"The Lamentation of a True Emo Kid" by Shane Ryan
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shane Ryan is an art student from Boston, Massachusetts with a love for both visual and verbal languages. He spends his time either writing or pursuing realism with a ballpoint pen.
A shame what emo has become. I mourn the days when poseurs had yet to flood the scene, before sell-outs wrested the label from the paragons of a deep, political despair whose raw sound had achieved such levels of sophistication as to rival the sublimity of any one of Stravinsky’s symphonies. Emo TikTok is an abomination. I can’t step foot outside my door without some idiot tween telling me I look like Johnnie Guilbert. I respect Johnnie Guilbert because he has been subjected to torments similar to mine. His videos regarding such matters have brought tears to my eyes. I also think he’s cute. But he belongs to a collective that is unaware that some instances of influence are perversions, that language is sacred. I am not a prescriptivist, but I believe distinctions must be drawn, even if describing the commodified angst of the 2000s as fake emo suggests that one can fake being emo in the first place, that one can simply RAWR XD into the room and expect to achieve the status of emo, fake or not. These days, the emo question is one of nominality, not one answered by a DIY catharsis carried out in the basements of the golden age. These days, the answer to the emo question is a tautology: emo is emo because it’s emo. My beautiful emo fringe once suggested a choice to absent myself from the world of the normies, but now my appearance is inseparable from the utter brainrot of our generation. I wore eyeliner and skinny jeans every day of high school despite the taunts of my Under Armour-clad tormentors, and still I am subjected to such mockery. It is always the broccoli-cut, chronically-online teenager who passes me on the street and asks for a “wrist check” or sings “Fall for You” by Secondhand Serenade with the grating affectation of some accursed emo stereotype. My father burned all seven volumes of my diary, over 4,000 pages, because I wore eyeliner to the family barbecue last July 4th when I was told not to. I was the emo Proust, but now I am but an emo of letters with no letters to show for. The love of my life stole away with her lax-playing Romeo to the big city, leaving me in my small town in Ohio with nothing to do but lie in the grass under the pylons listening to Orchid and Rites of Spring and walk the train tracks, contemplating whether to rest thwartwise and wait for my demise. I am not saying such tribulations are prerequisites to being emo, but one’s dress is superficial, and one’s music taste is irrelevant, even if one listens to the greats of the nineties as I do. Some argue that scene is a kind of manic offshoot of emo, but I posit that scene describes the axis of each and every pretender. The mall and MySpace homogenized emos, and emo TikTok is the logical extreme of that process. Those forums have ensured that one can be different by looking just like one’s peers, by listening to mallcore and pop punk and other genres of the plebeian persuasion. What were once individuals defined by an emo will to power were replaced by scenesters who patronize Hot Topic and drink Monster and flout the underground ethic of emo. Hot Topic is shorthand for the death of the emo apparatchik. The Monster sigil is the deadly clawmark of a capitalist monster. I read Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger at the dewy age of three. I pierced my lips with a rusty safety pin because it was the only instrument I could find and my parents forbade me from getting snakebites. Now my purulent mouth speaks of the plight of the true emo. I belong to the highest denomination of emo. You will never convince me otherwise.