Thursday, July 14, 2011

teenage angst has paid off well...

So in walking past a major concert venue, I thought about the last ten years, and how each decade tends to have its defining genres and cultural benchmarks. Maybe it's too early to tell my wiser companion says, but upon consulting the Dictionary of Imaginary Places, as we are well-versed in the Bookly Arts, it's probably that whole emo thing when everyone my age and younger decided to stop listening to Limp Bizkit and move on to bands like one acquaintance of mine referred to as "As I Lay Dying in a Poisoned Well on Thursday's Darkest Hour."

After so many hardcore shows full of mediocre bands whose names and sounds blended together, the way that Myspace seemed to highlight just another clique of people obsessed with image and status with more exhibitionistic ways to express it, and I found it amusing to see it mutate into its own thing, hearing parents talk about how their kid is hanging out with the "emos" and such. What started out as something with some good originators (hello Rites of Spring and Sunny Day Real Estate!) ended up more or less being the love child of goth angst and hair metal excess of my generation. It was hard to tell the scene kids apart from Nikki Sixx after awhile.

I don't know if this is all as big as it once was, because my sister and her friends like all that kind of boring indie stuff and disdain the "scene kids" with their eyeliner and crazy hair. I see a lot of t-shirts of bands that I pre-judge as crappy and generic based on the neon dayglo designs (superficial I know, but Randal assures me that http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifthese groups suck though he's more curmudgeonly than me).

Anyways, we found this in the dictionary of imaginary places, and the mentions of big hair and tattoos made me laugh. Click through, kids.



An island of Emo, where the savage natives have big hair that requires a lot of maintenance, tattoo each other until they're thirty, and worship a giant eel. Heck yeah. Teenage angst has paid off well, kids. Now I'm not-so-bored, but definitely getting old.

2 comments:

Randal Graves said...

So, wiser is code for old, huh. I'm on to you.

What's truly frightening is that Morbid Angel's David Vincent looks like Nikki Sixx these days, which might explain things.

Can that super emo-screamo-metal-hard-psycho-core band open for Storm of the Yeti while Headless Pigeon throws tomatoes at them?

I hope the residents of Emo don't resort to Oxycontin theft.

that girl said...

You might assume that, given my relative youth and snark, but notice I don't quote Certain Boomers as sources of wisdom. And you know how to spell. Age isn't always a correlative.

Your suggestion sounds like a lineup at Peabody's minus any Mushroomheads or insane clowns but I'd do it just to watch the chaos ensue.

Who needs presecription drugs when one can worship eels and engage in Surf Gymkata?