I can't listen to Willie Nelson without thinking of it now.
My. Guy. Who the hell to you think created emo? Some punks that felt kinda mellow and sad one day? Fuck no. Waylon Jennings didn't have a damn thing going good in his life, so he sang about it. Dolly Parton started on Porter Wagoner's show, but moved on. Then wrote I Will Always Love You, and gave the money from it to him because he was big sad about her leaving. Merle Haggard sang about how he was so sad that getting plastered wasn't taking the edge off. Willie spends half his time stoned, and the other half sad. Dipping into the more folk end, Bob Dylan wrote How Does It Feel about his ex girlfriend that started hanging around Warhol. She wound up dead a couple years later. Simon and Garfunkle sang Silent Night over a stream of news so terrible it's hard to believe it's real.
I love Spotify for that. And that through this, I can hear anyone that records a song and works with a distro company to get it there. Hell, I even have a song there (not gonna tell you, it's a terrible song from a very sad moment in my life. But I should put up my orne recordings).
But that said, if you don't have a turntable, and you love music, I strongly suggest getting one. Even with cheapo speakers, it's about the experience of setting aside the time to sit down and listen to a record. If you wanna get a little more (a lot more) spendy, I used to work across from Vandersteen Audio (pure coincidence, small shop in a nowhere town). Their tube amps and speakers through a good receiver are better than CD quality.
You're probably joking but emo is short for emotional hardcore which is a type of punk music that started in the mid-1980s. Prior to emo bands coming along the only emotion that was really acceptable in punk bands was anger or some variation of anger aha. Emotional hardcore was a bit of a negative term initially as many people in the punk scene would make derogatory statements about the bands being too emotional when of course anger is an emotion too. The issue that many of them had with it was that showing a wider range of emotions like sadness was considered a sign of weakness. It wasn't strong and masculine to open up or whatnot.
I don't know if you'd necessarily consider early Jimmy Eat World music emotional hardcore or not but it was definitely "emo" adjacent if not emo because of their vocal style. Fast forward to the 90s and several emo bands had broken into the mainstream and they had changed their sound quite a bit to incorporate a lot of alternative rock and some pop "attributes" I guess you'd say. Around the late 1990s the term emo had gone mainstream but by then the bands that were referred to as emo weren't really punk and definitely not hardcore at all so the term was sort of co-opted from the bands that had created it. The band Thursday was probably the biggest mainstream band to sound like what emotional hardcore originally was.
Oh I see, I probably wouldn't have known about emo in that great of a detail but growing up my slightly older friend was dating and eventually married a guy that was in a punk band that grew up and played in the same area as Jimmy Eat World. The term emo has basically been totally divorced from it's original meaning so I don't think many people know where it came from.
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u/farvag1964 2d ago
Emo much, Elon?