The Emo Diaries

Genres in music are pointless. That is, if you like something, you should like it no matter what someone else is dubbing it. But I am a musiophile for sure, and hence am obsessed with categorizing and then placing value judgements, all the while knowing the vapidity of it. What can I say, I'm sick. And speaking of sick, I can remember a time, a short month in the winter of 2001, when Madison Drive went emo. That's right, me, Billy Frolic, Bobby Campbell, Brendan Huffman, and even your man Karl Dettbarn embraced that bittersweetness, that fad. We would get up and skip school, wake and bake and listen to all the hottest new emo acts coming off Limewire and Napster. I can't speak for my compatriots, but I heft a bit of blame for my acceptance on booze and an enhanced sense of romanticism, re: virgin hunting. (See, since then I have been deprogrammed, reprogrammed, and deprogrammed again, now and forever basking in the organic minimalism of Johnny Ramone and Handome Dick Manitoba, so I am a crass bore with a refined intelligence. Complex.) Hot bands at the time included: Jimmy Eat World, Alkaline Trio, Hot Water Music, Dashboard Confessional, Modest Mouse, Hey Mercedes and others we didn't partake in like the Get Up Kids and the Promise Ring, who were to pussy for even the most forgiving, if conflicted, punk rocker. At the same time we listened to garage-revivalists like the White Stripes and the Hives, all of whom provided alot of what we love about punk rock, but those emo bands gave us a bit more: unashamed schmaltz.

Emo did not start as emo. First their was emo-core, derived from primarily D.C. hardcore bands who wanted to break the rigid rules of hardcore music. Minor Threat fans started the Rites of Spring (the "the" is and editorial dis, emo-core bands are never "the" bands due to their sickening post-modernity), which was a harcore band that opened their minds to melodic guitar work, varied rhythms, and the key note: deeply personal, highly passionate, emotion driven lyrics, emotions other than anger. With them began that now emo-classic happening of performers and/or audience members crying during songs, they are so overcome by the pure raw emotion. So, in 1985, that music was dubbed emo-core. Just as no Ramone wanted to play "punk rock", Rites of Spring, Ian MacKaye and their contemporaries dispised the emo-core label, but that was what they were playing, so says history.

From this unsuspecting seed/scene, the emo-core style spread across America's Underground throughout the eighties, proportedley acting as a bridge between the sometimes mindless harcore that preceeded it and the new "adult" emotions that it's participants would inescapably feel, such as: "It was better when we were young and dumb, and now we're somewhat sad about the loss of innocence but, hey, let's sing about it." What came out of these feelings was that new and even more intense realationship between bands and audience, all in it together. By the time the nineties rolled in, the underground sorta started to filter out and the "core" dropped off with new bands such as Jawbreaker and Sunny Day Real Estate recontextualizing the genre and nomenclature, and modern "emo" was born, that is, the huge agressiveness of hardcore, the songwriting of pop punk, and the whiny, tortured attutude of emo-core. When these two bands had run their course, the blueprint for a million bands who would actually want to be called emo was laid, and the sterotypes began to take shape, that is referring to a specific type of emotionally overbearing music that was romantic but distanced from the political nature of punk rock, along with the nerd-chic emo fashion. But these bands didn't take with America's youth as a whole, and the U.S.A. went pop punk as opposed to emo, so the emo movement took its lessons and its stereotypes and went back underground, for awhile.

As this new national subculture drew inspiration from bands like Jawbreaker, Drive Like Jehu, Fugazi, and Sunny Day, the new sound of emo developed into a mixture of hardcore's passion and indie rock's intelligence, bearing the anthemic power of punk rock and its do-it-yourself work ethic but with smoother songs, sloppier melodies, and yearning vocals. So Jimmy Eat World, Braid, Mineral, the Get Up Kids and the Promise Ring all did their thing, never threatening to encroach upon the turn tables of us dyed-in-the-wool pop punkers, whose Screeching Weasel, the Queers, the Vindictives, and the Mr. T Experience not only made those emo bands look like boring, no fun havin', mysoginist wussies, but also held the moral highground of being derived directly from the Ramones, the Platonic Form of what you oughtta do if you got a band. Then the unthinkable happened and the first true punk rock/emo crossover record come out.

Out of East Brunswick, NJ, everybody knows Lifetime. Beloved by punkers and supposedly an emo band, it was this blurring of the line that spawned the worst so-called emo-punk the nineties and new millenium would be unfortunate enough to experience, mostly out of Northern Jersey and Long Island, such as Brand New, the Movielife, My Chemical Romance, Taking Back Sunday, Senses Fail, and Thursday, none of whom are punk rock, but weren't exactly called emo on 93.7 WSTW. This was the beginning of the end, the watering down that would lead people to somehow believe that it had to do with anything more than music and fashion. So one primordial emo sound is that of Lifetime, super-fast hardcore-style delivery on thoughtful personal lyrics and big major chords. Another is the Promise Ring, soft and sweet, no balls and don't turn up to loud or you won't hear the singer's adorable lisp, "like getting hit on the head with cotton candy." And then Mineral, somber, dissonent and boring. Of their tune "If I Could", emo-expert Andy Greenwald said, "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."

What emo's appeal is/was and what ended up getting it on the charts was the old idea of the "lovable loser." Lot's of people don't feel to good about themselves, and so for them hearing Bo Diddley sing that he is 500% Man didn't make any sense, because they don't feel like they are even 10% man, as evidenced in the emo tendency to wear tight jeans that are cut for a woman's body. I mean, I LOVE wearing tight jeans which accentuate my male feature, so I buy them in the men's section of the South Street vintage store, for I am very cool. What I'm saying is that none of these band's singers are exactly Mick Jaggers and have given up trying. Now I AM Mick Jagger (cerca '65) and like Spider Man, I NEVER give up, so it is not the common man mentality but the ultimate realatability of being in a band in the late nineties and everbody trying to make their own great music without remaking "Love Songs For the Retarded" and some came out better than others. Greenwald highlights the positive, "the pinnacle of its generation of emo: a convergence of pop and punk, of resignation and celebration, of the lure of girlfriends and the pull of friends, bandmates, and the road." He refers to mid-1990s emo as "the last subculture made of vinyl and paper instead of plastic and megabytes." It hurts being on the cusp, unless you don't realize you're there. Or maybe it just hurts remembering when you were cusping and you could still see both sides, before you fell to the inevitable side you're on now. See how emo I am?

But who are we kidding, really? The reason emo broke was that Jimmy Eat World made hands down the poppiest emo record imaginable (followed closely by Saves the Day's "Stay What You Are") with a bonafide pop single. "Bleed American" dropped in the summer of 2001, the exact perfect time, if you catch my drift. Osama bin Laden and George Bush decided, not in conjunction with each other, but because of one another, to take America back down to Year One, and we were all gonna shape ourselves all over again and it was gonna be harder this time becasue all the mirrors are now two-way. And everything you learned about punk rock is at the end of a treasure map written in a now dead language, and let's just say that Joel Tannenbaum ain't gonna help where you're going, young sir. It didn't take me more than a half decade to get out of this Chapel Perilous (with a little help from Daniel Desario), and I think you could ask Bobby Campbell and he'd tell you: Every move a right one. No mistakes, no regrets, cause the best times of my life haven't happened yet. You might listen to "Bleed American" and hate its guts, but put on "A Praise Chorus" and I genuinely smell Autumn nights on campus and feel the crisp air, and the Doctrine of Infinite Possibilities, exponential potential, revolution and romance. And isn't it lovely that two chapters have already been written about you, and isn't it just sublime to be in a new chapter, all together like this? And two times percentage is proof, with little hallucinagenic goldfish swimming electric in the back of your skull, and every day you wake up you might be the real and actual Archie with a Betty and a Veronica and even a fucking JUGHEAD, so no way could you ever be more scared than excited to stand with your toes over the edge looking out into the starry black and did Dashboard Confessional really glamourize heartbreak any more than Dr. Frank?

Emo is a tricky animal, you can listen to it and not even know you're doing it. Some Lifetime sounds like the Gorilla Bisuits but poppier. Some Jimmy Eat World sounds like the Pointed Sticks. It came to describe more than it was, even including pop punk that veered even slightly from the so-called norm. The "emo" songs that I like are linked by the feeling of striving for sentimentality of the moment you are experiencing, and frankly that is something that I am interested in, and it takes a lot of energy, and it takes suspension of disbelief, and you might have to tell yourself stories about yourself which you may realize are impermanent and illusional, and maybe that'll help or hurt you, but I crave personal positive drama, I want to be interested, I want to be happy. Like maybe their exists a recharge, a daily wipe-clean where you could be shocked into action, trigger worded and not everything about you changes but you remember something gloriously essential. All I want is constant euphoria. Is that so much to ask?

Vote for Sugar Shane!

Excellent job Phils Phans, on making our men Chase Utley 2B and Raul Ibanez LF the top All-Star vote getters at their positions! Congrats to the Black Lava, Ryan Howard 1B for getting the nod from Uncle Charlie and making another All-Star appearence! Now is the time to make your voices heard one more again and get the Sweet One, the Flyin' Hawaiian, Sugar Shane Victorino in with MLB Final Vote. Do it here, now, and often. Go Phils!

Art Loop Tonight

Come see the Headies and many more tonight for free at the Spot for the Wilmington Art Loop! Cuz we are artists, y'all.

"I Think I'm Gonna Pop" or "Said, Danny Are You Okay?"

Illustration by Todd Purse.


















Michael Jackson was the vessel for a one of a kind story, pure Americana, Horatio Alger in Glitter Boots. Never before had something like him happened. The product of a very poor, crazy father, who, unlike so many other poor, crazy fathers, had the luck of having the most talented son the world had ever seen, and enough in the stock to make a great back-up band. The main thing about Michael wasn't that he was Baby James Brown but a better dancer and could sing like an angel, it was always his hyper-sensitivity. Too sensitive for the public eye but needed the stage to live, a real paradox.

The Michael Jackson story begins with Joe Jackson, who wanted more than anything to get his family out of the lower-class life he could provide for them, and would do nearly anything with the ample tools he was afforded to get there. Joe was a good manager, if you measure only in success, but it is widely believed that his physical, emotional, and psychological abuse employed to literally whip his band into shape warped the young, sensitive, uber-talented Michael's psyche into one only peripherally human. Bowie tried, with make-up and effects, to come off as an alien rocker, but it was Michael who, as an adult would be indistinguishable from an alien life form, or even super human, because no human could be that good.

Controversy always followed Michael, stemming directly from his eccentricity. In 1986 the tabloids first started to mine Golden Mike for sales with the false claim that he slept in a hyperbaric chamber. Michael let it go to enhance his sci-fi image to promote the upcoming Captain EO Movie, which I saw in 3-D at Epcot Center in 1988 and 1992. He bought his beloved pet chimp Bubbles and allegedly attempted to buy the Elephant Man's bones, which led to the tabloid moniker "Wacko Jacko" which MJ discussed and confessed that it really hurt his feelings, and he couldn't understand why he would be harmfully made fun of and lied about when he just wanted to entertain and help. Because money could be made by lying about Michael Jackson.

Musically he never really faltered, because to MJ, his fans were god, and everything was done in deference to them, to us. Of course, personally, I can't take a slow jam, even if it is by Michael, but it's not all about me. Michael's downfall was a result of three things: Physical appearance, prescription drug addiction, and accusations on his character. MJ started the plastic surgery after breaking his nose practicing a difficult dance move in 1979, giving him the still black, but thinner nose look known in "Thriller". Suffering from vitilogo and lupus, sensitive to sunlight, MJ's treatments caused his skin to lighten and he underwent more facial plastic surgery, with the noted commencement of thorough alterations coming after the Pepsi Incident. While filming a commercial for my favorite drink, Pepsi, MJ's hair caught ablaze and he was rushed to the hospital. He took this opportunity to begin a radical reconstruction of his face with more rhinoplasty, cheek bone surgery, a cleft put in his chin, and lip thinning. Unfortunately, it is believed that during this time Michael also began his dependency on prescription pain killers, no doubt to numb the emotional pain as well. It is also believed by many that Michael suffered from body dismorphic disorder, a condition in which you cannot comprehend how you are perceived, physically, by others. Michael thought he was ugly and wanted to be beautiful for his fans.

Remember what I said about the money you could get for lying about Michael Jackson? In 1993 the worst blow Michael's career could suffer occurred when he was accused by the father of a thirteen year old male friend of Michael's of molestation. The boy, while on sedatives, claimed that Michael had touched his penis. Michael adamantly denied it, cooperated with police, and under the advisement of soon to be wife Lisa Marie Presley, he settled out of court in an attempt to make it go away. After this ordeal, Michael would get on more prescription pain-killers and anti-depressants which plummeted his health and sent him to rehab. But, the world seemed to believe it. It was easy for them to see a weird looking, eccentric superstar and think, "Of course he did it, look at him!" But we in America have something called "innocent until proven guilty," and Mike was never, ever proven guilty. He died innocent, no matter what so many phony Americans and other fascists thought or think. For me, personally, that is enough. I am a liberal, and I'm not just saying that. I don't care. The worst thing Michael ever definitely did was snooging the Beatles catalog out from under Paul McCartney and making them Nike commercials, and who cares about that either?

Is there a good reason to think that Michael may have been sexually attracted to boys? Maybe... see, Michael is the ultimate Peter Pan, not just a man playing at it like me, but the real deal. His adolescence didn't make sense, forever trying to be the 9 year old singer of the J5, and girls or women just try and trample you and marry your brothers and take away your band, all the time screaming, screaming. So Michael could have been a perpetual pubescent, never able to mature emotionally or sexually, but with all the money in the world. He just wanted to be loved, but couldn't figure out by whom. What I'm getting at is that IF Michael ever did any of the alleged sex acts with alleged children, it should not be viewed as any more of a crime than his prescription drug addiction, his bizarre plastic surgeries, or his countless pop hits, all products of Joe Jackson's parenting/managing and the entire world wanting a piece of him and acting like spoiled brats when they can't have it. It is an acting out, a cry for help, but instead of the help he needs, he just gets the switch again.

In twenty five years, kids will have the best time learning about and listening to Michael Jackson. When I was a little kid, I had heard a wee bit of "Never Mind the Bullocks" and "Ziggy Stardust" and those two things stuck with me for years, trying to figure out what it meant and all about the colorful characters who perpetrated glam and punk rock. I think Michael will be even more fun to unearth. He's like five different, distinct beings throughout time. A child prodigy with exponential potential and number one hit singles, played with his brothers. The best disco star their could ever be, the prodigy grown up and bringing his gold standard to then modern pop music. The innovator superstar, inventor and perfecter of hyper-modern rock and roll dancing and savior/reconfigurer of pop after punk rock self-destructed. The King of Pop, so dubbed by Elizabeth Taylor, with the world in his hand and he just wants to make it better. And finally the disgraced popster with child molestation included in every thought about him, a pile of debt, and a muffed up grill.

But, for right now, and finally, all the Michael Jacksons have amalgamated into one entity, one that's being appreciated for the most complex pop star the world will ever know. The comparisons are easy to make, specifically to Elvis Presley. The King of Rock and Roll and the King of Pop, both died young while struggling with prescription drug addiction, both a little past relevant, both cemented as the best their field could ever know, both drowned in controversy over their personal life decisions, both died in their trademark mansions. It'll be interesting to see if their are Michael Jackson sightings at small town diners and the mall and the like, the Kings never die, of course, but people are too dense to see why.

It's impossible to say which my fave MJ is, the obvious answer being the J5 incarnation, playing Black Bubblegum that makes the ears happy and the feet boogie, or the coolest guy in the world Michael of "BAD", or the utterly insane Michael in Black or White, that night after the Simpsons but before In Living Color, smashing that car and grabbing that crotch and gyrating, perfectly, like a deranged maiden coming out of the cuckoo clock for a couple seconds every hour and trying to make the most of it. Michael that can jump into Billie Jean's bed, make it glow, and then disappear into it, Michael that hangs out in the wet back streets crooning to Dirty Diana's and telling broads the way they make him feel, the Michael that torments over upcoming fights in the garage and just has to stop it, the Michael that can change into a panther, the Michael that's a gangster, the Michael that can transport through dancin' dust to ancient Egypt and sex-eye the queen... all great Michaels, but mine is an in-betweener. The Jacksons' 1977 Variety Show. Michael was pre-surgery but adult. He looked like a grown up J5'er, but sung like "Thriller", and most importantly, he had broken the glass ceiling of dance, doing moves that noone had seen before and few could properly do since, except for Zac Ephron. But, from what I understand, this is when Michael hated his looks the most, and he was beautiful.

With everybody talking I almost wanted to keep quiet, but I see myself as knowing a bit more about music than they do. I used to see Mike and say, "if he had just stopped with the surgery then..." after "Bad" or "Dangerous" or even later, but now I just see him like his mother does, beautiful from the day he was born til the day he died. Lester Bangs should be alive to write about this, but he's not so you get me, and I have no point, just appreciation of an icon. Thanks Michael.

Tit Patrol @ the Spot 6/28/09

Photos by Nikki... See, we got fans!

One Short Fall @ the Spot 6/28/09

Outta Parsippany, New Jersey, One Short Fall! Excellent Rancid-esque songs, great bass playing!, cool guys. They'll be back around, I'm sure, and hopefully we'll make it up to their turf for some fun!

The Impatients @ the Spot 6/27/09

Da-Durr! @ the Spot 6/27/09