What the Hell, Bro

I was doing a little bit of research in PhilMusic and the Yupangco forums when I came upon a really interesting thread in the former discussing why the general rock n' roll community had this tendency to look down upon the musical genre / niche emo. I know shoegaze is fast becoming the trend in the pop music scene (and along with emo, I have a pretty strong dislike for it), but the fact remains that emo was bashed by not one, not five, but almost all of the resident rock cultures from dreampop (the precursor of shoegaze, bitchez) to prog metal, so this was a rather intriguing topic.

After all, emo is still a form of music, and PhilMusic is the melting pot of Pinoy music on the 'net.

But the one thing that not even that admittedly educated discussion thread could do for me was establish the roots of emo and emocore, so I did the next best thing and checked Wikipedia.

Near the bottom part of the entry on emo, there was this short paragraph that caught my attention:

Gerard Way, the lead singer of My Chemical Romance stated in an interview that "emo is a pile of shit", and that his band was never emo.[30] Panic at the Disco also stated in an interview with NME: "emo is bullshit."[31] These two bands, however, tend to be classified as emo.

What. The. Hell. Bro.

Honestly speaking, I don't really mind emo, but I wasn't exposed to it much so I never really could make an educated opinion - all I know is that My Chemical Romance and Dashboard Confessional both sounded horrible. This dude I used to work with in Outblaze, though, played music from bands like Saosin and Coheed and Cambria so much that I eventually took the time to listen and found that while these folks exhibited emo-ish qualities, the music was erudite and were something I could learn to like (That same dude, by the way, is copyright owner of the title I used for this post haha).

But MCR . . . meh. What little respect I had for them vanished with what I just read. After all, everybody with even a little bit of gray matter knows that the band is known for being what could probably be the biggest emo band on the planet. How the hell could the vocalist say something so fake and poseur and sleep well at night?

Well, enough with that. Back to work for me.

[ segue: The fun thing about Wikipedia is that it has shown me twice now that two of the current pop trends in music (emo and shoegazer) were both established way before the 90's, and in a sense were the underground forms of musical art whilst classic, glam and grunge paraded their way through the airwaves, and it's rather comforting to know that before all the drama, the attention, the brouhaha, they were honest-to-goodness musical expressions that weren't marketable (haha). ]