When the Get Up Kids crooned that “I’ll cry until I can’t see the whites of your eyes,” I knew, then and there, that boys could cry, and it could be cool. We sang together in the little basement of our misspent desires.
We swapped physical strength for hyperbolic introspection. Emo music offered me the first taste of a collective subculture, a “we” built not of chest-thumping aggression but of angst-laden melodrama. Of course, I wasn’t miserable, not really, but I’d found a community to help when I convinced myself that I was. Finding melody to answer the “misery” of my day. Emo music bred some of that out of me.Īs a virgin with a Walkman, I didn’t loathe girls I wasn’t dating I moped. American culture raises our kind to Everest-like heights of entitlement. This might sound like a common enough lesson, but it matters more when you grow up-as I did-white, hetero, suburban, and male. What did they teach me about masculinity? About life? That my hopes would be dashed, I’m guaranteed nothing, and girls will probably find someone else. These were my mixtape heroes and masculine lodestars in the 1990s skinny jean scene of Cleveland, Ohio. Take these telling examples, provided here with a gloss: The Promise Ring (no doubt broken), American Football (our kind didn’t play), The Anniversary (preceding a break-up), and The Get Up Kids (no thanks, we’ll sit this one out). Lyrics swoon, guitars moan, and band names broadcast-in the thickest of ironies-absence or loss. Subgenres and regional schools proliferate, but to my amateur ears, emo means one thing: lovelorn dislocation from girls, popularity, and joy. Google or Wiki will mash up adjectives in search of a definition: confessionalist, sensitive, hardcore, punk. What, you may ask, is emo? “Emo” is short for emotional, though my friends captured the genre in four words: “whiney white boy music.” Think Death Cab for Cutie.
To these I’ll add emo music, the soundtrack to my teen years, when I tried on new selves like so many pairs of socks. My physique, lanky as a praying mantis, kept me out of the nastier sports. Ditto my propensity, born of book-worming, for imagining myself as other people. How then did I come to be spared (I hope) from masculinity’s more toxic trends? My feminist parents deserve some credit.
THANK YOU FOR LISTENING TO ME GIF FULL
These are the men that make men look bad, though sometimes I worry that they’re just most men, full stop. Like the dudes who heckled me for walking my dog while wearing pink shorts. Like the father berating his “loser” son-the kid had just lost a wrestling match-in a public restroom. As an American, I’ve met my fair share of masculinist jerks. Is it normal to wonder how you didn’t wind up more of a mess?Īs a man, I sometimes find myself asking this question.
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