I'm 32 years old. I was there to witness the transition from the nu-metal phase to the emo one (or at least what we millennials call "emo"), and emo rose and hit its peak during my late middle school and high school years. My generation spent a lot of time hating the emo kids, and I've spent many of the subsequent years thinking about why. (Also, sorry if I've made these points before.)
My best guesses are the usual suspects. The anger of the older generations not understanding what the kids were doing and not liking how it reminded them of their own mortality. Our good friend performative toxic masculinity, particularly in the Bush era when kids shouldn't have been wearing all that makeup and singing about their feelings when they could've been bro-ing out and signing up to go to Iraq. Our hardwired impulse to shit on anything teenage girls like. So on and so forth.
I probably wasn't above any of that myself. But at the time, my reasoning for not liking emo or emo culture (I was friends with some of those kids though) was how solipsistic it seemed to me. Or that's the nice way of putting it because this was the height of my inability to appreciate anything that wasn't super conscious hip-hop. How could you sit around listening to Hawthorne Heights? People are dying in the war! Man.
(I was also a huge hypocrite because I dug the shit out of the emo Minneapolis rappers. That stuff just didn't register as "emo" to me at the time. The cliché emo band was singing "I'm so sad!!!!" and the cliché Minneapolis emo rapper was rapping about depressed girls named Ashley. There's a difference!)
Bless My Psyche is not really an emo album in the mid/late 2000s Fall Out Boy/Panic!/The Maine/ sense. At least to my ears, it reminded me more of older emo. Your American Footballs and Sunny Day Real Estates and whatnot. Emo that remembers it was an offshoot of hardcore. Yet, I was thinking about the former category of emo a lot while listening to it, because it made me realize that I've been spending too much time thinking "Why didn't we like the emo kids?" and not enough about the appeal of emo in the first place.
Or, to put it more bluntly, Bless My Psyche made me realize I was overthinking it. The appeal is, simply, being very loud about how miserable you are. We need shit to help us access our emotions, and I would've told my high school self that even though there may be darker shit happening in the world around you, people still need things to feel their feelings to. It also helps that Sincere Engineer sells that experience without the trappings of the aesthetics of the emo scene in the 2000s. (I'm open to the music now, but I'm not fucking with a lot of the visual aesthetic. I'm only willing to evolve so much damnit!) It's emo stripped down to its rawest form, and I dug it a lot.
There's a part of me that wishes it had more variation in its sound. But it's also a pretty short album, so I didn't sweat that too much. Really, an issue I have with it is overshadowed by what it's done in helping me think about emo better. I'm not going to go rushing into the deep end with it. But I'll happily try out some more.
Favorite Songs: "Recluse in the Making," "Come Out for a Spell," "Bless My Psyche"
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