Or, in which we subject songs about getting pissed to line-by-line analysis.

As I’ve said, it’s sad, really, that “emo” has become defined by the hordes of black-finger nailed and floppy-fringed self-pitying poseurs who fill the under 18s clubs and shopping malls up and down the length of Britain’s shores. Let’s continue our tour through the maligned backwaters of alternative rock with one of its exemplars: the rowdy and righteous punk three-piece Jawbreaker. In the twilight of the eighties and the nineties’ dawn, “emo”, inasmuch as any genre is an actually existing phenomena, represented the growing of awareness of American punks that they had other feelings as well as anger and other experiences than collective expressions of energy. Guy Picciotto, of Fugazi and Rites of Spring, disclaimed the “emo” tag not merely because, as with almost all tags, it’s a crude attempt to lump diverse units together under the pretence that they’re one phenomenon – which would, of course, have been extremely fair – but because punk was emotional: “what, like the Bad Brains weren’t emotional? What – they were robots or something?” Yeah, they were, but the groups eventually known as “emo” brought a more individualised perspective to their songs, which allowed for subtler, more sensitive expression.

Jawbreaker’s vocalist, Blake Schwarzenbach, was the finest poet among this intangible trend. Where others had assumed that fuzzy riffs, power chords and walloped drums were a platform fit for only throat-abusing rage, he offered stories that contained a slyly sensitive perspective on harsh living. “Chesterfield King” or “Kiss the Bottle” are as touching as songs about drinking, smoking, thinking and relating with toothless women in parking lots can be. “Boxcar” is the least pretentious tune to ever reference Kerouac. “Tour Song” is, perhaps, the only song about the hardships of being a musician that isn’t self-indulgent, whining drivel.

At the origins of “emo”, the music its practitioners devised expressed a range of feelings from the comic to the sad to the angry. Nowadays, the songs of tight-t-shirted and black-eye shadowed, tunelessly wailing tykes can be defined by one emotion: self-pity. It’s a shame. Genres might be largely bogus notions when they’re first conceived but, sometimes, they’re realised as a new generation of upstarts model themselves on the standards they think are ubiquitous. And the standards of the coming crop of novices are rubbish.

While I’m on the subject, Schwarzenbach’s lyrics are the kind often described as “honest”: downbeat; confessional; often involving alcohol. These can be really great or totally embarrassing and the line between the two of them is hard to pin down. As someone with too much free times, however, I’ve actually thought about this and I reckon it depends on achieving the correct balance of the particular and the universal. I was listening to a tune by Lucero – a more recent group who flavour noisy compositions with tinges of folk. Titled “Drink ‘Till We’re Gone”, it tells the classic tale of eternal alcoholism. It’s a good song, but towards the end the singer references “cheap beer and wine”. Yeah, it probably just fit the rhythm but it bugged me. If you were a dipsomaniac you wouldn’t think of “cheap beer” any more than a connoisseur would think of “expensive wine”. You’d know exactly what the cheapest brands are – and the minute differences in potency and price would be crucial enough to you that you’d never think in such broad terms. Punk is a genre noted for its grunginess. But the little things that matter.

Advertisement