Birds hanging low over the landscape, that thick taste on the edge of perception.
This is everything I was worried would become part of my business, the daily routine of soaking wet prophets & deaconesses disembarking on my infernal shore, wanting directions, hands out for maps & my little words to take the edge off their distress. I never thought I'd bite into this.
The heat lingering over me, clouds threatening to burst if only conditions were right, the subtle magick of ions & droplets snowballing down ethereal hills, Elysian domains of the trade winds. I'm calling down the rain, spitting to the ground to give it a model, opening my parasol indoors, inviting the back luck of a prolonged downpour. I'm calling down the rain, hail, sleet, snow in the middle of the summer, my windows open in case it wants to flood out the lower floors of my home, send me scrambling for higher ground. I am calling down the rain, I am calling down the rain.
This is exactly what I feared, having to pilot an ark across the Rubicon Down Stairs, the River of the Dead, the Rio Grande de los Muertos, y voy a ser el conductor. Ayúdame.
The question the ancients did not debate enough for my own taste: the source of the Styx, the foothills or springs or mountains from which the run off reached the Underworld. I am certain that if I could find those mountains and drink deep from that source, I would be qualified to pilot this ark, I would be prepared to steer that wet & weary course.
A friend of mine who is also a young educator found himself experiencing something I had once described and he found hard to believe - a middle class white student insisting to him that "emo" was a new genre. His experience wasn't as bad as mine, where a student grew damn near vitriolic about how wrong I was that emo wasn't new. When I told that young man that ten years before, I had been listening to emo, it was as if I had told him that the pair presenting themselves as his biological parents were actually cradle-robbers raising him for slave labor. He refused to admit it - as if he needed to admit what I factually proved.
Since it was once off-radar, many people are not aware that emo is old - a seasoned genre of the American underground. The same thing happened when Ska poked its head aboveground in the mid-nineties thanks to the success of bands like Sublime (reggae more so than Ska, but "Wrong Way" and "Date Rape" were straight up rocksteady jams), No Doubt (they returned to the Jamaican groove later on, but in their early days on national radio really only "Spiderwebs" had a Ska edge), the Mighty Mighty Bosstones (remember: "Never had to knock on wood...).
At the time, many folks thought Ska was a new genre (its roots lie in the late fifties and early sixties when Jamaican musicians began integrating elements of their traditional folk music with American r&b, soul, and rock & roll). The same thing happened a decade before when Ska had a revival at the start of the New Wave era. Dick Clark famously was given mixed up facts during an appearance on Police Squad.
So, anyway, the point of this: like punk rock, gangsta rap and Ska before it, emo has become a commodity. The same cut of cloth who mocked it when I was in junior high are now the kids flocking to it - this isn't to set up some "popular kids/uncool kids" dichotomy as much as to say that emo, a genre built on frustration, introspection, etc. has become a public forum success story. It's Doc Martens, parachute pants, flannel, etc. I'm not saying it's not viable subculture for disaffected youths to pursue, but the term of "poser" is not completely hollow. What was a cultural paradigm among inner-city youths in a dangerous world (gangsta rap) became a commodity that privileged youth in safe environments (urban or suburban) use as a means of self-expression. In the same way, emo(core) (or as I prefer: post-hardcore, though that's just as problematic) rose among frustrated working class post-punk youth interested in more complex and evocative music that would allow them to express not just romantic failings but social angst. Recently, it's become stereotyped as a heartsick, tears-on-my-diary sort of genre. That's really a more recent convention. Most of the best "emo"albumsare over ten years old & cover a variety of topics - there have been some more recent albumsthat I greatly admire.
Anyway, this is all to say that my digital ears perked when I saw these stories:
Now, when this hits the blogosphere, a bunch of asshats who know nothing about music that YouTube charts & NME magazine hasn't told them will make a bunch of crass jokes about the situation. And I'll admit, the idea of emo kids facing off with punk rockers and rockabilly kids in the streets of several Mexican cities has a romantic charm (I imagine a film will eventually be made about this by a wise independent film maker - hopefully it's a story set with the violence as a backdrop, not a documentary). And sure, it's human nature to tear down that which seems a threat to our superiority - so the armchair culture warriors of the Internet love to tear apart the emo subculture.
But I think what will be missed is that emo kids in Mexico are not emo kids in the United States. They don't grow fat from lounging in their chairs in their big comfy suburban homes (though a sizeable number seem to come from the Mexican middle class) - these are streetwise folks as much as the Mexican punkers.
I'm not saying they're authentic or even that authenticity can be measured. I don't know where they go to "access the subculture." Emo existed long before me, but I "was there" (odd to type, since it's so recent) when the new wave of emo started up - and I started listening years before, when it was still an underground phenomena. When I was in high school, we the "emo" didn't wear girl pants or eye liner, and we proudly listened to Ska, punk, techno, Tejano, jazz, rockabilly. We bought our "vintage" clothing at Goodwill & Salvation Army, not specialty shops or Hot Topic. And that wasn't just because we liked the hunt - I mean, it is one thing to buy a pre-made "wacky shirt" and it was another to personally discover one that was unintentionally so on a Goodwill rack - not to mention all of the great "retro" clothes that could be had. Part of our "thrift" shopping was out of budget concerns. I hate to bitch like an old man at age 23, but I can now see what it was like for Ska, punk, New Wave, and other subcultures to be co-opted and turned into a commodity, because the modern incarnation of "emo" that I grew up with has spring-boarded a dozen derivative bands onto the charts.
So I don't think the Mexican emo kids are somehow more authentic than American ones. But I think the idea of beating the shit out of their enemies and also getting shit removed from them by fists & kicks shows a marked difference between the States & Mexico. "What a leader does in moderation, followers do in excess." Well, that doesn't quite follow here, since I think it's the American model of excess that's being followed, but it's interesting to see how an American subculture shifts over national borders.
Whenever I go to Mexico I see kids there attempting to emulate American culture, often with mildly (and thus amusingly) skewed results - much as my "Otaku" anime-loving friends in high school & college embarrassed their Japanese friends by assuming their second-hand knowledge of Japanese culture from the Internet gave them an authority or edge of coolness.
Still, I think, at the risk of denigrating American teenagers, Mexican teenagers feel things more urgently & deeply. Mexico has a thriving wealthy & middle class, to be sure - and there is certainly poverty in the States. But while the American government is corrupt, the Mexican government is corrupt. And the United States doesn't have the shadow of a monolithic self-absorbed exporter of culture and values looming over it the way Mexico does. As a result, there's not a "safety net" feel to Mexican subcultures that I see in American subcultures, the idea that one can grow out of one's social group, or find numerous opportunities. I'm probably selling the American experience short, but I think American teenagers search for convenient short-term identities to allow them to participate in culture and stay on top. Mexican teenagers search for long-term subcultures in order to navigate a culture and find a community. This is why many youth in my city's Mexican & Mexican-American community keep one foot in their traditional culture - one might listen to death metal, punk rock, gangsta rap, hip-hop, techno, whatever, but the same person isn't embarrassed by or disinterested in traditional Mexican dance and folk music. Their associations are not short-term. I think this fire is what is preserving Mexican culture, especially in those areas where the Mexican population branches across provincial or national lines. There's an urgent, raw pride that American teenagers don't have.
But whatever, these are just my guesses. I feel for the victims, but I know selfishly that adversity breeds innovative art, so I, insulated from these minor flare-ups, can enjoy the benefit of a new wave of post-hardcore/emo coming from Mexico. I think this may be the revitalization the genre needs.
Last weekend I drove up with three friends to the Texas Pinball Convention. Despite being in a different world (at first we could not find the convention hall in the hotel and at one point walked into a PowerPoint seminar on classic pinball machines; some convention attendees playing in the tournament had special gloves for the task), it was a blast, and fifteen bucks bought us hours of pinball goodness.
It was a four hour trip each way, so I brought some reading in case conversation hit lengthy lulls. One of my selections was the latest issue of Poetry, and I was distressed that the vast majority of the selections did nothing for me. My roommate was asking questions about what the current working definition of "poetry" was, and I read a random stanza from the issue to illustrate a point and we both burst out laughing at the absurdity of the lines (had I read the poem before hearing his question, I wouldn't have attempted to use it as an illustration). But I purposed not too long ago in my heart of hearts that this blog would be mainly a celebration of things I love, so here are five poems that I've been enjoying greatly of late.
They call him "Ice Man," which is totally lame. I call him Wendigo Davis, 'cos that seems like a Warren Ellis kind of "too cool for tights but still a humanist" sort of hero.
