In Defense of the Genre (it's music again)

First off, I'll just admit that I obviously have no idea what I'm talking about most of the time. There was a musical genre right in front of my eyes for the majority of my existence that I didn't even understand. At one time, I thought I understood it, but I didn't.

The genre is emo.

As a 19 year old man, I listened to neo-nu-metal, punk rawk, ska, and 311. I was aware of this crybaby music that some kids somewhere made called emo, and I loved to poke fun at the kids crying because their girlfriend called them fat or something... Emo was not something I was interested in. Not while listening to this or this. I thought of emo as Dashboard Confessional acoustic guitar-style whining. Technically, I was right, but I didn't even know there was a whole wave of emo bands in the 90's that I totally missed. The bands had a serious rock side to them, more like, pop-punk than acoustic. But I guess this is where I blur the lines of what is pop-punk these days. Eh, nevermind. I never understood it before, why should I try to explain it now...

Now, the question I ask myself is, how important is knowing this now? The reason this is important now is that I realized that when I started this band, there were a lot of bands from this era that I really need to be aware of if I am to get along with my new band mates. I have never ever listened to the Get Up Kids until the exact moment that I'm typing this. I mentioned before that I missed the boat on a lot of bands of this era, and this is really good stuff. It's relevant to me now, even if it's only because I wish I was a different person when this was originally released. I want to be familiar with this music so that I can pretend I never was who I was. The music I listened to when I was between the ages of 14 and 21 are an embarrassing list of flash in the pan bands that I got caught up in, and I want to erase it.

But I know I can't. And I'm working on embracing that fact. But in the meantime, I'm gettin' all emo on everyone's ass, thanks to the greatest website ever for streaming music, Lala. I'm just trying to connect with a past I never lived. When I was trying to think of the genre of my new band, I immediately wanted to brand it punk/pop-punk. But I knew there was another layer to it, and more to it that that.

I'm pretty sure I'm in an emo band. Now, I'm trying to understand what that means.