Deja Entendu: In Defense of Emo

originally published january 18th, 2019

Emo was an epochal yet fleeting moment in the meta-consciousness of American suburbia in the early 2000s. It meant the world to a small, strange group of (mostly male) adolescents from 1999-2005. Most of us emo kids moved on and look back on the music with a combination of embarrassment and nostalgia. From the perspective of the wider public, the music seems like a strange sonic speed bump that briefly animated popular music only to be quickly moved past. The truth is that emo developed over decades, rooted in the '80s D.C. hardcore punk scene, and gradually grew in popularity to became one of the most visible music styles of the early 2000s. Propelled in large part by Jimmy Eat World's Bleed American and their hit "The Middle," emo got so big that we were singing that damn song in middle school choir. It meant something, something worth unpacking.

First off, I think to write off emo would be a profound mistake.

The hard part for adults is to really remember what it was like to be 13. Bo Burnham's excellent film Eight Grade has shown that this time in one's life is immensely informative. Developmentally, kids that age will always be hormonal Molotov cocktails composed of bruised egos, stained bed-sheets, and pent up angst. Good emo put a real emphasis on balancing the saccharine desire for love and belonging with the brutality only kids are capable of. It was a genre that displayed amazing range, even within the same band or song. Emo could be breathy whispers over acoustic guitar (Dashboard's "Carry this Picture"), relentless heavy metal kick drum underneath blood curdling screams (Senses Fail "Bite to Break Skin"), or churning guitar riffs blending with choruses so anthemic they were destined to be heard echoing through the architecture of massive soccer stadiums (Jimmy Eat World's "Bleed American" and Foo Fighter's "Everlong"). So Emo was stripped-down, introspective acoustic guitar, heavy metal thrashing, raucous punk rock riffs, and balls to the wall arena rock, all serving as a sonic representation of the emotional battlefield that is adolescence.

Perhaps one reason emo seems so antiquated from contemporary perspectives is that it is built on the radical premise of giving a shit. As Against Me said in "I was a Teenage Anarchist:" "Do you remember, When you were young and you wanted to set the world on fire?" Getting back into emo is remembering a time when being worn out and tired were not the dominant messages of popular music. The aloofness and emotional resignation of performers like Post Malone, mumble rappers, or Kurt Vile really didn't fit the zeitgeist of the early aughts. I think if one is looking to rediscover the raw emotional intensity of youth, few genres better encapsulate that feeling than emo. Because emo is a genre primarily about expressing the cognitive dissonance between one's caring too much and the world seemingly not caring at all, it has a lot to say what has been called the "Age of Loneliness," even if it comes off a little too sincere from the perspective of today's detached attitudes.

Even more so, emo can tell us a lot about where we came from as well as where we are going. Emo did more than produce some of the best albums of its era, many that stand the test of time. It also must be seen as a historical product, one produced by environmental substrates, namely suburbia. The reality is that the genre must be seen as a cry for help from the products of boomer suburban parenting - a canary in the coal mine for the toxicity that defines the way Americans not only live but raise their kids. Perhaps this is an overly conspiratorial take on a music genre. Perhaps, but from my perspective as both participant and historian, emo is a sonic representation of youth trauma we all tried to either channel, exorcise, or suppress. So in a lot of ways, emo is deeply rooted, a multi-generational product. Emo served as a conduit for youth expression on the subterranean historical forces that made its artists and fans. Regardless of your views on emo, or your political orientation, I think all of us have become deeply concerned over the degeneration of family life, parenting, and youth that has objectively occurred over the last 50 years. Conservatives like Ben Shapiro will blame it on the decline of family values, omitting the structural forces that contribute to such a decline. As a survivor of a dysfunctional, neglectful household, as a participant in the emo music bloom of the early 2000s, and as a historian, I argue vehemently that emo must be seen as the result of the dream of the 'Affluent Society' running headlong into the reality of millennial adolescence in the neoliberal age.

Now not all of the boomer conditioning we received as kids was bad. It's far more complicated, and historically entangled. The truth is that the messaging ("you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up") could be interpreted as positive by itself but when you weight it against the reality that youth faced, the cognitive dissonance could drive you nuts. And it did. The cacophony of emo served as a less than subtle way of proclaiming that something was not quite right about the way our parents prepared us for the world we would inherit.

I really don't see the message as fundamentally different from the one proclaimed by hippies or punks; in fact, it should be interpreted as the next step in rock 'n' roll discourse. Rock, distilled to its core, is the idea that shit is totally fucked but that YES WE CAN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. As a sonic discourse, it has always been deeply critical of the decadence and indifference inherent to the music industry and American popular music. Pete Townshend summed up the hedonism of the Woodstock Generation in "Baba O'Reilly: "...And don't look past my shoulder, The exodus is here, The happy ones are near, Let's get together, before we get much older...Teenage wasteland, It's only teenage wasteland...They're[We're] all wasted." The greatest songs of the Sixties were those that juxtaposed the Age of Great Dreams with the harsh reality of seemingly endless war, rioting, and real limits of the postwar economic prosperity gospel. Generation X'ers, the first to fully understand the American Dream to be a cruel joke, carrying the message into the neoliberal dark ages. Hardcore supergroup OFF! said it best in their original track, "What's Next?" for Grand Theft Auto V: " What now? What's next? Who's gonna save your world? Plan B doesn't exist!" So, amidst a backdrop of endless suburban malaise, economic anxiety, and post-9/11 jingoism, the only response to my dad's incongruous message of "you can be anything you want to be!" that made any sense to me was that of the blood curdling emo scream. While there was a backdrop of political protest to the hippie and punk cultural rebellions, emo devolved into not much more than a (historically apropos) emotional whimper.

With this sort of context, I think more people can appreciate, if not enjoy, what I believe to be an excellent gateway album to emo, Brand New's Deja Entendu. This sophomore LP showcases a band in transition. While still firmly in the emo genre, the album was the first step in Brand New gradually moving towards the experimental indie sound that can be heard on their later albums. I think for this reason, Deja is an excellent introduction to the emo genre for casual listeners not quite ready to dive into something like Taking Back Sunday or the Get Up Kids. With elements of ambient, noise, and post-rock, most people can find something to enjoy on Deja.

The albums overall message becomes quite apparent upon first glance at the album cover (a faceless singular astronaut suspended in a maroon-colored vacuum just above deceptively placid waters). The stripped down album artwork for the demo versions of Deja describe this message of alienation in even starker terms:

The album begins with a sound reminiscent of the calming ambient post-rock of Explosions in the Sky. Those seemingly placid waters are betrayed by the ominous lyrics breathed by frontman Jesse Lacey, who at first whispers (then repeats in fuller yet still distant vocals): "I'm sinking like a stone in the sea, I'm burning like a bridge for your body." Named after french actress Audrey Tantou, the image evokes the unrivaled beauty of one's first love, who we all know in hindsight ripped out our heart like Mola Ram from Temple of Doom. Brand New, like an undertow, has already sucked you under.

The next song, "Sic Transit Gloria...Glory Fades" reads like one of those "DANGER! HIGH VOLTAGE" signs outside a power plant. Beginning with a bouncy bass riff and Lacey's characteristic hushed vocals, one can sense the impending doom as the song's tension and volume rise. The juxtaposition of soft/loud dynamics, one of the staples of the emo genre, are used to perfection on this song. The song speaks to the death of innocence that happens in one's first sexual relationships. Jumping disastrously into sex, consensual or not, many of us can remember whispering alongside Lacey, "This. Is. So. Messed up."

The album continues to develop portentously, building and dissipating its tension in "I Will Play My Game Beneath the Spin Light" before descending into the genuine maliciousness of "Okay I Believe You, but My Tommy Gun Don't." If you ever felt like you were dating some incarnation of Satan, the tone of this song will appeal directly to you. The song is particularly engaging because Lacey seems to alternate between victim and villain, something young people learn to do quite quickly. In relationships at that age you will tear, and be torn, apart. The strumming of the guitar and the bouncing of the bass line provide a backdrop for lyrics that make this song "Sympathy for the Devil" for emo kids:

This is the grace only we can bestow This is the price you pay for loss of control This is the break in the bend This is the closest of calls This is the reason you're alone This is the rise and the fall!

Lacey is a man possessed on the absolutely sinister "Okay I Believe You, But My Tommy Gun Don't"

Next is "The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows," a song that has been on more mixtapes and mix CDs than I can even remember. The song was an anthem for my storied history of shipwrecked relationships and emotional false starts. It begins with a guitar riff that echoes across the emotional chasms of my mind to this day. The lyrics speak to secrets kept between lovers and the strange, morally gray things that love can make you do. Lines like "And though our kids are blessed, Their parents let them shoulder all the blame" speak to the ways in which kids are fucked up long before their first relationship. Along with its follow-up, "The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot," Brand New cogently articulates the complex emotional currents that run underneath ones teenage years. Those currents still animate our adulthood but they resonate less and less strongly as time progresses onward. These songs really speak to the core of what it means to be young, to the limited agency that young people have. Brand New speaks to the real limits we face in carrying out the dreams we were instilled with from a young age by our upbringings and the media we consume. The pairing of these two painfully sincere songs lays bare our pock-marked souls for the brutal examination that comes on those lonely sleepless nights we all remember.

With "Jaws Theme Swimming" and "Me vs Maradona vs Elvis" Brand New continues to explore the fears that define our adolescent years. These two, I would argue, are the best songs from the album. They balance raw emotional introspection with a callous, detached attitude that is a big contrast from the previous songs. I came to know intimately that love was not dissimilar to war, that it was defined by "Who will cast the first stone," by "desperate desires, unadmirable plans...and malicious intent." I, like many kids, left my teenage years extremely jaundiced from disastrous relationships. We all knew intimately what Lacey meant on "Jaws Theme Swimming" when he sang:

And we learn (As we age) We've learned nothing

And my body still aches And you take ('Cause they give) Though I love you and my body it leaks like a sieve.

Lines like these served as representations of our romantic relationships but, upon reflection, I've learned they fit our fucked up family dynamics even more. Every year my family Christmases get sadder and angrier. We never learn from each other's hurt. We continue stabbing, even as we pull daggers out of our own backs. The disasters that were our romantic relationships had deeper roots than us emo kids really realized at the time. The pathologies were ancestral. Brand New articulated with clarity the sense of futility in trying to transcend them on Deja Entendu. Something was quite familiar about the way our relationships failed. Even though these relationships were seemingly new, their dynamics played out similarly to ones in our family history. Much like the waters underneath that astronaut, things ran deeper than previously thought. Who knew what arcane horrors lay underneath the surface?

The album finishes with "Play Crack the Sky," an appropriately slow song that lets us continue to grapple with our malaise and our melancholia. Written about the shipwreck of a party boat in 1951 where 45 people died within a mile of a lighthouse, Brand New speaks to the greatest fears in all of us. With references to other nautical disasters like the SS Dakota, the song articulates that "This story's old but it goes on and on." I saw this song (and the whole album) as an expression of how our anguish is NOT isolated. The album is filled with obscure references to film, other music, and various historical events. Despite emo's reputation as being self-involved and apolitical, I could never shake the feeling that something deeper was going on in those years. Upon later reflection, I think we are all learning that trauma we experienced in childhood continues to have ramifications in later years. Music, similarly, is a discourse that builds off the failures and near misses of its predecessors. The profound sense of loss that has come with the failure of rock and punk to create a more ethical world for its sonic children is something I see vividly in the emo genre. I think the expressions of futility that define emo should be seen as both historical and political. And, from a personal side, I don't think we need to be embarrassed by this shit. And it is perhaps better not to be because we carry it with us, like some pathogen or toxicity we could never fully shake off.