“Emo” is not short for “Emotional.” “Emo” does not mean Dashboard Confessional and I KILLED THE PROM QUEEN, despite what MTV has lead you to believe in the last few years. “Emo” is not tight pants, sidebangs, and male vocalists who sing like little girls about their failed relationships. “Emo” is not the use of diluted, meaningless metaphors and similes such as “My arms are like pinecones,” and most definitely is not the rampant use of words such as “autumn,” “heart,” “knife,” “bleeding,” “leaves,” and “razorblade.”
I just thought I’d clear that up after all of these “definitions” in which I have encountered an unbelievable amount of people who try to pass off their blatantly false pretenses as fact, and are slowly infecting others with their high-horse, holier-than-thou bullshit. Because honestly, with your ridiculous definitions, Beethoven, George Gershwin, and Britney Spears are/was “emo bands.”
Now, onto the real definition.
Often, more recently, this gets intertwined with post-hardcore, and understandably so - that’s nothing to make an issue of, since well shit, at least it’s close.
Since the late 90s, though, bands have been emerging in the vein of Taking Back Sunday, Dashboard Confessional, and the thousands of their clones. As far as I can tell, some lazy journalist somewhere, writing an article about them, decided “Well, fuck, no one knows what emo is anyways, so I’ll call these bands “emo” - sounds more appealing than bubblegum pop rock…” and the spiral continued downwards into the current amalgomation of bands MTV has told everyone is “emo.”
Anyhow, people decided that “emo” meant “emotional,” which is obviously bullshit, as 99% of bands make music to illicit emotion, which would make “emotional” a completely all-encompassing genre from classical to opera to pop to rap.
from urbandctionary.com
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Emo is a style of rock music which describes several independent variations of music with common stylistic roots. As such, use of the term has been the subject of much debate. In the mid-1980s, the term emo described a subgenre of hardcore punk which originated in the Washington, D.C. music scene. In later years, the term emocore, short for “emotive hardcore”, was also used to describe the emotional performances of bands in the Washington, D.C. scene and some of the offshoot regional scenes such as Rites of Spring, Embrace, One Last Wish, Beefeater, Gray Matter, Fire Party, and later, Moss Icon. (In more recent years, the term “emotive hardcore” entered the lexicon to describe the period.)Starting in the mid-1990s, the term emo began to refer to the indie scene that followed the influences of Fugazi,
which itself was an offshoot of the first wave of emo. Bands including Sunny Day Real Estate and Texas Is the Reason had a more indie rock style of emo, more melodic and less chaotic. The so-called “indie emo” scene survived until the late 1990s, as many of the bands either disbanded or shifted to mainstream styles. As the remaining indie emo bands entered the mainstream, newer bands began to emulate the mainstream style. As a result, the term “emo” became a vaguely defined identifier rather than a specific genre of music. (from wkipedia.com)
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