Running Down... in Circles.

At some point during my junior year in college, I made the decision to NOT go home for the summer and, instead, get an early jump on moving in with some friends in a house off campus. Whether it was a something of a lark, some way of exerting my independence from my family and old friends, or some combination of both, I cannot remember, but I count the summer of '98 as one of the best of my life. I am still not quite sure why my mother agreed to let me do this, but, as I recall, she had little issue ponying up the paltry $273 per month for May, June, July, and August provided that I cover all of my other expenses. In what, in hindsight, was a surprisingly responsible move for 21-year-old me, I got two, count 'em - TWO jobs: one working at "media center" (read: CD, LP, and VHS library) - which was really just my NOT taking the summer off from my regular work-study gig - and one at a local Ice Cream Shoppe/Cafe called Halo Pub.

I had frequented this place since my freshman year and there seemed to be a revolving cast of students from my school behind the counter, so securing employment was quite simple. As most of the other college-types were home for the summer, thus necessitating the establishment's hiring of several local high school and/or community college/live-at-home kids, I was one of the oldest people on staff, so I progressed fairly quickly from lowly ice cream scooper to barrista (making coffee and espresso beverages) to shift supervisor. I was pretty proud, to tell you the truth; but my rising up the in-no-way-corporate (this joint was family owned and operated) ladder was really only a nice perk. The real fun at Halo came from the people I worked with.

Be it this girl Nicola who I took out on one date, my college friend Constance (who got me the gig), another girl who's name I can't remember but about whom I wrote a really great but as-of-yet-unfinished tune, or our hippy manager (and the big boss's son-in-law) Tom, there was always an interesting cast of characters that took an otherwise thankless and mundane job and made it fun. The ones that had the biggest impression on me were the North Brunswick emo kids: Mark and Robyn. Now I know what you're thinking: "EMO?!?!... yuck! Isn't that the adjective used to describe 13 year olds who wear their hair in their face a pretend that their rather pleasant suburban existences are far more dramatically terrible than they actually are to the point where they cut themselves?! Isn't emo some shitty music with screaming and/or whiny vocals about melodramatic teenage bullshit with vague references to the gothic or gorey all set over annoying clichéd punk guitar playing?!" The answer to these questions is a bit complicated, but that's why we're here.

To be fair: the only reasons I remember Robyn Tesauro is 'cos I have for years been trying to write a song in which I rhyme her last name with the word "bureau", she was cute, and was friends with Mark - and he's the important one here. I wish to god I could remember Mark's last name, but it completely escapes me at the moment. He was a skinny kid from North Brunswick who shaved his head and looked like a skater and seemed to be really hip to what was going on in the world of below-the-radar punk music. I was pretty hip to all sortsa other genres at the time, and since we seemed to dig talking music with one another, we agreed to make each other mix tapes. I spent some serious time on his, making sure to include some Phish, some Moondog, some Stravinsky, some Tom Waits, some Monk, and (I am guessing) some Barenaked Ladies and Ben Folds Five, but I really don't remember if he liked it at all. Again: not important. What is important is how lifechangeingly great the tape he made me was.

He said the the tape was made up of songs by all of his favourite punk and "emo" bands - a term he defined for me as "short for emotional punk". Boasting early tunes by soon-to-be-famous bands like Blink 182 and Jimmy Eat World along with seminal proto-emo artists like Sunny Day Real Estate and masters of texture The Jazz June, this tape instantly changed my life and remains one of my favourite compilations ever. (I still have it!) Knee deep in the world of classical music and very arty and/or bubbly pop, this tape full of angry and emotional young men and women playing music that combined the energy and drive of punk with the guitar orchestration skills and attention to texture that really got my brain working, I was in serious need of a reminder as to what first excited me about music. This cassette, called "Chuck's Oh So Political Tape #1", was just what the doctor ordered. It not only forced me to immediately rejigger my values and tastes, but also changed the way I approached contemporary music. I thought Emo was just about the coolest thing in the world.
The knowledge I gained from that tape, in concert with the fact that many of the bands whose music was included were still "underground" also gave me a certain amount of caché when it came to the occasional cultural pissing contest I would often engage in. A few years later, when I started a band that was made up of me and three professional music critics who were always three steps ahead of me in terms of new tunage, my knowledge of emo, which was not even a word in the general public's conciousness yet, allowed me to tread water in the inevitable "what's next" conversations we always seemed to get into. As it was indubitably a young people's music, it also made me seem just a little hipper to my first group of middle schooler students when I taught right out of college. So not only was this tape awesome, but it was helpful too!
Over the course of the last few years, "emo" became a dirty word. Riddled with my aforementioned assumptions about your reaction to the word, it hardly carries any of the weight it did ten years ago. It's become a name brand of sorts - and one that seemingly no one wants to wear. BUT WAIT!! What is that I see?! Someone looking to remedy and explain this in a way that is much clearer than my babble? Indeed. While I have something of a love/hate relationship with Paste Magazine, I still read its online content fairly dutifully, and I couldn't let one today's articles pass without being linked to and commented on. I freely admit that what I have written here is most likely longer than the article itself, but I seriously suggest you give it a read and give the musical examples a listen, because these guys seem to want to rescue the term emo as much as I do.

You can read it here.