally ravaged young girl hugging herself to stop crying. The band already apologized for hurting her- even if they haven’t done anything yet. The girl is voiceless and faceless, and yet it is still possible to catch a tantalizing glimpse of cleavage. She is sexy in her bottomed-out desolation- the band’s and the consumer’s only role is as voyeur.
Something Corporate- a name either obnoxious or charming depending on your placement within the punk divide- is a young band on Drive-Thru/MCA that released its debut album in late 2002. The album, Leaving Through the Window, is actually a helpful primer of all of the above points. The record cover depicts a gorgeous, statuesque model hanging out of a window- she’s clearly distressed, but not so distressed to forget her makeup. Our glimpse is godlike and omniscient- we’re both lokking down on her and looking down her shirt. The overall effect, perhaps unintentional, is that we are on the other side of the window from which she’s leaving, that she’s running away from us.
The songs on the record take the opposite tack, presenting the band’s nineteen-year-old songwriter Andrew McMahon as the emotionally stable wise man ready and willing to aid any confused young women in his path. Leaving’s first song is an overwrought piano ballad called “I Want to Save You” and appears to be the emo boy’s wet dream writ large. There’s a sad yet beautiful girl who wakes up after another anonymous one-night stand: The girl is “messed up” (i.e., she has sex parties), but all she really needs is to be told she’s beautiful- and, since she is, that’s a selfless act McMahon is only more than happy to perform. The chorus builds to a crescendo of simplicity: “I want to save you!” McMahon sings over and over again. The swollen romantic nostalgia of emo seemingly reaches its nadir in this one song- McMahon wants to be her Romeo but he’d never, ever, like, sacrifice himself for her. He is the sun and the son; she’s just some confused chick who could use a good shoulder to cry on and then, maybe, a hickey. Dude.
“This sort of stuff is an emotional outlet with no sense of balance or responsibility,” says Jessica Hopper. “It’s incredibly self-indulgent. There’s no culpability and no personality. Women are just things that do things. Emo in 2002 is just a passive-aggressive rewrite of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Under My Thumb.’”
Despite this, the curious thing about emo is that its fans are democratically split evenly along gender lines, with some bands- Dashboard Confessional and The Starting Line chief among them -more popular with women that men, “Part of the reason for that is the same reason with everything,” says Hopper, “because the dude is cute. It’s also expressive- in its way- which automatically appeals to teenage girls. There’s also a fetishization of the emotional aspect of desire. But when I was a teenager and into Sonic Youth it was partly because [guitarist] Thurston [Moore] was cute, but I also wanted to play guitar like him. There are no role models for young women to feel they have the power to take an active role in this scene.”
The only female-fronted band that gets lumped in with the general crowd of emo groups is Florida’s The Rocking Horse Winner- it like all emo bands, dispute the claim. In this case however, it’s true. The band plays, sunny, chiming, uncomplicated guitar pop in the style of The Sundays or The Cranberries. The only reason The Rocking Horse Winner is considered emo is because lead singer Jolie Lindholm has dueted on record with her friend Chris Carrabba from Dashboard Confessional. “Personally, I don’t think there are enough women playing in bands,” says Lindholm. “I have a hard time finding bands with female singers that I’ll listen to. Maybe it’s just ‘cause girls aren’t that interested.”
“It doesn’t bother me,” says eighteen-year-old Whitney Borup from Utah. “I get sick of hearing guys complaining about their girl problems sometimes because I’m from the other point of view. I do want a girl to sing about boy problems so it would be easier to relate. I think a girl emo band is far overdue. But I think that itself is part of the appeal of emo. It’s boys saying stereotypically ‘girl’ things and being accepted for it. There’s this feeling that guys just don’t care, that they break up with girls because of ‘getting action’ and nothing else. And emo boys don’t seem to be like that. Plus boys can do raw emotion better with their voices than girls can- mostly because of anatomy. I know that when I started a band, I just didn’t like the sound of it. I couldn’t scream right.”
“No girl has ever come up to us and said, ‘Hey you guys, we want to say what we have to say with our own songs,’” says New Found Glory’s Pundik. “Our songs are about relationships, but anyone can relate to it. Even though we might say ‘girl’ in the song, girls come up to us and say that they’ve had the same problems with their boyfriends and put it into their own perspective.”
Despite emo’s purported sensitivity, many of the old gender fault lines remain. Perhaps when this generation of emo fans begins to form their own bands, a new female-voiced wave of heartbreak songs will emerge- perhaps they’ll be more articulate and nuanced, perhaps not. In the meantime, the place where the real male/female dialogue is occurring and the rules are being rewritten is not on record, but online, where the huge number of women fans have their say and assert themselves in varied and surprising ways.
It’s also possible that fearing for the ears of young female fans is presumptuous- that the unifying appeal of emo may be just that, at heart, emotional devastation knows no gender.
“It doesn’t really bother me,” says eighteen-year-old Iris Chi. “Whenever they sing out about how they hate this girl or that girl, I just change it in my head so that the ‘she’ becomes a ‘he’. Eventually a girl or a guy will break someone’s heart, so it doesn’t matter if they target a certain sex. I think all love problems are the same.”
-Andy Greenwald
Taken from Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers and Emo