1. 1 year ago 

   Angry Rant v.1

   This may possible be my first and only personal post, but I just need to get it out.

   Yesterday, my friends and I went to the movie theatre for one of my buddy’s birthday. When we climbed the electric stairs (Because I turned them off) we realized a “rave” was going on in a store. It was two guys DJing inside a small room with a glass wall for outsiders to see. What was appalling to me however, was the crowd outside. Bolivia is such a small country that you get to feel like you know everyone, but never in my life have I ever seen so many neon “emo-punks” in one place, in my whole life. I just started to think; since when did music become a competition of who can be the most neon or who has the tightest jeans? All these people didn’t seem real to me. They were following a fad, a temporary fashion statement that will soon be overridden by a larger coming of a new wave of music and clothes. Why couldn’t they just develop a proper sense of individuality and self-recognition? I understand if they feel like the music “speaks out” to them, but most of them seemed so fake it made me sick. It reminded me of a friend of mine who up until two years ago despised the whole emo movement. Two years ago this whole “emo” fad had finally started to properly get to Latin America, so I can’t really speak for other places in the world per se, but in my case it felt like the “big boom” of the emo movement. My friend hated every single aspect about it, and admittedly so, I didn’t really like it either. Bands like My Chemical Romance and Jimmy Eat World and such didn’t appeal to me whatsoever. Eventually I came around and started to listen to the music because it was forced down my throat. It became the popular genre, the popular style, whatever you want to call it. I took it in and swallowed in all these emo bands and it became a competition with others. Who knew the most emo band? Who was the most emo person? Sure enough, as is with every fad in the world, there was a considerable amount of people against this emo movement. Now older, I enjoy listening to a selected amount of bands that I loved in that time period, namely the aforementioned My Chemical Romance and Jimmy Eat World, but I realize how I just took in all the mainstream bullshit that was fed to me by the masses. Society is a vicious cycle where you take what you give in, but I digress. My friend now, was a hater of all the emo movement and all that jazz. He would criticize my friends, and myself, who would listen to this so called “emo music” up until he met a girl he started to like. I remember vividly he told me, before they got together, that he started to actually like the emo music. This is after the girl told me her favorite band in the world was Fall Out Boy. Too much to be a coincidence, no?

   How sick is that?

   I am quite a weird individual, I sometimes force myself to hate what everyone loves and love what everyone hates. The minute my friend told me that the whole emo music wasn’t so bad I realized how the genre had just broken into the mainstream bullshit that I thought it separated itself from. Naive, I know, but hindsight is always 20/20. I started to hate the genre and started to listen to a more alternative style of music, namely Foo Fighters and Audioslave and such. Even though these huge bands were mainstream and “popular” per se, they were different from the whole emo fad that was surrounding me. I wanted to be different than everyone else so much that I neglected all the bands that I loved even before “emo” blew up. I stopped listening to Saves the Day, The Get Up Kids, and even blink-182, who if you know me at all, you know is probably the closest thing I have to a favorite band. I got sick of forcing myself to like music when I just realized that maybe despite the fact that bands like All Time Low and My Chemical Romance were part of this emo movement, I enjoyed them nonetheless. I started to listen to whatever the fuck I loved. My friend, who loved Cat Stevens, Ozzy Osbourne, even Red Hot Chili Peppers, started to neglect that side for a while to focus on bands like Silverstein and Alesana. He now came back to his true tastes, as I did, but I won’t ever forget how he just let the mainstream bullshit consume him. Eventually the whole emo fad “evolved” into an even more false-sense of popularity and poise. They teach the fans that the more they are hated, the cooler they are. They took a step back.

   What was so great about the 90s, although I never got to fully live in that decade myself, is that music evolved from generic songs about sex, drugs, and alcohol into a much more developed and insightful experience. Kurt Cobain is not praised by millions for nothing. Grunge let people talk about their feelings and their pain and solitude through songs, and this appealed so much to audiences because they were so used to songs about infatuating a girl or just wanting to get her to bed. What went wrong with us? Look at a video by Bring Me the Horizon or a band like that and tell me its not a carbon copy of the glam movement in the 80s. Bands now do it for the money and the industry again. No one gets it anymore. I started to play music because I wanted to inspire those around me like music inspired me. I want to change lives and all that starry-eyed hopeless romantic story every musician claims. As cliche and cheesy as it sounds, it’s true. I didn’t start to play music to release a record and become the next Lady Gaga. I just wanted my music to be heard by everyone and help change lives and influence. That’s why I was so angry at that mob of neon scenesters. Why do they let themselves be fed the mainstream bullshit that the neon scene is all about? How could we have gone from something like The Beatles or The Rolling Stones to Brokencyde and Millionaires? Maybe all we need is just a little push in the right direction rather than to be led into an abyss of shallow thoughts and melodies. We’re getting stuck into a hole built by a society that seemingly lacks too much of a personality to break out of the stigma that this neon scene has inflicted upon us. We need a push. We need to break free.

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