First Judas Priest, then video games, now ... emo?

You might as well blame music

I first heard about this from Steve Seel on the Current, and you can go ahead and file it under ridonkulous. Ah well, emo was always kind of a bullshit name anyways, right? I mean, I'm pretty sure what's generally considered the first emo band, Rites of Spring from D.C., predates the Internet actually, and I always think of the good "emo" stuff as being from the late '90s, i.e. Jets to Brazil, The Promise Ring, etc.

The term "emo" has obviously taken on a different connotation nowadays. For instance, a whole lot of shirts over at Threadless are what I would now call "emo." This one, say. And I used to get a lot of CDs that were covered in blackface fonts and had a lot of black and a lot of red and maybe some silver hits, and these were often considered "emo." When exactly did emo go from being cute little Davey von Bohlen and the boys in The Promise Ring to being My Chemical Romance? It's weird, because stuff like The Get Up kids and Promise Ring always seemed to have the straightforwardness of punk, but stripped of all desire to change the world, acknowledging that it was hard enough just to change ourselves. Somehow this got all bound up a kind of dark, black, gothic thing, somewhere between Thursday and Taking Back Sunday. Ha. That's a days of the week joke.

Anywho, it hardly needs to be said that Salt Lake City is off its rocker. Spurs in 5, I say.