Rolling Stone, you take the cake:
…so we can pretty much pin the entire state of emo at this point on Minor Threat.
Why do I even bother? Do the folks at RSÂ even know what music is anymore? They’re probably too busy catching up with The Beatles circa 1966 to even try to recognize what music is being made now, never mind back in ’82.
This news byte by Daniel Kreps landed on the site about a half hour ago and references yesterday’s Drowned In Sound interview with Jim Suptic of The Get Up Kids. Obviously, this is a little side snipe that is supposed to be funny, but considering the entire article is based off of a snippet from another interview, there’s no stopping the nitpicking on this one.
Because it’s not just that one sentence that display’s RS‘s inability to perform as the kind of magazine it advertises itself as, it’s the entire article. The entire article is based off of another person’s hard interviewing skills, and the fact that Rolling Stone merely ripped off a few questions from that person’s interview (and it may have taken a lot to get that out of Suptic), made it the basis for a big news article, AND STILL CONSIDERS ITSELF THE TOP OF THE MUSIC JOURNALISM HEAP is absolutely ridiculous. Sure enough, I wrote an entire post based on the same responses, but I don’t pretend to be the source of important music information today. And, I beat RS to it to boot.
And as for Kreps, the auteur of this fine piece of RSÂ BS? The one who insinuates that Minor Threat is the reason emo sucks today, simply because Suptic referenced Fugazi as an influence and Ian MacKaye was in both bands? (As an aside, I’m sure Suptic would have something to say about Kreps’ idiotic pandering.) Well, who knows much about him, but, if this happens to be his Twitter account, the following isn’t unsurprising:
Is the “bio” comedy through Irony? If it is, I can’t say that I entirely get it.
Minor Threat – “Filler” (live):
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLD-2o5fkSo&feature=related]
I actually thought that emo as a genre began with Minor Threat and Rites of Spring. Like seriously Rites of Spring, right? The same word can have similar/overlapping and even totally different meanings.
Rites of Spring, yes (they are, pretty much, the first emo band, circa 1984/5). The word “emocore” was coined in ’85 to describe the tinkerings to hardcore that post-hardcore acts like ROS, Embrace, Beefeater, etc were doing in DC at the time.
Minor Threat, no. Not at all. Though the members of Rites were immediately influenced by Minor Threat – as they were the epitomal punk band in DC that really represented youth at the time – I would hardly say that emo started with Minor Threat. Minor Threat became the prototype for hardcore acts; short, fast songs, screamed vocals, etc. Even their within-band chemistry – a group of teens still trying to figure out their place in the world – which, in part, lead to their break up, offered a blueprint for bands to come. Though Minor Threat were in no way militant or macho, the scene devolved into that kind of a world. And Rites of Spring were a reaction to that, combining the hardcore of the time with poppier elements and a completely different lyrical style to boot. Minor Threat’s only relationship to emo is as a precursor, a pioneering punk band who set the template for emo to create itself upon.