Another day, another journalist seeks to kill a genre of music. Today’s suspect is news.com.au‘s Neala Johnson. The weapon – My Chemical Romance. What got the axe? Emo, of course: NO MORE angst. No more whingeing. No more playing the victim. When My Chemical Romance re-emerge in early 2010 with their fourth album, any trace … [Read more…]
This is why I cannot respect Andy Greenwald’s opinion on emo: Obviously, taste is taste. Opinion, opinion. But if this man is the guy who’s supposed to be the emo know-it-all (read: self-created title/Spin created title), I’m not buying it. The guy doesn’t seem to understand the impulse that emo acts have towards evolution, probably … [Read more…]
It’s an absolute pleasure to bring Chris Simpson into the America Is Just A World fold. Part of my inclination for adding more interviews and material to what I’ve already written for the book is to really uncover the narratives that have been overlooked, and no band’s lifetime has the same mixture of mild coverage … [Read more…]
Another day, another quizzical top ten list. This time it’s curtsey of Justin Jacbos at Paste magazine, with a piece entitled “10 Bands That Prove That Emo Wasn’t Always For The Hot Topic Tween Set.” The newsworthiness of the piece is due to the two fall reunion tours by emo 2nd wave forefathers Sunny Day … [Read more…]
I’d been meaning to post this up for quite a while, and here goes… I met up with Geoff Farina, frontman of the now-defunct and beloved band Karate, for an interview to be included in America Is Just A Word. Karate is one of a handful of bands that really challenged the ideals for what … [Read more…]
The Jealous Sound have confirmed a rumor I tracked down a little while ago: they are in fact touring with Sunny Day Real Estate and sharing bass players, one Nate Mendel. Whoa, is Mendel trying to one-up his bandmate Dave Grohl on the how-many-bands-can-I-perform-in-at-one-time? So far, Mendel’s got Foo Fighters, SDRE, and The Jealous Sound… … [Read more…]
Chuck Klosterman swung through Boston last week, doing a talk at the Hard Rock Cafe that was hardly publicized. But, perhaps I’m just not looking in the right places. I did a little piece for Bostonist on what I might have heard had I attended the event; check it out here. For most folks, Klosterman’s … [Read more…]
Last night, Public Enemy’s Chuck D dropped some knowledge at Harvard. Among the many insightful and brilliant things D had to say, one struck me in particular: “People need to write books. People need to write more books, now, more than ever. Write books and the cream will rise to the top.” That’s a bit … [Read more…]
Like any “normal” male adolescent in America, my elementary school days were filled with a love of sports and comic books. For me, it was more comic books than sports. As my friends dreamed of a future on the gridiron, I diligently worked on my impending comic book career. Somewhere along the line I became … [Read more…]