I Don’t Stand (unless it’s on a stage).

I said we would get to emo and what better day to do that than on a Thursday (pun intended)?  Of course, me being an old man over the age of thirty means that when I refer to “emo” I’m not referring to Madina Lake.  For me, emo was a genre that thrived in the mid to late 90s with bands that usually put out two albums and then broke up because nobody knew who the hell they were.  Now, emo is a haircut.  Actually, it’s worse than that;  Emo is the most made fun of genre in music.  It’s an insult.  Yes, that’s right: emo is the new nu-metal…

Lake Bizkit?

The thing is, it’s always been this way with the term “emo” itself.  It just took a couple decades for the word to reach enough people so that it could be hated en masse.  You can read about the history of emo elsewhere, but I thought I’d share a quick little video first from 1986 where former Fugazi/Rites of Spring frontman Ian MacKaye expresses his frustration with the word long before that dude in Yellowcard even knew what a violin was.  Give the volume a boost to hear Ian dish it all:

“Emo” wasn’t even cool to the bands who were playing it at the time the genre was created.  That’s not a good sign.  At least something as artificial as the word “grunge” not only sounded cooler but also couldn’t be confused for a character on Sesame Street, you know?  The real tragedy here though is that the GREAT emo bands of the nineties who perhaps could have benefitted from being part of a commercially popular scene are now posthumously grouped together with current bands that sound nothing like them.

Shotgun Stories

Take Oregon band Thirty Ought Six.  Here’s a band that released an album in 1995 called Hag Seed that is from start to finish everything great about what emo can be.  The music is ferocious and the lyrics are often pained and introspective.  There’s a punk mentality that echoes throughout, but the musicianship (particularly from drummer Ryan Paravecchio) is never intentionally sloppy or simple.  And perhaps most importantly, it’s an album that sounds nothing like Blink 182.  I don’t mean to pick on recent emo, but there’s a notable shift between what this band was doing in 1995 and what Fallout Boy was doing in 2005.  Somewhere along the line, it’s as if the young musicians who would form the emo bands of the new millenium were way, way more into the pop punk of Green Day instead of the post punk of Sunny Day.  And if none of this makes sense to you at all, just listen to my favorite track off of Hag Seed, a song called “Eris.”

Stream at muxtape.com

Download Thirty Ought Six – “Eris”

Isn’t that song amazing?  I remember seeing Thirty Ought Six play in the early afternoon on the third or fourth stage at Lolapalooza in 1996.  It was hot as hell and they ripped through their short set like a tornado, not even slowing down when something on the bass drum broke mid-song.  Me and a couple friends were right up front and I kept yelling out for them to play “Eris.”  I realize now that this is a highly annoying/nerdy thing to do, but I don’t regret it.  Given their short set I wasn’t sure they would play it and it was nice seeing them respond with genuine surprise and saying that they would get to it later in the set.  I’m not trying to brag or anything, but in all seriousness I think I may have been the only person there who had heard them before.  This was the year Metallica, Rage, and Soundgarden topped the bill.  Emo just wasn’t on people’s radars yet.  But when the band finally played “Eris”…it was as good as I had hoped for.  Thirty Ought Six broke up later that same year and to my knowledge none of the members have really released anything since then.  Hell, there’s not even a real Wikipedia page for Thirty Ought Six.  But I hope the guys in the band can sleep comfortably at night knowing that they may have to live with the “emo” tag forever, but they’ll always be better than Panic! At the Disco…

Sadly, there’s no YouTube videos of Thirty Ought Six to my knowledge, but you can hear more from Hag Seed over at a fan created MySpace page.