RTS: I Wear Black on the Outside, Or You Kids Get Offa My Emo

[jon_chaisson]

John Scalzi has a great post from a few days ago on his Whatever blog entitled Emo: Older Than You Think. Well worth checking out and SOOOOO true. Apparently sparked off by a negative reaction to harsh-but-true writing advice for teens (read: "Yes, your writing does in fact suck. But it gets better with time.") and a commenter's inane reaction that he doesn't understand and that Emo kids didn't exist back in his day (read: "You don't know what it's like!! WAAAH!").

To which he responds brilliantly:

...and I can assure you that 20+ years ago, we certainly did have Emos, i.e., sulky and morose teens scribbling bad poetry into notebooks and retreating into their music because no one understood them and so on. Our Emos listened British post-punk rather than American post-punk by dint of British post-punk hitting a couple decades earlier, but, otherwise, yeah, pretty much the same concept. We had Bauhaus, they have Fall Out Boy, and both bands just really want to go back in time to the Weimar Republic, what are you going to do.


Apparently Scalzi was spying on me back in the late 80s. ;)

Comments

[dollydelusion.livejournal.com]

Yeah only our version of "emo" didn't involve the shitty-ass music and nut crushing pants that these little wimps have. We also didn't have MySpace to connect to other like minds so we were, in fact, truly alone in the world and lucky if we could find one or two other people from our universe. These kids think they have it so friggin hard. *smacks for emos* Can't stand 'em.