jimmy eat world - clarity

"Emo" occupies a strange, twisted place in my heart.

I grew up hearing the word emo both as a term of derision and a legitimate descriptor of a musical sub-genre.  Neither meaning was concrete by any means, and they often seemed to vary between social groups, or even individual people.  Eventually, emo simply devolved into a catch-all term to mean whatever you wanted it to, positive or negative--not unlike what "indie" would soon become.

As I got older and started to branch out musically, however, I slowly began associating emo solely with "emocore," a derivative brand of hardcore punk that favored sincerity and revealing, personal lyrics over political leanings or simple raw aggression.

At its roots, emocore really didn't differ all that much from hardcore.  To me, Rites of Spring never really sounded all that different from any other Dischord band.  The genre arguably only began to take shape when bands took the style in a more pop-oriented direction, breaking most directly with Sunny Day Real Estate.  Certainly for me, emo only became a tangible force upon hearing Diary and LP2.

I keep waiting to grow out of this music.  I've definitely reached a point where my heart is no longer worn so openly on my sleeve, and in that sense it has grown harder and harder to relate to bands like Sunny Day Real Estate or Mineral or Cap'n Jazz or their endless streams of imitators.  Yet I keep finding myself listening to them, perhaps not with the same youthful fervor, but nonetheless with at a level of interest that transcends simple nostalgia.

I guess the simple answer is that this is music for unhappy people, and I am an unhappy person.  But I no longer have that angst inside me, the kind of yelping passion and feeling of being wronged or what have you that drove my initial connection to emo. The flames have dulled to a few burning embers, the almost violent desire for fulfillment reduced to an uneasy acceptance of my life situation.  I suppose you could call it maturity.

Yet here I am, listening to Clarity for the umpteenth time, an album dated to the point that the very people making it aged out of the genre almost a decade ago.  Is it an amazing listen?  Not particularly.  The impassioned delivery is certainly compelling, and "A Sunday" has always been one of my favorite songs, but much of it settles into the kind of pleasant, vaguely alternative lull that Jimmy Eat World has based their career on.

So why am I listening to it?  Am I trying to reclaim those high school emotions?  Am I trying to relight the embers?  Or am I just too tied down to the music to let it go?

Perhaps I'm just overthinking it all.  As "Goodbye Sky Harbor" spirals on into its ninth minute, I'm not finding myself thinking back to high school or college or lost loves, or really anything at all.  It's pleasant music that resonates somewhere within me as an honest emotional release.  Which is all "emo" should really be in the first place.