ENL262 emoviolence, fetish of loss

“We lack the motion / to move to the new beat” (Refused / Shape of Punk to Come)

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As for McCaffery’s notes on punk rock, much has changed since the reign of the classic punk bands he mentions, and perhaps not all for the better. I sincerely wish I could extend McCaffery's reading through American hardcore into contemporary postpunk, posthardcore, emo / screamo (though I'm in no way endorsing the rhetoric of this particular video, its rancor seems not ungermane to McCaffery's discussion of resistance to co-optation) and whatever you'd call the likes of Dillinger Escape Plan, or Antioch Arrow. The reasoning would start out something like: "...the things McCaffrey locates as mere intimations and anticipations in the music of Velvet Underground, Sex Pistols, et al., are now fully realized conventions in various punk subgenres, and even bleed through into in far more mainstream acts." But while McCaffery located in these earlier artists a significant critical or emancipatory potential, I would argue that momentum has been substantially impeded. It’s interesting that McCaffery describes a few authors in his roster as having written cyberpunk without being aware of it, for in the case of a majority of successful posthardcore performers, it’s the very awareness of what they’re doing that seems to have stalled their subversive potential.

Yes, we have (and there is some unfair conflation here between genres) The Locust, Fear Before the March of Flames, Heroin, Angel Hair, Fall of Troy, Blood Brothers, to name a few, deploying hyperbole, hysteria, pastiche, wide dynamic range (tempo, intensity, volume), polyphony and schizophren(et)ic, often nonsensical, spectacular lyrics— it’s a list of postmodern tropes you know by heart already — to render images of disintegration, of breaking, of being unable (or refusing) to breathe, of spilling blood, and emerging from aftermath as a survivor cut free from past obligations (or complicities) [1]. And yes, operational freedom on the postapocalyptic scale would come in handy for those attempting to do the real progressive work [1.5] of moving on beyond the moment of emergence, and ordering the wreckage around us into something that can be called home.

But that’s not happening much. If her marketing of a punk persona is enough to include her in the discussion here, Ashlee Simpson is “Beautifully Broken;” practical concerns, the drudgery of ‘real work,’ would smear the eyeshadow, interrupt the indulgence in a broken, Derelicte persona and merch table iconography of wings, skulls, vines, branches, angels, birds, and other suggestions of phoenixrising (Thursday's now canonical "We can rise / Wings of the dove / See blue skies...") that is nonetheless continually deferred in the interest of luxuriating in the present moment. "Just Let Me Cry," another Simpson song begs— because work, as Burroughs’ urban youth and mafiosos explain, is passé: “Who you, worka for a living?” [2] It’s not operational freedom, then, that much contemporary punk is producing, it’s narcissism— as the trope of scars suggests: “just look at [what they’ve done to] us” —and rather than deconstruct the subject, as Hollinger suggests, emo-posthardcore re-subjectifies scenesters as the beautifully broken. “If you don’t care … I don’t matter, I don’t exist,” Hollinger quotes one cyberpunk character, a foil for the selection’s protagonist; emo reverses this logic: “Because you don’t care, I matter"— i.e., my loss is what matters; if loss, disintegration, damage are ubiquitous, then it's only by an extraordinary intensity of loss that I am special."


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[1] Cf. W. Dixon, Visions of the Apocalypse: Spectacles of Destruction in American Cinema.

[1.5] Maybe the Canadian punk band Propaghandi would have pleased McCaffery with song titles like “Stick The Fucking Flag Up Your Goddamn Ass.” I would suggest that progressive praxis has been better realized at the “Reconstruction Site” of Propaghandi bassist John K. Samson’s less strident band, The Weakerthans. Or may I recommend as a just-as-hyperized punk descendant without its forebears' assiduous noxiousness: Tera Melos.


[2] Much to be said here about the resurgence of Sentimentality and "the manly tear" in emo-influenced subgenres, the transfixion by and indulgence in loss, and the vaccum of loss filled by the subject’s pride in being so special as to have suffered such loss in the first place. Though their style began as straightforward pop-punk-- a term somehow used without irony --Saves the Day's seminal violent hyperbole, with that of more emo and posthardcore influenced Thursday and Taking Back Sunday, seems a major point of origin, carrying through a majority of the current scenes and traveling collaterally into the performance of associated groups like The Spill Canvas. The antifeminist implications of this asthetic— when women are reified as the source of that loss; Chiodos's "One Day All Women Will Become Monsters" comes to mind by its title, though as a better example maybe Saves the Day's lyrics still reign—have been taken up by Jessica Hopper in "Emo: Where the Girls Aren't" in Punk Planet 56