I'm doing a top 10 screamo bands of all time list..

[plagueship]

srs, i always see bands like this tagged "real screamo" on last fm. really brings out the walter sobchak / steve albini in me.

anyway, yes, i am aware that saying opinions on the internets is a pretty futile activity, especially when it comes to complaining about the young whippersnappers and their stupid ways of talking and dressing. i am a cranky old man who plays chess and fiddle and drinks tea wearing a flannel robe, and lives somewhere with no hardcore shows (or much of anything to do except drink). so here i am. deal.

at any rate, i would even suggest that the pubescent mall rats with terrible hair and their crappy overproduced music are as much, if not more so, the true heirs to the title of screamo (by way of ctts of course) than any latest crop of sincere, 90s-worshipping diy nerds making handmade cassette demos in their parents' basements late at night. bands that sound like orchid are hardcore. bands that sound like indian summer are, according to the taxonomy i was taught while coming up, EMO, as in first-wave emo.

pete, this is way more imporant than i realized when i started typing this post. we are keepers of the flame.

so anyway "screamo" would have to pretty much refer to saetia, spirit of versailles, etc and their descendants. obviously there is some crossover here but the "skramz"/"real screamo" label begs the question, WHAT IS UNREAL SCREAMO? can we posit imaginary or even complex screamo? in what sense is garbage like thrice, the used or atreyu that kids want to call 'screamo' not screamo? well obviously, most of it is actually some combination of pop-punk, metalcore and nu metal. but you can't deny there is a trail of influence there, a common genealogy (again: ctts, the locust, etc). they are our retarded, inbred cousins from the trailer parks of middle america who didn't know what screamo was until it was repackaged and sold to them at the mall and on myspace. but now they ARE screamo. deal.

[brianutatx]

Plagueship,
I understand what your saying. But I'm gonna disagree. I refuse to accept that because mainstream culture co opted screamo that I will even acknowledge any "mainstream" screamo bands like Thrice, Thursday or various other "mainstream" "screamo".

The same debate has happened before with the term emo. I refuse to believe that bands like The Get Up Kids, Capn Jazz or Dashboard Confessionals are emo bands. Emo bands are bands like Rites Of Spring, Moss Icon, and Policy of Three. The term emo was co-opted by these pop bands because it was a hot term that helped sell albums, along with kids using the term where it wasn't applicable.

With that being said I do feel that bands like Capn Jazz or The Get Up Kids may have somehow been influenced by emo bands and because there is a tangent of the emo sound in there music I would call these indie-pop-emo bands second wave emo. The same type of idea could be applied with screamo where it should be and the result is calling the more pop-metal-screamo bands second wave screamo.

[CDRCK]

i've read the whole conversation and everything that comes to my mind is... wtf. who cares? we all know what real "screamo" is on HERE.

[kyeospeaks]

it's all hardcore punk. strange how 15+ years allows for people to get away with calling certain styles "screamo". silly. the useage of "skramz", words cannot describe.

[plagueship]

the question remains though, if it's not "real" emo/screamo then what is it? i know it's not like saying something makes it true but they're also not saying the moon is made of cheese; when a genre label sticks persistently enough, it's just kinda there, for good or ill...

[Pete > You]

it's all hardcore punk.

It's actually all hardcore. No punk.



Or wait, maybe it's all just rock. Fuck it, why not all just music? This anti-intellectualism via an aversion through labels really is not conducive to anything. As a media researcher, if I wanted to conduct a genre analysis, I wouldn't just hand in a submission to a journal with "They're all just films, maaaaan" scrawled on a piece of paper.

Plagueship brings up some very interesting points. It's weighing very heavily on me. Let's keep this going.

[kyeospeaks]

pete, it's very punk. diy punk.

[Pete > You]

Hardcore punk refers to the faster/louder/rougher/ect. punk of the late 70s. You know, with the punk sound and all that if you heard a band doing now you couldn't contain your laughter. Like if you put on London Calling at 45 and pitch shifted the vocals back down to 33. None of the music we're talking about is from this time period or conforms to any of the sounds of the genre. This is hardcore. DIY hardcore. Basement hardcore. You are falsely equating "punk" with "DIY". If that's all you have to go on that's pretty dumb.

[plagueship]

i always thought hardcore punk is like discharge and other proto-crust type stuff

[TehBurgerKing]

Bad Brains, brah.