I Hate Emo Music So Much I Cut Myself

Music, more than any other branch of the media, is subjective. Two people can hear the same song and get completely different messages from it. And besides the meaning of the lyrics, different sounds appeal to people. Some people may really love guitar solos in metal bands. Others love the rhythmic vocals of R&B songs. So, when talking about music, it is difficult to get a large group of people to agree on what is good and what is not. With that said, emo music is pretty much terrible.

I’ll begin with the aesthetic aspect of emo music. The songs just don’t sound good. The vocals are whiny. The Used illustrates this point exactly. Bert McCracken shows how shrill he can be in the song “All That I’ve Got” within the first 30 seconds. Besides the piercing singing, there is also the rasping screaming featured in many songs. A great example of this is in “I’m Not Okay” by My Chemical Romance. It’s featured throughout the song, but can be specifically heard around the 2:50 mark. The screams are as though the singer gave up on being harmonious and just wanted to be loud.

I mean, I kind of get it. The screams are for the parts of the songs where the singer needs to convey extra emotion. They scream for the parts where the lyrics get “deep.” Well, let me tell you about those emotional lyrics. They’re nonsense. In “Silver Bullet” by Hawthorne Heights, the lyrics say, “Got a single silver bullet/ Shot right through my heart/ To prove I can’t survive/ Without you.” I’m not saying songs about lost love are bad. Many great songs have been written on the subject, such as “Now That It’s Over” by Everclear. But it’s the way emo lyrics go about it. Much like the singing, the lyrics sound whiny. There’s no dignity in them. The words clearly say this man is going to die without this woman. His life will be over all because of this one incident. I’ve felt like this before, don’t get me wrong. But I never wrote about it and got rich. I have a bit much self-respect for that.

So emo music sounds bad and the lyrics are garbage. All that is left is the band members themselves, and they are no saving grace. I like to be diverse when speaking on subjects like this to show it isn’t just a band here or there that sucks, but when it comes to band members, there is a specific target I enjoy: Gerard Way. He is the frontman and lead vocalist for My Chemical Romance. He is the first experience I had with the emo genre and I have yet to recover. A friend of mine wanted to watch the making of th video for “I’m Not Okay” a while back, and I, being a good friend, obliged. However, as soon as I heard what the song was, I was in a constant state of agony. Yes, the song was bad, but what was worse was looking at Way. In the video he looks as though he had been sprayed in the face with mace. It isn’t mace, of course, it’s eye shadow. Bright red eye shadow. I’m not saying men can’t wear make-up. I’m saying nobody should wear make-up that makes them look that bad, though. On top of his eye shadow catastrophe, he is the whitest man on Earth with jet black hair (dyed no doubt). And, the cherry on top this fashion nightmare is the fact his hair is greasy. That’s just not okay.

Emo music sucks for more reasons than this, but these are the reasons most closely attached to the music itself. If I wanted to, I could throw in the fashion trends that have been spurred because of the genre, or I could throw in the emotional trends, both shown in this video with clarity. In the end, though, when it comes to taste in music, the music itself is what’s most important. And when it comes down to it, emo music just sucks.