penningtron wrote: Sun Sep 17, 2023 11:03 am

Krev wrote: Sat Sep 16, 2023 11:42 pm John Lydon supported Trump.

His comments at the time were something like how "punk" it was of Trump making a mockery of the whole thing but also claims he still voted for HRC (he's a US citizen/lives in LA).

Krev wrote: Sun Sep 17, 2023 8:51 pm

penningtron wrote: Sun Sep 17, 2023 11:03 am

Krev wrote: Sat Sep 16, 2023 11:42 pm John Lydon supported Trump.

His comments at the time were something like how "punk" it was of Trump making a mockery of the whole thing but also claims he still voted for HRC (he's a US citizen/lives in LA).

According to Wikipedia, he admitted that he voted for Trump, branding Biden a "champagne socialist." I love Second Edition, too, but he's turned into a bit of an old tit.

"washington post" wrote:Today’s biggest hitmakers share a complicated punk lineage. But maybe emo isn’t as confusing as we think.

Perspective by Chris Richards
Popular music critic
September 21, 2023

There’s no home test kit where Olivia Rodrigo can do a cheek swab and find out she’s three percent Rites of Spring, but if you believe in musical genealogy, there is a line you can trace from the hardcore punk of Washington, D.C., circa 1984 to the summit of the current Billboard albums chart. It’s strange, but it’s real, and no matter how hard anyone fights it, everyone keeps calling it “emo.”

The word still confuses people because it continues to generate meanings. Emo began as a style of music, which became an attitude, which became an identity, which became a stereotype, which became a slight, which is why the term “emo” now serves as pop culture shorthand for any hue of interior teenage sadness. But before all of that, emo was a sound, originally a hyper-expressive idiom of high-decibel hardcore punk, but now so profoundly mutated across the decades, its only recognizable features reside in the voice (melodies sung as if they’re too big for your mouth), which is how emo has found its way into so many of today’s most eager and exhilarated pop songs, including Rodrigo’s.

As music, emo has a four-decade history, and it looks something like this: Smack in the middle of Reagan’s ’80s, a young hardcore band called Rites of Spring arrives at a vulnerable, cathartic new sound that the punk scene — dizzy and grasping for words — dubs “emotional hardcore.” In the 1990s, a new class of bands pick up emo like it’s a torch that deserves carrying, all while trying to dodge the stigma of the word itself. Then, as a new century fires up, tons of fame-hungry bands pounce on it, polish its lofty sadness to a gleam, then roll it out to Warped Tour, to MTV, to Myspace, to Hot Topic, and ultimately, to the bank. In the 2010s, emo gets both smaller (waves of principled revival bands) and bigger (rap stars who worship Paramore). Now it’s 2023, and the likes of Billie Eilish, Taylor Swift and Rodrigo — whose emo-tinted new album “Guts” just went No. 1 — have funneled trace elements of this underground noise into the hits that perfume the top of the world.

That counts as one of the most weirdly circuitous inheritances in American popular song, but we’ve made emo more confusing than it needs to be. Maybe it’s just a previously unnamed dimension of the adolescent experience sung in a deeply intuitive, profoundly expressive, highly flexible way. In his prescient 2003 book “Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers and Emo,” culture journalist Andy Greenwald wrote, “As long as there are teenagers, music will get labeled emo.” Twenty years later, that still holds true, even though emo has never been able to stop changing its musical shape.

Instead of thinking of emo as a style, maybe we should think of it an adaptation. Even at its most introspective, introverted or solipsistic, this music has always been a response to the tumultuous everything-else that exists outside our heads. Emo is an explicit recognition of humanity in a world that wants to strip it away. And that world keeps changing.

The term “emo” started as a pejorative, and until only recently, it stayed that way. The consensus is that shortly after Brian Baker of the D.C. hardcore band Dag Nasty tried to zing Guy Picciotto from Rites of Spring by telling him his band was “emo-core,” the word began to spread, appearing in Thrasher magazine, then in Maximum Rocknroll, then in every other fanzine across the land, until it became punk parlance for any hardcore band that might prioritize yearning introspection over bristling hostility, including Dag Nasty. Strange times. Punks often wore these kinds of badges with pride, but this one stung because it came from the inside. To be labeled “emo” was to be othered by your own culture.

The standard retort: Isn’t all hardcore — all music! — emotional? But more than a misdirected insult, emo was a misnomer. Yes, all music is emotional, but it isn’t always vulnerable, and the unprecedented self-exposure of Rites of Spring is what made the band’s songs feel like a form of metaphysical truth-telling, an almost violent exteriorization of the human spirit. Someone could have just as easily called it “soul.” But emo was still hardcore, and hardcore was still punk, and this raw, new expression of the innermost self required a certain courage that ran parallel to the anti-conformity of being a punk in the first place.

It all felt so tangible in 1985 in the music of the Hated, a band of visionary teenagers from Annapolis, Md., who sang not only about the fires inside their brains, but the injustices that lit them up — from the racism they experienced at school to the articles about South African apartheid they’d read in the newspaper. Worldly and contemplative, the Hated were marking their place in an unjust society, perhaps to simply affirm their existence. The bands they would influence would retreat deeper within, though, blocking out the ugliness of the world altogether.

The first time I encountered the word “emo” was in a mail-order catalogue from Sub Pop Records. The heavyweight indie label had famously introduced our species to Nirvana back in 1988, but by 1994, Sub Pop didn’t quite know how to describe their latest signees, Sunny Day Real Estate, a Seattle quartet that would soon become the most pivotal band in emo’s zigzag bloodline. Sunny Day Real Estate took huge aesthetic cues from the Hated, but instead of trying to stare down the cruelty of the world, singer Jeremy Enigk mewled about spiritual reveries, his gaze aimed at heaven.

The intensity of Rites of Spring could not be duplicated, but the triumphal prettiness of Sunny Day Real Estate could, and the underground got busy. The latter half of the 1990s delivered a rush of emo bands — Texas is the Reason, the Promise Ring, Mineral, Jejune, Christie Front Drive — who made their guitars shimmer and gust while they sang about geographies, temperatures, colors and moods. The sound was energizing yet intimate, a punk of pure feeling. Something important was evaporating, though. In her influential 2003 essay “Emo: Where the Girls Aren’t,” critic Jessica Hopper remembered ’90s emo being politically defanged by the general “armchair comfort of the Clinton era.” This wasn’t a music of minds — or even hearts — so much as nerve endings.

Scrubbed of its politics, emo was well-primed to go pop in a post-9/11 America where protest music hardly seemed to exist. The aughties were a self-infantilizing decade for rock-n-roll across the board, from the childlike freak folk of Animal Collective, to the party-brained dance punk of LCD Soundsystem, to the cocooning singalongs of countless emo bands on the Warped Tour each summer. There was a war going on and nobody wanted to sing about it.

That doesn’t mean this new iteration of emo wasn’t distinct to its era. “The emo boom is inextricable from the internet,” writes Chris Payne in his terrific new book, “Where Are Your Boys Tonight? The Oral History of Emo’s Mainstream Explosion, 1999-2008,” explaining how the unprecedented intimacy and immediacy of message boards, mp3 file sharing services and the blogging site LiveJournal helped listeners find their favorite new bands at bewildering new speeds. Perhaps more significantly, those pre-Myspace days also taught the children of Big Emo how to perform their interiority for one another in digital anonymity — something like training wheels for the social media age.

As a sound, emo quickly transformed into something rousing and relatable via massive hits from Fall Out Boy, Panic! At the Disco, Paramore and any other band willing to push its songs past melodic succulence toward something richer, tangier, queasier. If punk was the sound of confidence exceeding ability, aughties emo was the sound of feeling exceeding imagination. Leading lights of the era sang as if high school was a congenital affliction, memorializing yearning and betrayal in anthems that ranged from biting (Taking Back Sunday’s “There’s No ‘I’ in Team” in 2002) to existential (My Chemical Romance’s “I’m Not Okay” from 2004).

And still, nobody was calling themselves emo. “We treated the word ‘emo’ like a dog you’re training not to jump up on you,” says Zach Lind of Jimmy Eat World in “Where Are Your Boys Tonight?” “The best way to train the dog is just to ignore the dog.” But during emo’s most lucrative years, dodging the emo label wasn’t about being perceived as a punk with an asterisk. It was about being perceived as a rock star with an asterisk. If anything, emo’s mass-culture arrival proved how thin the line between “acknowledge my humanity” and “acknowledge my greatness” could be.

Hang this on the fridge: When people talk about musical revivals, they’re not really talking about the music being revived; they’re talking about a revival in attention. Such was the case with the “fourth-” and “fifth-wave” emo revivals of the 2010s which saw surges of young bands — Algernon Cadwallader, Snowing, the Hotelier, many more — embracing emo as an aesthetic, as a tradition, and finally, as an identity marker, too. That last part felt different, at least.

And while those waves didn’t wash emo back onto mainstream shores, a new generation of rappers did soon after. Lil Uzi Vert eagerly cited the influence of Paramore and Fall Out Boy. Lil Peep rapped over guitar-twinkle lifted from a Brand New song. Juice WRLD used his signature hit, “Lucid Dreams,” to unload the kind of lyrics that typically clot the air at Hot Topic: “I still see your shadows in my room/Can’t take back the love that I gave you/It’s to the point where I love and I hate you.” The stakes in this music, however, were, tragically, much higher. Juice WRLD and Lil Peep frequently rhymed about the opioid addictions that eventually took both their lives. Their music had brought emo back to its starting point: a state of extreme vulnerability.

Which means emo might be a Mobius strip, even though you can jot down its lines of succession on the back of a napkin. The Hated influences Sunny Day Real Estate. Mineral pantomimes Sunny Day and the Hated. Paramore covers Sunny Day Real Estate. Lil Peep raps over a Mineral sample. Just this year, Lil Uzi Vert performs “Misery Business” live with Paramore, and Paramore’s Hayley Williams lands a guest spot on Taylor Swift’s “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version).” Make it even easier: Draw a straight line from Dag Nasty to Lifetime to Fall Out Boy to Juice WRLD. Simple, right? And yet, if you were to play Olivia Rodrigo a Hated song, she’d be completely within her rights to feel like she’s staring at a fish crawling onto land.

Now squint your ears and listen to Rodrigo sing, “I made it weird, I made it worse,” all sweet and sour on her new “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl.” Can you hear emo’s intimacy wrestling with its vastness? This music has traveled a relatively short distance through time, but it has bridged so much: suffocating ’80s moralism, smothering ’90s ennui, numbing ’00s shock and awe, an opioid crisis that won’t let go — along with all the deeply personal awkwardness and anxiety commonly associated with coming of age in any of those shaky American timelines.

If emo’s immense breadth does actually contain every sensation generated by surviving this world’s bigness and brutality, it also contains a very specific one: Feeling like you matter, but knowing that you might not.