rites of spring - end on end

Looking back on this post, I was somewhat considered with the flippant way I dismissed Rites of Spring's role in the history of emo.  They're considered the fathers of "emocore," but every time I listen to End on End, I'm struck by how similar they sound to every other decidedly non-emo mid-80's post-hardcore band I know.  Admittedly, however, it had been over a year since I last gave Rites of Spring a listen--certainly enough time for a change of heart--so I decided to revisit them and see if my opinion of these forefathers was still the same.

In short: it is.

Rites of Spring represented what amounts to a rather minor stylistic shift from hardcore punk, largely just melodic chords changes and personal lyrics.  A handful of distracters labeled their sound "emocore," and it was all downhill from there.

In hindsight, this makes absolutely no sense.  Guy Picciotto is no Dan Hoerner--his lyrics may pack an emotional punch, but his delivery here really isn't any different from his future Fugazi performances.  As for the musical changes, I can't help but personally find them a welcome, needed development of the mechanized nature of DC hardcore.  So too did Ian Mackaye himself, leading the vaunted Minor Threat frontman to from a band in the same vein, Embrace.

As dubious as its beginnings were, "emocore" eventually did succeed in becoming a true genre of its own--it simply happened eight years after Rites of Spring broke up.  These guys simply tweaked hardcore at a time when the DC scene was becoming increasingly stale and repetitive, and in response, the scene slandered them, tainting them perhaps forever as the founders of a weak, laughable derivative sound, instead of recognizing them as one of the better bands to ever come out of DC.

When we finally re-write the rock 'n roll history books, the emo chapter is gonna start with Sunny Day Real Estate.  Let Rites of Spring stay in the Dischord annals where they belong.

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.