Things are going well for California emo-rockers Say Anything. They’ve signed to a major label; their lead singer, whose bipolar disorder had previously forced them to cancel more than a few shows, seems to have stabilized; and their popularity is on the rise. Fuelled by this burst of good fortune, they’ve decided to use their new record to take on a gargantuan task — the album is called In Defense of the Genre and that’s exactly what the band is attempting.
“When [front man] Max [Bemis] came in with the concept for the new album, he pitched it to the band as lyrics he was writing to defend our genre and everything we do in our lifestyle being an emo-rock band,” explains lead guitarist Jake Turner. “We’re trying to establish the fact that this is real, and we do have real problems. On top of that, we feel like it speaks for the entire community — we had something like 23 people from the scene sing on the record, and everyone put a part into this record saying we’re part of the scene. We’re all friends, we all support each other, we all believe in the genre and we all feel it’s something that needs to be put together.”
Every generation has its musical whipping boy, a genre that, in spite of its proponents’ best efforts, just can’t be taken seriously. Unquestionably, the modern-day community that’s begrudgingly accepted the mantle of marginalization is the emo scene, an outgrowth of a small cluster of mid-’80s bands that labelled themselves “emotional hardcore” punks. Like so many other genres — “indie” being another fine example — emo has grown to be defined as much by the community that supports it as it is by any specific musical features, though most bands in the genre tend to draw more influence from pop-punk than those early hardcore bands. That community has been subject to constant potshots from music journalists.
“People suggest that every one of us looks exactly the same, and every one of us does the exact same thing every day, and every one of us is the same in relationships and the same in what we listen to and what we write,” says Turner. “People say emo is a generic type of music. They write it off as something less than genuine and say it’s just not all-the-way ‘real music’ — they just think it’s this amateur pussy music written by people who don’t know how to express their emotions.”
That said, emo-mongers don’t have a hard time finding vindication outside the music press — the genre continues to be tremendously successful. While the rest of the music industry grapples with waning sales figures and struggles to find a foothold in their losing battle against online file sharing, emo bands like Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco and My Chemical Romance are moving huge numbers of records and selling out tours in otherwise fruitless markets. These musicians are doing a hell of a lot of business, but given the fact that they tend to rely disproportionately on the notoriously fickle teen demographic, is it likely that the scene will be around much longer?
“I think the genre is growing, and in the long run I think it’ll get bigger and bigger,” says Turner. “Whether or not it’ll still be called emo I don’t know. Things change every day. For example, the first single from our new album is a very dancey kind of song, which is unusual for us, having that extreme kind of electronics on our records. There are a couple other songs on the record that have a jam-band feel, and there are some songs that we think of as Johnny Cash-sounding songs. We just went out and tried to do as many different kinds of songs as we could for the album.”
Indeed, the sprawling Defense puts its 27 tracks to good use, pilfering liberally from musical styles as diverse as grunge rock and euro-dance and applying an unmistakably emo twist to every one: strained vocals and melodramatic lyrics abound. It may not win over the anti-emo contingent, but the scope and ambition still serve as an undeniable defense of a much-maligned genre.
