Emo: A Loaded Girl Complex

Emo: A Loaded Girl Complex

A Musical Ethnography by G.Q. Greenfield

Brown University, Spring 2009

Emo is one of the most stigmatized genres and styles in recent music culture, yet it is difficult to define. Since 1984, emo has undergone an evolution from “emocore”, a subgenre of hardcore punk to the recent, emotional, power-pop rock that has owned the label since the end of the 1990s. The term “emo” evokes derision, commentary, and even violence, making the genre a complex musical youth culture that has “been the next big thing twice, the current big thing once, and so totally over millions of times,” (Greenwald, 2003).

This scene faces gender issues that have been overlooked since women have gained infamy in other areas of music. While women have come to dominate the pop and R&B charts, rock & roll (or any guitar-heavy genre) is still a territory in which the participation of women ebbs and flows (Dowd et al, 2005:14). Emo is a particularly difficult genre for women since so many songs are reactionary lyrics lashing out at or agonizing over women. Common emo content does not invite women as participants or fans, and yet the audience is dominated by women (Aslaksen, 2006). This ethnography seeks to explore gender in current emo culture in terms of content, audience, and participation in the scene. This research leads me to find that though there are stark gender biases within the scene, it may also be a gateway for women to guitar-based music and blur gender visibility in rock music.

“It Takes One to Know One”: Research Methods

For this ethnography, I limited my search to emo music from about 2000 to today (2009), which is more mainstream than earlier emo. I have spent a lot of time on the topic as a fan,

and have been able to expand my fieldwork through shows I attended and emo friends. The internet played a huge role in providing access to music, blogs, and articles. I attempted to get in touch with fans on a broader level, by posting on message boards, but had trouble getting any

feedback, other than one irksome comment. The stigma associated with the term emo makes it

difficult to research the subject, but I was able to find material that led me to interesting

conclusions about the genre and the women

associated with it.

“Emo girls don't exist, dude”: Fans

According to UrbanDictionary.com, “There's no such thing as a female emo. All emos are homosexual boys.” This disregard for emo women does not appear to affect female involvement. Female fans dominate the scene of people who simply dress and associate themselves with emo. Women have an established place in the audience at mainstream acts such as Fall Out Boy, Brand New, and Dashboard Confessional, and though it is less pronounced they are also present at more physical, “hardcore” shows of bands such as Manchester Orchestra, Taking Back Sunday, and Say Anything (Asklasken, 2006). With emo now in a mainstream stage of it’s evolution, there are distinct categories of women that attend the shows. One fan pointed out that as bands gain popularity and recognition, their fanbase expands into the tween scene (Bennett & Peterson, 2004).

Even in older settings, there seem to be distinct categories of women. As I found in my performance ethnography of a recent Brand New show, emo performances stratify women into active, non-gender conformists or passive accomplices. The active group blurs the gender line, which is easily accomplished since many male emos also consciously blur this line. They leave little discernable difference between themselves and their male counterparts since they dress similarly and fully participate in the physical aspects of performances – singing along, pumping their fists, and jostling with the rough crowd. The more passive female fans generally accompany another passive friend or significant other. Though this second category of female fan is passive, they are present, creating a more gender-balanced scene.

Brand New's Sic Transit Gloria

The audience’s gender-balance is not mirrored on the stage. Even with an enormous female fanbase, very few women musicians or singers exist in emo. The female-fronted band with the most success is Paramore who formed in 2004. Women are scarce in many rock, guitar-heavy music groups, but usually this is true of their fans as well (see: heavy metal). My fieldwork yielded few other bands with women, but emo music has the fanbase and capacity to accept women and blur the gender divide.

Paramore’s singer Hayley William’s notoriously detests being asked about her gender because as she said in one interview, “The fact that I'm a girl just doesn't really have anything to do with it” (Cleveland.com, 2008). If it is true that gender does not matter, and the fans agree, then there is tremendous opportunity for females in this genre. Perhaps if more women can gain access to the performance side of emo, there will be less gender disparity of men singing to a crowd of women. Female-fronted bands like Paramore seem to highlight this possibility.

In a highly-cited article on women and emo, Jessica Hopper declares that gender has everything to do with it. Hopper explains that because there is little female representation on stage, female emo fans are simply consumers and do not own any part of the scene. The “front row girls” display so much dedication to emo music, but she questions whether watching all-male bands will ever encourage these girls to pick up a guitar or drumsticks. She sums up her article, with a statement of solidarity, “We deserve better songs than any boy will ever write about us.”

“I Slept With Someone In Fall Out Boy And All I Got Was This Stupid Song Written About Me”: Lyrics

The most glaring suspect for the gender disparity in emo bands is the lyrical content. In Greenwald’s chapter on women and emo, Sad Girl Stories, he talks about how the messages range from anti-female and violent to sexism that views women as one-dimensional. Girls are either the object of desire, forcing boys to pine and feel pathetic; or they play the role of emotionless heartbreaker. Regardless of the woman’s role, the boys wear their love, devotion, and pain on their sleeve as victims (Greenwald, 2003). The lack of female perspective in the emo canon allows few avenues for female response. There is little lyrical evidence that women also have a range of emotions that they wish to express. They are instead portrayed as emotionless shrews while the boys are full to the brim with emotional angst, and without female lyricists, there is no way for them to respond.

Evidence can be found in an analysis of several bands’ lyrics demonstrating that all-male bands often sing about situations that victimize them, and most often the culprit is a woman. For instance, Brand New’s Magazines is about a boy who agonizes over a woman from a magazine even though he can never have her. Fall Out Boy's Sugar, We're Going Down is more active in that he has dominated the woman by having sex with her and reducing her to "a line in a song." Yet he is the victim since he became "just a notch in your bedpost" who still wishes to "be the friction in your jeans."

Fall Out Boy's Sugar We're Going Down:

If there were more women writing lyrics in emo culture, how would they respond? Paramore serves as the best example to date.

Misery Business offers the best comparison to themes Greenwald discusses. The song is similar to Brand New’s Seventy Times 7 in which Jesse Lacey sings about when a friend stole his significant other. There is not much action to the plot in the song. Instead, he hopes the friend crashes his car on the way home and thinks of him as his "head goes through the windshield." The instantaneous emotions that inspire the song seem to support the interviewee’s comment about how male lyrics are about personal situations and reactions.

Paramore's Misery Business:

The interviewee’s comments seem valid upon brief analysis. Rather than always introverted and thoughtful, Paramore's lyrics simply appear varied. For example, Emergency is about bad relationships and the death of love, but the song is external to the singer: it's about her parents' divorce. This type of soul search can be found in male emo bands, but it is much more about their reaction to a situation and their victimization. I Caught Myself is about Hayley Williams’ inner struggle, as well as the issue of abstinence.

Paramore's I Caught Myself:

“Sing Us a Song, and We’ll Sing it Back to You”: Conclusion

The advent of Riot Grrrl in the 1990s serves as a past example of women seizing ownership of a scene they had already been involved with (Bennett & Peterson, 2004). Emo could possibly serve the larger purpose of removing gender barriers in male-dominated popular music. Much of the culture is dominated by women already, many of whom already break the mold of the bedroom culture (Bennett & Peterson, 2004). For men, emo music is already a venue for male artists to break from the hegemonic norm of being “strong and emotionless” (bittersweetsym-phonies.blogspot.com, 2007). If men use emo culture and music to break out of male stereotypes, women too could use this opportunity to break the stereotype of non-involvement in guitar-heavy music. It is significant that women are so active in the fanbase, but if women were to also become active participants on the performance side then emo could become a genre in which gender plays less of a role than is so prevalent in other music scenes.

Considering the amount of gendered content in emo’s lyrics, it is important that women have the opportunity to respond rather than being faceless characters in a boy’s song. It is also important for female fans to feel represented by the emo artists they support. But if artists like Hayley Williams do not want to be perceived as female and male artists strive to demonstrate that men have feelings too, then a more important goal for emo would be to continue to blur gender lines until they are no longer important, allowing more females to have a voice and representation in rock and guitar-driven music.

Word Count: 1627

“Our Lawyer Made Us Change The Name Of This Song So We Wouldn't Get Sued”: Work Cited

Amanda. March 29, 2007. “Analyzing Gender in Emo Music.” On emerging music (?) of the 21^st century.

Aslaksen, Matthew J. 2006. “Middle Class Music in Suburban Nowhere Land: Emo and the Performance of Masculinity.” Graduate College of Bowling Green State University.

Bennett, Andy and Richard A. Peterson, eds. 2004. Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

Cohen, Sara. 1993. “Men Making a Scene: Rock Music and the Production of Gender.” In Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, ed. Sheila Whiteley. London: Routledge. Pp. 17-36.

Dowd, Timothy J., Kathleen Liddle, and Maureen Blyler. 2005. “Charting Gender: The

Success of Female Acts in the U.S. Mainstream Recording Market, 1940–1990.” In Transformation in Cultural Industries, Vol. 23, pp. 83-126.

Greenwald, Andy. 2003. Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Hopper, Jessica. 2003. “Emo: Where the Girls Aren’t.” On PunkPlanet.com. Pp. 56.

“Paramore Band Info.” Paramore.net

Robertshaw, Steven. May 27, 2008. “Paramore: Born for This.” On AltPress.com.

Soeder, John. August 21, 2008. “Paramore’s Hayley Williams is Just One of the Guys.” On Cleveland.com.

Walser, Robert. 1993. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.

All original photography.