Playlists

Restoring the Feeling

In 1960 Nico Jacobellis was managing a movie theater in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, when he decided to program a showing of Louis Malle's second feature Les Amants, or "The Lovers." The film featured a sex scene that, while quite tame by modern standards, ruffled enough feathers to get Jacobellis charged with possessing and exhibiting obscene material under Ohio state law, forced to pay a fine of $2,500 in the aggregate. Two state courts upheld the conviction, but in 1964 the Supreme Court overturned it, ruling that Les Amants did not actually meet any threshold for obscenity. The court, however, could not agree on what that threshold actually was: the six justices in the majority combined for four different written opinions. Jacobellis was exonerated and Malle enjoyed a long and storied film career. The Supreme Court would itself establish a formal definition and corresponding test for obscene material merely nine years later. But Jacobellis vs. Ohio endures for the concurring opinion of Justice Potter Stewart, who argued that the Constitution protected all obscenity save for hardcore pornography: "I shall not today attempt further to define ...[hardcore pornography]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

In the past five years or so, as I've broadened certain artistic horizons and narrowed others, I've been mulling over how I might articulate what I'm drawn to and why. I skip tons of albums and movies every year that I might love for reasons that seem, even to me, completely arbitrary. I may have really connected with a band's record in 2021 and feel completely unmotivated to check out their newest release. I'm fine with these inherent contradictions; I'm fine with finding out years later that an album I passed over is actually deeply meaningful to me. As a music nut whose home base has been the world of emo music for over a decade, I'm used to feeling at least a bit out of touch with the zeitgeist. What really gnawed at me, however, was how disconnected I felt from that same world in the present.

In high school and college I was ravenous, trawling blogs and Bandcamp for whatever new, strange emo I could find. In the early 2010s, as the so-called "Emo Revival" was in full swing, it wasn't uncommon to find bands from across the country throwing their albums up for free download, some straightforward, some run through a prismatic filter with some truly weird influences. My friends and I would pass these curios around in text messages and Dropbox dispatches, reveling in the millennial ennui set atop clangorous guitars. These primarily digital modes of discovery distorted popularity and flattened the historical record in strange ways: we were freshly discovering The Promise Ring and Foxing and Somebody's Basement all at once. None of these bands sounded particularly like one another. None of it sounded like Taking Back Sunday or My Chemical Romance, the bands we understood to be "emo" growing up. And all of it felt apart from mainstream cultural relevance. I spent four years of college watching other the music nerds look at me askance for my preferences; they were into Mac Demarco or Iceage or Parquet Courts or Hiatus Kiyote* or something else deemed more tasteful or complex.

*Am I airing petty grievances with these particular choices more than making a salient point? Almost certainly. Indulge me. This is my silly little website and I call the shots.

At some point, though, emo broke containment. All of the sudden, a genre that once sounded like boundless possibility felt calcified. Rising buzz bands started to sound like watered-down retreads of the bands I already knew and loved. I'd check out the new talk of the town (read: Twitter) and feel nothing. Was the genre oversaturated with mediocre bands or was I merely becoming Principal Skinner? The more I thought about it, the more I was forced to conclude that this was a Me Problem. Perhaps everything felt new back then because it was all new. Maybe people ten years older than I was heard all of the bands I loved as cheap imitations of their favorites. Are we all doomed to approach 30 and begin cantankerously regarding [BUZZY NEW BAND] and "we-have-[BELOVED BAND]-at-home?"

I do think lots of newer emo is mixed in a way I don't like–vocals too high, instruments too low, everything too compressed** as if it were pop music. And I do think that one of the dominant lyrical styles is a sort of navel-gazing self-pity that, much like with weed, I consumed in excess from 16 to 22 and now really can't handle. The world looks very different than it did 15 years ago, and increasing amounts of time and energy are required to simply make ends meet. It's not as easy, financially speaking, to start a band just for shits and giggles and toss some bizarre music online for free. I'm also pretty personally removed from any real life scene: by the time I moved to Brooklyn proper, longstanding DIY venues like Shea Stadium, Suburbia, Silent Barn, and The Glove were either already shuttered or about to close down. Nothing substantial has emerged to replace them since.

**I don't understand mixing for shit and could be wildly off-base explaining the technical reasons for what I don't like. If anyone with audio experience wants to help explain my preferences to me I'm all ears.

But I kept returning to Stewart's famous concurrence. I've joked for awhile now that my taste is governed by the pornography standard--I know what I like when I hear it. It always felt like a cop out, a way of joking past a question I can't answer. Reading the quote in full while writing this, however, I was equally struck by the preceding statement, that Stewart could potentially never successfully explain himself. How to try and make sense of why some newer emo bands DO click for me? Maybe there's real value in not totally understanding, in giving yourself over to instinct and trusting your gut.

In this vein, I decided sometime this year to compile a list of emo songs from the current decade that have really resonated, songs that have restored the same wild and boundless feeling I used to get as a teenager. The playlist focuses mostly on bands that have flown under the radar***, but I included some heavy hitters when the tune in question has really stuck with me. The process was not very scientific--it involved my sorting my iTunes library by "emo"--but I'm pretty satisfied with the results. I took a broad-brush approach to what counts, including some bands that lean more towards shoegaze or straight-ahead indie rock so long as I could discern an emo "core" in the song. I didn't really include artists from the emo-rap/digicore/hyperpop spheres because their music tends not to speak to me as much.

***Disclaimer: Several of these bands are friends or bands I've played with before, but all were included because I genuinely love their music.

Rather than my usual folder of mp3s, this is hosted on Bndcmpr--as these are almost all small, working bands I feel less inclined to share all their music en masse (Many of these songs are up for free download on Bandcamp in any case). I sequenced it to flow as best as I could, but you can feel free to skip around to whatever interests you. Songs are roughly grouped stylistically, so if you hear something you like, odds are you'll be most interested in what immediately precedes or follows. Feel free to remake this on your streaming service of choice; like it says on the can, not all songs will be there. Don't worry too much about the why; just focus on the feeling.

bonus - "Lose"

Lesser Halves - "2 x 2"

Va Fa Napoli - "Cold Coffee"

marigold 925 - "Now I Sit and Watch the End, Holding on to What I Got"

The Big Easy - "It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Gets Hurt"

Private Mind - "Catching on Too Late"

Northeast Regional - "Staples Mill Station"

gladie - "Nothing"

Leg Biters - "out the lodge"

Clamor - "Orquestra China"

Dagwood - "Trying to Be Kind"

Branching Out - "Forgetting Sarah Pacini"