Hello!
That WIKI article misses the point vastly to include a lot of muso journo nonesense.
This is my music, when you break it all down, this was my first love.
Emo is a subgenre of punk, more specifically hardcore punk, and originates from Washington DC. A lot of things that are described as Emo are not Emo, much like a lot of genres of music, although the term has been dragged through the shit really badly, although these days more and more people ACTUALLY know what Emo means.
In the mid 1980s, Hardcore Punk had kinda become a joke of itself, lots of very macho bands, very comic strip kinda bands, and lots of guys playing really bad metal. Emo is considered to be the main reaction to that (pre- American Indie Rock/Lofi, which is also very much born from the ashes of Hardcore Punk).
The first wave of Emo is very Hardcore Punk oriented, but slower and with more chord changes, and quite openly blunt lyrics, often about self loathing/regret/social political issues of the time. A lot of proper Emo bands are politically motivated, the imagery used in classic Emo bands varies between political and personal in a very free form way, in a way this is a big part of it's popularity and it's downfall.
Emo was very popular in the mid 90s, and musically a lot more diverse than in the 1980s, popular indie rock/math rock bands, most predominantly Slint, had a big impact on the sound, allowing for essentially "non hardcore sounding hardcore bands".
Although the music differs from the 80s HC sound, a lot of the early 90s hardcore sounds have crossed over with Emo, much as small musical sounds SHARE a scene, so to speak, there was a big slowed down chuggy metal thing going on with Straight Edge style bands at the time (See Unbroken) and this crossed over with Emo bands such as Still Life.
In the mid 1990s (considered to be the glory years of the genres) there was a lot of different sounds about, you could hear super fast scratchy spazzed out stuff like Mohinder, Antioch Arrow and other bands from San Diego, as well as the super dynamic slow "LOUD soft LOUD soft" stuff such as Indian Summer, Don Martin 3, Moonraker etc. All the same style, much like when Skreamizm 1 and Burial's s/t came out, no one argued that they wern't both Dubstep!
In the late 1990s it all kinda falls apart a bit, a lot of the slow bands go super super slow and broken (best record of this era being the I Hate Myself / Twelve Hour Turn split LP) and the introduction of the Screamo sound, which is essentially a very OTT and quite poppy version of the 1990s emo sound, although some of the early Screamo stuff is fucking great and really really raw, see early Orchid or Jeromes Dream.
Screamo kinda took over in the early 2000s, and although there were still "real" emo bands around, like Yaphet Kotto, and then later (and still going) Sinaloa, the sound has kinda tapered off a lot.
THIS SAID, there are two Emo sounds around at the moment, the revival (copying) of the more upbeat Mid West style emo ala Cap'n Jazz, Promise Ring et al, albeit it IMHO a lot of these bands really miss the point. And a very small but gaining speed mixture of more rocking American post punk ala Mission of Burma/Minutemen and 80s and 90s Emo, the best examples of this would be the bands Tubers (ex Twelve Hour Turn) and perhaps Sinaloa, who have a Gang of 4/Wire type vibe to them. Massive pat on my own back here, but my band What Price, Wonderland? have also been accused of being one of the more "postpunkmo" bands, I dunno, but I do love both styles A LOT!
NEXT POST WILL BE VIDEOS WITH AUDIO FOR YALL!
