The Unbearable Weight of Eyeliner

Take a hit of musical nostalgia here with the Uncapped Eyeliner playlist.

I’ve spent the last three days trying to figure out which, if any, side I would take in the ancient Emo vs Punk battle. Music Friends who care much more about this divide than I do have pressed me in the past to pick a genre: what was it going to be, side bangs or safety pins?

I’ve waded through the slush of the internet in an attempt to answer this question. I’ve braved decades worth of forum posts to understand the borderlands and skirmishes between the kingdoms of hardcore, post-punk, mall emo, math rock, and midwestern emo. I have spent an embarrassing amount of time thinking about the geometry of Pete Wentz’s bangs. I may have increased my myopia by a shade from squinting at pictures of Greg Ginn’s guitar rig to figure out what makes it sound like Black Flag is melting their amps.

The result of this research and hours of listening to the peak of mid-aughts confessional song lyrics? The uncanny realization that this weekend was the first time I had actually listened to emo. Emo (and punk proper) was everywhere and nowhere in my musical memory. You would have needed to live in a cloister to avoid hearing Fall Out Boy’s From Under the Cork Tree, but I would never qualify it as a core part of my musical taste. The opening notes of “Welcome to the Black Parade” don’t make me shiver (you know who you are, yeah, I see you in the back!). But the emotion at the heart of emo is, I think, a central part of the millennial music experience.

There was an emo wave to surf from the late 80s through 2010, overlapping with a generation’s teenage and university years. Emo is overwrought, baroque, and self-indulgent in the way that only young adulthood is. Punk, as a counterpart, is unfettered, searching, and aggressive in the same way. The binary doesn’t matter so much as the method of expression: what’s the best way to let out the untrammeled emotion of being young in a world that simultaneously demands your compliance while disrespecting your autonomy? Side bangs and safety pins are variations on aesthetic rebellion.

Emo and Punk are Too Much and Proud of It. The titles are too long. The amps are melting down. The toenails are pulled from the nailbed and everyone is screaming their hearts out. Emo and punk bands never really made it into my CD binder when I was younger, and sometimes I think that was my loss. I might have benefitted from a good bout of screaming at the time and sublimated that urge into shitty poetry and repeat listening of Death Cab for Cutie.

“Death Cab is firmly emo. You know that, right?” pointed out a music friend as I was talking about this piece.

“Death Cab is emo?”

“Death Cab is DEFINITELY emo.”

Well damn.