Talk:Emo

Misogyny Claims Evidence?

I was just reading over the criticism of emo and there's a whole section on how it's anti women. Perhaps it is true that there are few girls in emo bands but that is true of almost every genre and style of music that has bands as its primary unit, from jazz to metal to reggae. In addition, there's a section in regards to "anti-female lyrics" that cites a book page number as a source; I think it'd be better substantiated by actual citations of examples. I just don't feel that that section of the article and its allegations are really that well supported is all. Please comment on the matter, thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Naturada137 (talk • contribs) 05:22, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

If you're talking about the "gender bias" section, it is referenced to a reliable secondary source (Greenwald). If you would like to double-check the source or read more about the specific examples Greenwald discusses in his book, you may use the citation information to track the book down yourself. That's what citations are for. Actual examples would be superfluous and difficult to summarize, as (A) nearly all emo songs are written/performed by males, and there are dozens (if not hundreds) dealing with male/female relationships, and (B) who would decide which are the best examples? --IllaZilla (talk) 08:21, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

I actually have to agree with Naturada137. The claim is too broad and too controversial to simply cite to a single allegedly reliable source without even quoting the source. Without clear evidence that this idea is supported by more than a single, opinionated source, our article needs to make it clear that this view is simply that espoused by Greenwald, and what the particulars of his view are, rather than pass on his assumptions as encyclopedic fact.

IllaZilla, I have read several pages of archives of this article's talk page, and I feel that you are perilously close to asserting a WP:OWN level of control at this article. I see little evidence that any idea that you disagree with, or any challenge to your small number of personally preferred sources, has any long-term effect on this article, meanwhile there is a very large amount of disputation, which is "conveniently" archived very rapidly so that none of it ever attains enough critical mass to gain consensus for major changes. It looks to me like the majority of people who comment on this talk page believe that the article badly misrepresents the facts, on multiple levels. Yet you appear to generally ignore these issues, you are often the first to leap in to attempt to dispel any criticism as if it were of you personally, and you mostly just assert that your sources are complete and reliable, when we really have no reason to think this is true. Pop culture journalism and scholarship is almost invariably controversial, incomplete and promotional of particular points of view, and thus requires balancing. While I agree with you that "I was there, and this is how I remember it..." is not a justification for adding alleged facts to the article, when reader after reader consistently leaves comments here questioning the validity of the article and its sources, this is a very strong indication that the sources have WP:RS problems and/or that the narrowness of the source selection amounts to a perhaps unintentional WP:NPOV problem, and even (as a form of novel synthesis that "cherry picks" sources and their information) a WP:NOR issue. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 06:39, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

American Football

The debut and only self-titled album by American Football (1999) is worth mentioning in the late 90s, independent emo movement section, as it has maintained a cult following for over 10 years and is considered in some circles as one of the best emo albums of all time. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 183.96.186.218 (talk) 10:31, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

Source?. Classic case of POV, weasel words, & peacockerry. --IllaZilla (talk) 10:43, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

The Illinois scene gets passed over in most good sources. --Guerillero | My Talk 16:01, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Descendents

How on earth could Descendents/All not be mentioned as one of the bands, like Dag Nasty (with whom they've shared two members as I recall) who led up to this? To a lot of us back in the day, the whole "melodic hardcore" thing in the 80s was pretty much defined by Descendants. It's jarringly revisionist to omit them. They released obviously emo-core-ish albums in 1982, '85, '86 and '87 as Descendents, and as All they had 5 similar releases from '88 to '92. I'm not counting the later reunion stuff, just their original run. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 06:18, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

I've read numerous books on punk, hardcore, and emo, and not even once have I seen a source link the Descendents or All to emo. They're pretty much universally linked to melodic hardcore and/or pop punk. They came out of the Los Angeles hardcore scene, which had nothing to do with emo. It's certainly not revisionist to omit them when none of the sources discuss them in the context of emo. Rather, it would be jarringly revisionist to include them, given that they are almost universally associated with melodic hardcore and pop punk, and not with emo. For pete's sake (and I say this as a huge Descendents/All fan who owns all of both bands' records), their songs (especially the ones from the '80s) are mostly about girls, food, and flatulence. The claim that their albums are "emocore-ish" is entirely your own opinion and I've never seen reliable sources that would support it. They were contemporaries of Black Flag, the Minutemen, and the Adolescents, not of Rites of Spring or Embrace. Emocore in the '80s came from the DC hardcore scene, not LA. "Melodic hardcore" came from LA, while "emotional hardcore" came from DC. The two are not synonymous. --IllaZilla (talk) 06:31, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Nor are they unrelated. I don't know what sort of insular "we live a cave" world you are imagining in the 80s. It wasn't like that. And Descendents' stuff veered between the silly songs you point out and the emotional stuff for which they've been principally notable as a band, especially after '85. Your blind faith in separation of the East Coast and West Coast hardcore scenes is counterfactual. Bands toured. We all bought records from everywhere. People moved. Black Flag blended the styles, to the extent there were distinct anyway. And so on. I've addressed your over-reliance on a few pet sources (and your aggressive "guard-dogging" of this talk page) elsewhere. I agree with you that Descendents shouldn't be added without a source, though I don't see sources cited on a per-band basis in the article prose as it stands now. I side with many, many commentators that much of this article should be deleted as unsourced or unreliably sourced. I'm highly skeptical that no sources link Descendents and other melodic HC bands with emo, even if the DC influence was stronger (as it obviously was), but I haven't got one yet, so I'll table this for now. I suspect that the sources you personally prefer and rather vociferously defend here, as if you have a personal stake in them, don't make that connection, so you think it doesn't exist. I'd bet real money that other sources do. I didn't add Descendents without a source, I suggested that their omission is an error. I'm not sure I care enough to go do a pile of punk research right now, but if I don't someone will eventually. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 06:53, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Just goofing off for a couple of minutes:

• "New-old emo" (W'everTF that means) band Monument cites Descendents as an influence and covered their song "Bikeage".[1]
• An article from editorialist Ryan Ritchie at the Orange County Weekly specifically states that emo is (in part) directly descendent (pun intended) from the Descendents. "Every band that falls into the emo category owes the Descendents a royalty check." There's a whole segment of the article naming emo bands as an entire genre as part of the topic of that article: "Descendents Family Tree: Bands Directly Influenced by the Fathers of Pop Punk".[2]. I don't know what Ritchie's personal qualifications are, but the OC Weekly is a reliable source generally under the criteria of WP:RS.
• The increasingly misnamed TVTropes.com (it now covers every aspect of pop culture imaginable) has a page on the Descendents, which says "While nobody would mistake them for an emo band, they might be seen as a precursor for the genre".[3]

And so on. I found those in under two minutes on the first two pages of Google search results, while eating a sandwich. It took 10 times longer to write them up for this talk page here that it did to hunt them down. I'd be interested in the results if I actually started looking for collegiate-level work (this tends to exist more for filmmakers than bands, but there have been a lot of academically-inclined books about punk and post-punk and post-HC genres over the last decade. But I have more pressing matters than hanging around university libraries. And this is already enough to add at least a mention of Descendents in this article. Hell, it's better sourcing than most of the namedropping has already, since we have an emo band giving them kudos and a mainstream-published article that makes the connection is very clear terms, so we have a primary source and a reliable secondary. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 07:21, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

PS: Speaking as someone who was actually in the punk scene in multiple U.S. states back in the relevant period, your assertion that Descendents couldn't have influenced emo because they started melodic HC not emo-core, and emo is an outgrowth of emo-core, and they're just different, is untenable and bizarre. Actually, even if I only liked classical music and knew nothing of these bands, just basic logic would suggest that this made no sense. It's as off-kilter as suggesting that Gary Numan, for example, couldn't be cited as an obvious, palpable influence on modern industrial rock and industrial metal, and throwing out this idea just because while he's one of the best-known, first-wave synthpop performers ever, synthpop (an outgrowth of purist electronic music fused with disco) led to electro, house music, trance music and other variants that now inform our mass of electronica-pop acts, meanwhile industrial rock & metal came from a fusion of industrial music (itself an outgrowth of noise music) with post-punk and thrash metal, and they're just different. That's all true. And it's all false, if taken as some kind of map of limitations to influence or of "genetic" relationships. Setting up a diagram of "familial" relationships like this is a very limited metaphor, nothing more (you can only have only two genetic parents, but a genre can have 50 memetic ones). Failure to see that leads one to almost reasonable-seeming but ultimately absurd assumptions and assertions, such as that synthpop and industrial are just different, even geographically, with synthpop being mostly European and industrial mostly North American, so industrial rock can't really have anything to do with synthpop, and early synthpop pioneers can't be counted as influences on industro-rock. Which is total crap, just like the assumptions that a highly influential and long-lived emotive hardcore band had no influence on the development of emotive post-hardcore, simply because they were in California (mostly; All wasn't based there), as if records never left the city in which they were pressed. Real life just doesn't work that way. The idea that Descendents wasn't a huge influence on everything that led up to emo, and remains so on emo bands even today, is as dead wrong as pretending this isn't happening. Or that emo bands like the one already cited aren't doing covers of Descendents songs on their tribute albums. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 08:00, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Look, the page is on my watchlist, and I contributed significantly to the article. That's why I keep an eye on it and respond to comments made here. I understand that not everything was localized in the '80s, but it certainly wasn't as nationalized as it later became. The DC scene was very insular, and most of the Dischord bands were short-lived, at least those directly relevant to emo. A comparative few toured nationally (Rites of Spring only played 14 or 15 shows, for example). Black Flag trailblazed a lot of the national touring routes, and their impact on the east coasters is well-documented, but the bands associated with them and their development tend to be those classified as hardcore or alternative, not emo. And the records were coming from small independent labels, most of which were focused on a local scene (Dischord, SST/Cruz, Slash, BYO, etc.). It's not "counterfactual" to talk about the east and west coast scenes in the early-mid '80s as being largely distinct; this is backed up by many reliable sources and is why these sources talk about the LA scene vs. the OC scene and about "harDCore", rather than about a homogenous national scene.

I also wish you'd quit complaining about my so-called "pet sources". I'm sitting on a small library of books here and have read them all, I'm not picking and choosing and I didn't pull the article out of my ass: Our Band Could Be Your Life, American Hardcore, We Got the Neutron Bomb, Rock and the Pop Narcotic, Get in the Van, Spray Paint the Walls, Nothing Feels Good...I could go on. That's several thousand pages and none of them cite the Descendents as an emo band or talk about them in the context of emo. Just because there are some latter-day emo-leaning bands that cite the Descendents as in influence doesn't mean the Descendents were ever emo (as some of your sources above note, and call them "the fathers of pop punk", not fathers of emo). The descendants of the Descendents, as described in your OC Weekly article, are bands like Blink-182, NOFX, and Face to Face, not Jawbreaker, The Promise Ring, or Jimmy Eat World. The author's attempt to link the Descendents to emo is based on the fact that they had songs about girls. So what? So did plenty of other bands that weren't and aren't associated with emo. The Ramones, The Dickies, and Screeching Weasel all had plenty of songs about girls, but none of them are ever cited as progenitors of emo. In other words, just because Kris Roe really likes "Silly Girl" doesn't make the Descendents forefathers of emo.

"I don't see sources cited on a per-band basis in the article prose as it stands now"? Are you serious? Nearly all of the bands mentioned in the history section are directly referenced to specific sources. If that isn't enough for you, List of emo artists cites sources directly on an act-by-act basis. "Descendents' stuff veered between the silly songs you point out and the emotional stuff for which they've been principally notable as a band, especially after '85"? The Descendents are principally notable for their catchy tunes, not deep emotional introspection. Yes, there's some emotion in songs like "Good Good Things", "Cheer", "Clean Sheets", and the aforementioned "Silly Girl", but it's of the pop-punk variety (and for every one of those there's a "No Fat Beaver", "Weinerschnitzel", or "Kids on Coffee"). You could draw a direct evolutionary line from those Descendents records to bands like Blink-182 and MxPx (both of whom have cited the Descendents as a direct influence), but not to Sunny Day Real Estate or Mineral, whereas sources have drawn evolutionary lines from Rites of Spring on through SDRE to Jimmy Eat World, etc. The fact that you found sources in 2 minutes of a Google search by typing "Descendents" and "emo" isn't surprising, given that in the last 10 years pop punk and emo have become pretty much synonymous (again, Blink-182, The Ataris, etc...add "Warped Tour" to that search and you'll still probably get a ton of hits), but it's telling that those sources are from this year. Again, the fact that a current "emo" band gives the Descendents kudos doesn't make the Descendents emo...Chris Carrabba really likes R.E.M., but that doesn't make R.E.M. emo either. I've got plenty of Descendents cover songs in my collection, and very few are by emo bands: the vast majority are by pop-punk groups. Face to Face covered "Bikeage" too, 15 years before these Monument guys, but Face to Face isn't an emo band and "Bikeage" isn't an emo tune, so what's your point? Jimmy Eat World have covered The Prodigy and Wham!...does that make The Prodigy and Wham! forefathers of emo? Of course not. Correlation does not imply causation.

Anyway, as previously stated the vast majority of reliable sources link the Descendents directly to melodic hardcore and pop punk, not directly to emo. The links between them and emo have been made in recent years and are tangential, ie. "this pop punk band that is sort of emo says they like the Descendents, and the Descendents had songs about girls too, so...". But in all my reading about the histories of hardcore and emo I haven't seen any authors give a direct correlation between the Descendents and emo, or describe how the Descendents fit into the evolution of emo as a style during the 1980s. I'm unconvinced by latter-day sources that draw revisionist tangential connections between the two based solely on pop-punk bands and lyrics about girls. Your "I was there, so I know better than you" attitude is irrelevant, not to mention unhelpful. --IllaZilla (talk) 08:27, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

I repeat: "Actually, even if I only liked classical music and knew nothing of these bands, just basic logic would suggest that this made no sense." (I.e., I retracted the "I was there" argument). It isn't of any interest to me whether you personally find modern day sources interesting. This isn't your article, and you are not the arbiter of source reliability. WP:RS finds them interesting, and sufficient. If you believe that all modern sources who might make a connection between the grandfathers of emotive punk that has been largely categorized by outsiders like music journalists into a "melodic hardcore" box, on the one hand, and similar music in a slightly differently named artificial category, and the newer music it spawned, then the burden of proof is clearly on you to demonstrate that these sources are somehow unreliable while yours aren't. I also don't care what Descendents covers you have in your personal music collection; that's another "I was there" fallacy, really, and it misses the point. An actual emo band claims them as an influence. In all your reading about the histories of hardcore and emo, you never saw a link between emo and the Descendents? I just showed you one, published in OC Weekly. Of course it only took 2 minutes to find one, since the connection is obvious to everyone but you and whatever obsessive "rock family tree" sources you're relying on who seem to be making the "genetic fallacy" argument, and denying relationships between bands and genres because they think they've already identified the "parents". I guess you should go do your history rewriting at Descendents (band) and All (band), too, since both articles make it clear that the band (or bands, depending on how you like to think of their relationship) are not only known for introspective, emotional songs, but that this type of content increased release by release, coming to define them more and more (and their original release was pretty much nothing but silly stuff). This progression in lyrical content is a major aspect of the Descendents article, especially, which does not dwell on their catchiness.

I'm not going to argue with your further about this. It's clear that you have a dead-set view on this and nothing is going to change it. I've already sourced well enough the fact that some, including a music journalist at a major California weekly, believes they were influential on emo. You have sources that do not mention such a connection, but I'd bet zero of them specifically deny it. Nothing to argue about really. Neither I nor anyone else has made a case that Descendents were the most influential, only that the were influential and can be sourced as being viewed as such. I've already proven that at least some music writers DO see a strong connection. QED. I don't feel strongly that it has to be added right this moment. Another source or two like that would be helpful (hey, maybe that'll take another two minutes to find).

No one but you said anything about "lyrics about girls"; that has nothing to do with the position I've advanced and defended. Attacking a weak and imaginary "there's must be a connection because they both sing about girls!" argument is to bash an obvious straw man.

I believe you that "the vast majority of reliable sources link the Descendents directly to melodic hardcore and pop punk", since that connection is of course obvious. The upshot of that is that some (even if not the majority) do not limit their influence to that "line" entirely. You'd actually need a reliable source to push that view, a source that actually specifically rules them out as an emo influence. It's blatant original research (novel synthesis) to take sources that say that emo mostly derives from X, Y and Z, other sources who say Descendants mostly influenced A, B, and C, and then try to cite those sources as proof of no influences between the ABC and XYZ sides or of no influence by Descendents in particular upon X, Y and Z. Being heavily influential on the development of melodic HC, and not being one of the most obvious and recognized direct influences on period emo-core, are independent facts that cannot possibly be used as a causal argument against influence on the later development of emo, or against what we know of as emo now having drawn from more than just a handful of emo-core bands, as if they lived in bubble. Your own stated belief that "emo" and "pop punk" are being used increasingly interchangeably means this dichotomy can't actually exist, or it would be like calling country and rap the same thing. They can't be widely separated genres if no one but you and a few alleged scholars of modern music history can tell them apart.

PS: I'll take your word for it on the sourcing of individual bands in the article. I must have looked at the wrong passage, and missed some of them being sourced earlier; I just thought I saw some without citations. But it was a side point anyway. I think the piles and piles of harsh criticisms here and in the recent archives raise far more serious problems than this entire conversation. No one's going to be grossly mislead by Descendents not being mentioned, but many who come here feel that 90% of more of this article it wrong and that it's sources are full of crap. That's a very serious issue, and auto-archiving it all under the rug doesn't do anything to solve it. I also still think that your involvement is too hawkish on this page. Watchlisting is one thing, but compulsion to put down every suggestion that the article isn't perfect is another. Your responses to people here come off as snotty, flippant and dismissive. The archives are a long string of you and not much of anyone but you basically telling everyone else to screw off. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 10:37, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Typo

Under the fashion topic, this sentence is misspelled.

Bright colors, such as blue, pink, red, or bleached blond, are also typical as highlights in emo hairstyles.

It's "Blonde" — Preceding unsigned comment added by XMusicFreakoX (talk • contribs) 01:41, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

Either spelling is correct, actually. Many English writers choose to adopt the French convention where applicable, using "blond" to refer to a male's hair and "blonde" to refer to a female's. Here, there is no obvious gender, so it makes sense to use either form. Remember, though, Wikipedia policy is to be bold and try fixing things yourself. If someone disagrees with your edit, they will undo it, and then it is time to go to the talk page.  dalahäst ^{(let's talk!)} 01:47, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

Melodic musicianship

Can anyone explain what this phrase is supposed to mean? I removed it and someone reverted that, suggesting that melodic does not mean the same as musicianship, which has nothing to do with the fact that these words together describe pretty much all musical genres to the extent that "melody" is subjective. Any change in tone will produce something that can be termed melody, including percussion. Melodic musicianship sounds like someone couldn't come up with a proper way of describing it, and so lazily put in this redundant phrase. Why should wikipedia contain this redundancy? Ninahexan (talk) 05:11, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

It's not redundant, and it's certainly not lazy. This has been discussed before; It's somewhere in the archives. Musicianship is the craft of playing instruments (as distinct from vocals). Melody is the arrangement of the sounds. "Melodic musicianship" means that the playing of the instruments is arranged in an agreeable (melodic) manner. There are plenty of musicians whose playing is intentionally not melodic. Saying that the musicianship is melodic is not redundant, as melodic is an adjective describing a quality of the musicianship, just as expressive is an adjective describing a quality of the vocals. "Melodic musicianship" = adjective + noun. Simple. --IllaZilla (talk) 10:04, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

The point is that it is too simple, to the point of being redundant. You can give a number of examples of "musicianship" not being melodic, but the fact is that the majority of musical expression with instruments could be described as melodic. If you want to say that this form of music is characterised by melodic musicianship then this is wrong, because that quality is NOT a distinction between this and other genres. Just putting an adjective next to a noun doesn't justify wasting space in wikipedia. "An Inuit is a breathing human" is an example of an adjective and a noun pairing which although intelligible, is rendered meaningless by the lack of distinction it confers relative to the majority of other members of its overall class. Do you now understand? It is not a conflation of musicianship and melodic, but rather that this pairing confers an inadequate distinction between this and the majority of other genres. Ninahexan (talk) 00:51, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

The melody of the instruments, specifically the melodic guitar lines, is mentioned several times throughout the article as one of the style's key characteristics. --IllaZilla (talk) 00:58, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

If there is a particular melody, or melodic structure that characterises the genre then that makes sense, but just to use the word melody without any distinguishing character to it is just using a broad word that provides little meaning. For example, if when describing the transition from a more punk sound to a softer mellow sound then such adjectives would be used to describe the melody, whereas the word melody itself doesn't confer such nuance. I am not saying the musical quality is not melodic, just that melodic itself explains very little.Ninahexan (talk) 02:51, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

Let's back up here. Are there sources that discuss the "melodic" nature of the style, and in what context. I agree that "melodic musicianship" is an empty phrase that could be used for most music in the world except maybe for stuff like drone metal or some non-Western indigenous music style. But the important thing is what do the sources say, and do they elaborate on the meaning of the term?--¿3family6 _contribs 03:05, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

This is from an MSNBC article: "Originally associated with dense, caustic music and nontraditional song structure (no verse, chorus, verse), emocore stuck with its original definition while indie emo was defined by a more accessible pop sound as heard from bands such as Weezer, Jimmy Eat World, Promise Ring and The Get Up Kids. With accessibility came radio and MTV airplay. Now Emo belonged to the world." So, "melodic musicianship" is going and I'll put in some words that actually attempt to differentiate the genre from the majority of other musical styles. Unless someone has any cogent argument?Ninahexan (talk) 22:14, 20 February 2012 (UTC)