NME : War on EMO (16 Sept. 2006)
As promised here are theedited highlights of the NME article:
THE WEEK EMO BECAME PUBLIC ENEMY NO.1 (Dan Martin)
The festival bottling tradition has long been a cornerstone of rock democracy and the crowd at the Reading Festival are among its most avid followers... It happened again this year - except this summer it wasn't the novelty turn or the token hip-hop outfit that took the shit. This time the missiles were thrown right into the heart of our own rock culture, and it proved what we've suspected for a while: that our normally happy global nation of alternative rock is in the midst of a bloody civil war, with the emo kids in the firing line.
On Friday afternoon at Reading, just seconds into Panic! At The Disco's opening tune, frontman Brendon Urie was hit in the face by a flying missile and knocked out cold. And this was before their cover of 'Karma Police'. Brendon woke up soon after and continued the show. Later that day he told NME: 'I'm doing all right now. I could be way worse, I could be dead. What I remember is I got hit, got knocked out, woke up and finished the set. We just got on with it. I guess we were sending a message to whoever threw the bottle: you can't stop us!'
Up at the Leeds leg of the festival that day, My Chemical Romance were owning the stage with their new Black Parade get-up, thrilling with their new songs, shocking with Gerard's new hair and keeping a lot of people waiting in the NME Signing Tent's biggest queues of the weekend. It was what you might call a triumph. Yet when they took to the stage two days later at Reading they were met with an ongoing torrent of missiles that made Panic's KOing look like a skirmish. Again it was taken in good spirit, with Gerard shrieking, 'This song is called 'Thanks for all the bottles, thanks for all the piss, thanks for all the golf balls, thanks for all the apples and thanks for all the sticky shit'.'
...anti-emo feeling has been at critical levels for a while now... and the Indie establishment isn't happy.... when NME put Fall Out Boy on our cover back in April, it provoked one of the most furious mailbags in our 54-year history...
Back at Reading Gerard Way, ever the optimist, was already describing his band's experience as 'one of the best sets I've ever had in my entire life'. Despite being primed to take over as biggest band on Earth, Way sees himself as ringleader of the outsiders and you suspect he always will. 'You take that negative energy,' he told NME, 'and you either work it out of them or they get bored of you and move on, which is what I thought happened. So it's a great thing, because negative energy is just hatred and this band has always taken negative energy and turned it into something positive. Which is why I said that thing about The Daily Mail...'
Ah yes, the good old Daily Mail. After surviving the pelting Gerard then stood up and led the crowd in a chant of 'Fuck The Daily Mail!' in response to a feature written by a journalist called Sarah Sands on August 17, warning parents of the 'dark cult' of emo... (check out The Daily Mail website www.dailymail.co.uk and search 'emo cult') ... Sands article lived on as a comedy email forward for weeks, but beneath it are some scary implications, not least that My Chemical Romance are responsible for taking demure, Aryan young virgins and turning them into wrist-slashing goth deviants.
'That was a very negative article written about the band and the band's fans and it was completely ignorant,' says Gerard Way. 'It was unfounded, there was no factual information at all. We do not promote self harm but we encourage kids to find other ways to get out their frustrations... My objective that day was to get that across, pretty much to the whole country, that that's not what we represent. We represent the exact opposite.'
Indeed, one mother was so outraged at the article that she wrote a letter to The Daily Mail on behalf of her daughter, a My Chemical Romance fan...'I have a teenage daughter who possibly would not be here today if it weren't for the love and support of one of the bands mentioned in this article - My Chemical Romance. She had suffered from depression - caused by a chemical imbalance, not music - for a long time. Being under 18, it was difficult to get treatment for her and I was watching a beautiful, intelligent person fall apart in front of me. It was totally heartbreaking and I had nowhere else to go to for help, until Gerard Way took the time and effort to talk to her, providing a meaningful role model and giving her hope. I have met this band, I have watched Gerard Way encourage anyone in their audience who feels depressed or likely to harm themselves, to seek help, to talk to someone ... Bands like this provide a forum for teenagers to talk about their feelings, and also give a sense of belonging which is so often missing in everyday life for them.'
...Some of the biggest attacks on this movement come from its own backyard. 'I've never heard any band ever call themselves 'emo',' says Mike Davies, presenter of Radio 1's The Lock Up. 'It's a derogatory term.'
Indeed, the phrase 'emotional hardcore', as it was first dubbed by the US underground hardcore punk scene in the 1980s, has since evolved, been upgraded, amended and bastardised until the word 'emo' itself has come to stand as either a lifeline for misfits everywhere or the music you hear on The OC depending on which side of the fence you sit. Mike Davies doesn't mind Fall Out Boy 'because thay write really good pop songs' and thinks MCR are 'a straight-up rock'n'roll band', but believes P!ATD 'appeal to the lowest common denominator..'. He regualrly disses them on The Lock Up....
Put all this hatred together with the genre's tendency not to fight back (because they're, you know, emo) and you've got one hell of a lot of isolated people. But the freaks are growing in number and influence....
Even scene godfather Gerard Way thinks it's time to break free of the 'emo' shackles - he denounced the genre tag in last week's NME while discussing MCR's deranged new rock opera 'The Black Parade': 'I think we're bigger than that (emo),' says Gerard, 'and I think all these bands and all or our fans...are bigger than just one subgenre that's hot for a minute.'
It's unlikely his words are going to stop the Daily Mail's witch hunt turning introverted rock kids into public enemy No.1. Or thugs in Whitechapel beating up our bands because they look different. But hopefully it'll be enough to stop the fans fighting the fans. After all, when we all signed up to rock'n'roll in the first place, was it not based on an open mind, a shared feeling of outsiderdom and a hatred of intolerance? Even if we were all cutting ourselves, would we not all bleed the same?
I though this was a really good article. I'm not ahuge fan of NME cos it's indie-biased and tends to take the piss out of rock a bit much for my liking but this was unbiased and honest and really informative.
I hope you all like it!
