But there’s another recent Fugazi interpretation the Post missed: “Not Playin’” by Charlotte, N.C., rapper Stranger Day.

via Stranger Day Samples Fugazi – Arts Desk – Washington City Paper.

STRANGER DAY – NOT PLAYIN’ (Produced By Emynd) from Stranger Day on Vimeo.

Well, allow Wugazi take you back to a simpler time.

via Wugazi: Wu-Tang Clan and Fugazi, Together at Last – Arts Desk – Washington City Paper.

Enter the Wugazi:

Sleep Rules Everything Around Me by WUGAZI

Image via Wikipedia

My friend’s niece is a big fan of Yo Gabba Gabba!, a brilliant brand of childrens’ programing on the part of Nick Jr. I remember finding ridiculous videos from the show and trying to show them to some of my friends. I mean, who wouldn’t want to learn beat boxing from Biz Markie?

Well, at one point, I tried to pitch the show to a few friends. They didn’t buy it. Instead, they launched into a nostalgia-fest of childhood, with the usual “kids today have terrible television,” and “in my day” speeches. It made me feel old not because we were discussing TV shows from decades past, but because my friends seemed so set in their ways.

I bring this up because the field of music journalism includes many pitfalls, one being nostalgia. I often worry that sometimes I may lean a little too hard on my Fugazi reference-points. And I fear that sometime in the future I may turn myself off from current music and still try to serve the cause of music journalism.

Case in point: Chris Conrad’s deplorable article on “The Aughties versus the ’80s” for South Oregon’s Mail Tribune. Conrad’s work of “journalism” is half grumpy-old-man-complaining, half factually impoverished. It appears as if Conrad just sought out some space to complain about things he didn’t know about and talk about the good ole’ days of indie rock by using Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life as a veritable crutch without understanding the finer points of the book. That being, those artists, those kids, made their music partially because of the old white guys telling them how great the good ole days were.

It’s an article that should warrant an entirely different sphere of conversation. But, it still worries me. What if I come to a point where I outright ignore the vital music of the present, come to the conclusion that the future of music is bunk and still believe that I have the ability to curate the vanguard of pop music? Isn’t that a failure of journalism in and of itself?

Before the turn of the millennium, emo was a term best used to describe an ambiguous, post-hardcore punk sound that had been evolving in the American underground music scene for about 15 years. Perhaps “best used” isn’t the right term as much as the term was saddled upon this sound: Just as many musicians tagged with the name today, it had been a point of annoying contention since it was first uttered in the community centers and tiny, all ages clubs in D.C. where the first “emocore” bands performed. Unlike the close-minded term the sound was often described as, these teens fused the cathartic dynamics of hardcore with a confrontational pop-twist and blended it all with introspective lyrics that had that was ambiguous as the genre within which these bands found themselves.

Flash forward to the beginning of the 21^st Century, and emo hit an odd nexus between the past, present and future just as it approached its tipping point. 2001 was the year that bands from emo’s first, second and third waves all convened, a year before the “genre” hit its tipping point in mainstream popularity. Fugazi – the band formed by members of two of emocore’s progenitors and the group that influenced nearly every second wave emo act, be it Drive Like Jehu or Sunny Day Real Estate – released their final album, The Argument. A map of the band’s evolving sound, The Argument was perhaps the group’s greatest album and an excellent farewell as the quartet called an indefinite hiatus in 2002.

All the while, many second wave emo bands began to end their respective musical runs in the early part of the decade, and many did so in challenging fashions. Although emo would transform into something of a tangible genre for millions, an almost shallow form of pop-punk in the guise of some bands, many of the second wave groups would exit not with a bang, but with a sound that left many emo apologists scratching their heads. There was Sunny Day Real Estate’s prog-heavy 2000 effort, The Rising Tide, an album that perplexed many longtime fans and left the chaos of their earlier albums on the studio floor. The Promise Ring dropped Wood/Water in 2002, a record that eschewed the group’s potent poppy-punk sound for a retrained, oft-acoustic sound driven completely on harmony. The Get Up Kids followed a similar route with their 2004 album, The Guilt Show.

While many of the titans of emo’s second wave bowed out in seemingly unfashionable ways, one of the period’s second fiddles would push emo onto the charts and into confused adolescent hearts. In the ‘90s, Jimmy Eat World was hardly an emo headliner. But, after being dropped by Capitol Records for failing to produce a big hit single or record, the group quietly recorded what would become the album that helped make emo a sought-after commodity.

Originally titled Bleed American when it was released in 2001, the band changed the name of their third album to Jimmy Eat World following September 11^th. And the album became a smashing sensation, a venerable hit parade and moneymaker at a time when industry types first began to fear illegal downloading. Perhaps Jimmy Eat World’s late career success can be boiled down to timing. In 2001 and 2002, Americans were looking for a certain kind of somber and comforting sound, but one that was ultimately positive following the national tragedy. When there was nowhere to turn in the world of shallow boy-band pop, a song called “The Middle” provided all the comfort one could ask for in a pop song:

It just takes some time/little girl you’re in the middle of the ride/everything, everything will be just fine/everything, everything will be alright

Throw in one heck of a pop hook and mix it in with that undeniable chorus and some positive, comforting lyrics and Jimmy Eat World came away with one of the strongest singles of the decade. Considering “The Middle” helped usher emo into the mainstream, it’s odd to think of how “emo” has become almost synonymous with “depressed.”

While Jimmy Eat World survived emo’s second wave for 21^st Century chart glory, emo’s third wave was well in full swing. Often described in Christ-like fashion amongst his most-rabid fans and critics, Chris Carrabba was stirring things up in the world of emo. Cathartic and punk inspired, Carrabba’s most affecting moments came in the form of his solo, acoustic-guitar driven ditties under the name Dashboard Confessional. Carrabba became something of a fixture in the mainstream music press, and his role as poster boy for the genre seemed solidified.

Though Carrabba plays the same heart wrenching tunes to a smaller group of cult fans today, his meteoric rise in the mainstream and substantially-longer career as an afterthought in the press have transformed Carrabba into a different kind of poster boy for emo. If emo had any solid definition following the aughts, it’s been lost in the translation of pop culture this past decade. Carrabba was the image of emo at the first half of the decade, but thanks to pop culture’s ever-shrinking attention span, emo’s transformed into something completely different at the end of 2009. Carrabba represents the odd staying power and ambiguity of the genre at a time when everyone seems to have a definition of “emo” down pat. Whereas earlier in the decade, emo was synonymous with well-adjusted, upper-middle class teenagers who wore Abercrombie & Fitch and sought to force all their existential quandaries on failed relationships and romantic longing, emo has somehow become associated with depressed, potentially-suicidal tweens who drape their bodies in all things black and could potentially be members of a cult, maybe.

Or has it? For every person that thinks they know what emo means, there are about several hundreds of people ready to disagree. For that, we’ve got the middle aughts to be thankful for. At a time when “emo” was being used to describe any up and coming independent band by the most well-meaning of music critics, the linear “genre” of emo saw a number of inventive albums and bands. Say Anything’s …is a Real Boy. Pedro The Lion’s Achilles’ Heel. Thursday’s War All The Time. Coheed & Cambria’s In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3. The Format’s Dog Problems. Even the “backpacker rap” of Rhymesayers artists like Atmosphere and P.O.S., or Rhode Island spoken-word rapper Sage Francis, followed some of the same post-hardcore dynamics of their emo peers to produce a solid number of albums often roped into the “emo” bubble and augmented the definition of the term.

While emo (and screamo) was getting the full court press style coverage in everything from The New York Times to Rolling Stone, something was awry. It was something that only Jessica Hopper was able to verbalize in a 2003 Punk Planet article titled “Emo: Where The Girls Aren’t.”

And then something broke—And it wasn’t Bob Nanna’s or Mr. Dashboard’s sensitive hearts. Records by a legion of done-wrong boys lined the record store shelves. Every record was a concept album about a breakup, damning the girl on the other side. Emo’s contentious monologue—it’s balled fist Peter Pan mash-note dilemmas—it’s album length letters from pussy-jail—it’s cathedral building in ode to man-pain and Robert-Bly-isms—it’s woman-induced misery has gone from being descriptive to being prescriptive. Emo was just another forum where women were locked in a stasis of outside observation, observing ourselves through the eyes of others. The prevalence of these bands, the omni-presence of emo’s sweeping sound and it’s growing stronghold in the media and on the Billboard chart codified emo as A SOUND, where previously there had been diversity.

And though some artists pushed the boundaries of where a term like “emo,” could go, others shoved it into a misogynistic, uncreative box. For all their cathartic bleedings, bands like The Used produced “hits” rank with the negative sound Hopper described so well. This, quite unfortunately, became the face that emo has worn throughout the decade, and is part of the reason the genre’s thought to be so worn out.

And the backlash came, though much of it not nearly as intelligent or even knowledgeable as Hopper’s critique. Warped Tour, the preeminent punk summer tour, became ground zero for anti-emo sentiments in the punk community. Elsewhere, the dynamic and image of emo shifted under the guise of two new scene bearers: My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy. Though Fall Out Boy achieved a cross-pop-cultural popularity unsurpassed by most bands, My Chem grew the kind of “cult” fan base that attracted the kind of negative publicity for emo that couldn’t be made up.

Suddenly, more than before, emo transformed from something of a musical term, to a catchall term for an odd subculture, with little to no roots in the “genre.” It became a type of fashion, inspired by My Chem’s obsession with gothic Tim Burton wear. It became a “state of mind” which parents were told to fear for their kids’ safety. It became hated, like nothing before. Be it the anti-emo beatings in Mexico, the threats of banning emo in Russia, or the simple-minded misunderstandings of local news reporters across the U.S. warning parents of the “dangerous new trend,” emo became huge, and not in the good way.

Although all would seem lost for emo at the end of the decade, it’s reached a curious nexus not unlike the one at the beginning of the decade. Though all signs would seem to point to its “death,” emo has continued to evolve, perhaps in some cases, mutate. Emo is still a misunderstood and maligned “culture” in some circles. And yes, many of the negative aspects of its popular form have continued to thrive in the guise of fifth wave emo-inspired bands operating under the scrunk and crunkcore sounds.

But, perhaps there is a light at the end of the decade. The reunion fever that has caught the indie world by storm churned out headlines that screamed “Sunny Day Real Estate” and “Get Up Kids” across the country. Though nostalgia is so often a dangerous poison in pop culture, every Jawbox reunion performance on TV allows people to refocus their perceptions of emo, and even where it can go.

More over, with band like Brand New challenging the very sonic nature of what emo has become and crushing the Billboard 200 at the same time, it can spell a new crossroads for emo. And all he while, the “indie” scene has been a source of newfound evolutions for emo. Groups like Maritime, The Appleseed Cast and Owen have quietly been creating some of the best music to be paired with the term “emo” this decade. Over the past few years, there’s even been something of an “emo Renaissance” in the underground punk scene, with tiny, DIY bands with names like Algernon Cadwallader, Empire! Empire! (I Was A Lonely Estate) and Monument producing songs steeped in emo’s second wave.

Though emo would seem to be a lost cause at the end of what has been a very long decade in the genre’s existence, if anything, it’s merely proven the definitive point that’s made emo such a longstanding presence in music: It’s all about perspective.

Jimmy Eat World – “The Middle”:

[youtubevid id="tVP0b8qvZg8"]

The band may do something again; we don’t know. We see each other all the time. We certainly always have work to do concerning the band, and we’re still working on projects within the band—like right now we’re trying to get every live tape that we have from the group archived on the Internet so people can listen to 1200 Fugazi shows! [Laughter] If they want to! You know, shit like that. We’re always dealing with stuff, there’s always an outside chance that we may decide to do something.

Is this new information? Not really. The members of Fugazi have always been fairly opened minded about their rather opened ended status. I’ve heard Ian MacKaye discuss the potential/non-potential future of the band of the band on many occasions (once at a one-on-one interview at Dischord house, other times in numerous interviews). It’s an attitude I appreciate, especially amongst waves and waves of reunions where one has to wonder if there’s some hidden agenda behind every band that ended in tatters is suddenly on good terms again.

Fugazi was always a pragmatic band, and their hiatus came to be due to outside commitments that tore the members in separate directions. I can’t imagine that those circumstances have gotten any easier, considering Joe Lally’s living in Italy with his family and MacKaye recently had a baby with Amy Farina.

And yet, who knows what may happen. Perhaps Picciotto may catch the touring bug again, and Brendan Canty, MacKaye and Lally might be able to coordinate their schedules to play some shows. Who knows. That was always a possibility before, and it will be in the future. Unlike any number of recent reunions, the potential reconvening won’t have the stench of, well, reunion fever as it were. Mostly because it wouldn’t be a reunion. Fugazi didn’t end because of egos, botched record contracts or insane drug fatalities. They’re four normal guys who have retained their friendship through nearly two decades of recording, touring and performing together and sometimes other responsibilities just get in the way.

The always-there potential for a Fugazi show speaks to a certain optimistic quality of the band that normally isn’t given the same light as their lyrical societal criticisms: namely, they didn’t want to hedge their bets and awkwardly call Fugazi a day. So why does everyone else? I guess it’s just a method to one’s own madness. In any case, I’ve always got my calendar open and prepped for a flight home to D.C. just in case a Fugazi show is on the horizon…

Fugazi – “Shut The Door”:

[youtubevid id="apuLs_ayKRM"]

Dischord in the Aughts was something many of the label’s ardent fans never saw coming. The beloved DIY label seemed to be going through changes no one was quite prepared to handle. Fugazi, an act who’s importance in punk and independent rock cannot be boiled down into a mere sentence, bid farewell a year after the release of the excellent 2001 album The Argument. The label’s second-longest running band, Lungfish, began to slow to a hiatus halfway through the decade after 2005′s Feral Hymns. Most of the big name acts that called the label home had either broken up (Nation of Ulysses, The Make Up) or left Dischord for major label disappointment (Shudder to Think, Jawbox). The Aughts appeared to be something of a mystery for the storied label.

There’s a message in this history somewhere. For folks who stopped following the label’s releases beyond Y2K because of the lack of any familiar bands, Rachel Burke sung it best on Beauty Pill’s “The Mule On The Plane”:

“Look beyond the things you know.”

Simply put, Dischord in the Aughts provides a fascinating example of a community-bred and-inspired label undergoing unforseen change. It’s not the first time Dischord went through some heady change: the transition from its hardcore heavy catalogue to a range of post-hardcore acts in the mid-’80s is well documented in books like Dance of Days and Our Band Could Be Your Life. Yet, whereas the change at Dischord in the ’80s reflected a post-adolescent maturation beyond the schema of hardcore, the label’s evolution in the Aughts has been something of a family tree. Dischord was no longer an insular friend group of youngsters. It became a group adults with children and more responsibilities than most touring acts endure; it became an extended family tree consisting of newly-minted adults inspired by the previous decades’ Dischord artists; it became a rambunctious, eclectic collective that included dozens of little voices.

One of the more intriguing acts to come out of Dischord the past decade is easily Beauty Pill. Though Q And Not U became the franchise band once Fugazi bowed out, Beauty Pill has a certain ambiguous relationship with punk that’s nearly unrivaled in the Dischord catalogue and downright negligible to overlook. Today, you’d toss Beauty Pill’s sound into the ever-confusing “indie” label without second thought, but a record like The Unsustainable Lifestyle is more aurally dexterous than some commercialized genre term could ever provide.

Image via Wikipedia

Released in 2004, The Unsustainable Lifestyle continues to sound like a revelation today. It might not bring about world peace anytime soon, but the kind of musical montage the group created still seems novel today. There are the usual elements of storied-DC post-hardcore guitar work mixed in with some pop-friendly piano arrangements, hip-hop break beats, studio dub experimentation, twee sentimentality and lyrics that span the depths of societal critique, pop music polemics and simply inventive storytelling.

Musically, Beauty Pill are one of the most adept bands to release an album on Dischord. It’s quite hard to find a song as achingly simple and heart-wrenching as “Prison Song (A Love Song Called Will You Come Visit Me In Prison),” where Burke’s multi-tracked vocals are drapped over an acoustic guitar and the spare wurlitzer. And yet, one of the most striking aspects of the song isn’t merely its simplicity, but its lyrics and executed performance: the juxtaposition of a comforting female voice atop the narrative of a lovelorn inmate makes the track that much more memorable.

The ingenious use of lyrical and musical dynamics are, quite unfortunately, something that many bands just don’t quite seem to understand or test out. And Beauty Pill just got it right with The Unsustainable Lifestyle. Be it the cinematic music providing cover for Chad Clark’s homespun story of cool-chasing bands and fans on the opening tune “Goodnight for Real,” or Burke’s sweet vocals serenading an instrumental straight out of mid-’90s emo territory providing the “other side” of a relationship (in all its definitions) on “I’m Just Gonna Close My Eyes For A Second,” every song holds it own in impressive ways.

And yet, despite all of its fantastic qualities, The Unsustainable Lifestyle and Beauty Pull are practically unheard of outside certain circles. Which is a downright shame. For if every music fan who loves Fugazi were to give a song like “Won’t You Be Mine” a spin and hear Clark’s intelligent, insightful and catchy indictment of gangsta rappers, The Unsustainable Lifestyle could have been an early success in the eventual rise of “indie” culture rather than an unheard-of gem.

Beauty Pill – “Terrible Things”:

[youtubevid id="mMOlApPpiLA&feature=related"]

What’s even odder is Lloyd’s thesis statement on the origin of emo, which he sort of drops in at the end:

Rites of Spring and Sunny Day Real Estate did not start the emo genre.

Eh? Lloyd continues to throw out vague, inconsistencies, many of which I can agree with (genres are a culmination of the sounds that have influenced the bands), and some that are rife for contradiction. Namely the last point:

With all of these factors in place a band and or a label had to start the wheels in motion forming the emo genre.

Huh? Didn’t he just say Rites of Spring did not start emo? And Dischord doesn’t count because emo didn’t rise solely out of it?

This happens to be an ongoing problem with people seeking a solid definition for emo: the fact that the genre/sound exists as a fluid and evolving concept that many individuals ignore simply because of the condescending nature of the term makes it damn hard to tack a pin in it and call it a done day.

But, those irrelevancies aside. Rites are duly credited for starting emo: that’s where the term as a definition for a musical sound came from. Period. Not Husker Du, who Lloyd credits as an important factor. The fact is, Zen Arcade came out after Rites were a fully formed band with an entire pedigree of songs (1984 to be exact). Rites were listening to all sorts of hardcore (nothing I’ve read remotely mentions Husker Du though), and sought to challenge the trends within their own community by embracing a poppier sound. They took from many a British popper: The Buzzcocks are most credited as an influence there. But nothing about Husker Du.

And Lloyd’s idea of indie rock fusing the gap between Rites and Sunny Day is… well, a bit much. Lloyd also calls into play grunge as an important influence on emo and bridging these two bands: hardly. As far as grunge goes, the only role that played was its skyrocketing popularity behind Nirvana led to sale numbers that helped Sub Pop move out of the red zone and avoid bankruptcy so that they could go on and sign SDRE: grunge’s influence on emo is really relevant in a business capacity. Emo was a complete change from grunge, which is why Sunny Day startled so many people in Seattle: it was different. They were different. They took from hardcore, took from bands like Rites, Fugazi, Lungfish, Shudder To Think, and many of the DC bands that Lloyd overlooked. Yes, as Lloyd mentions, there are too many bands to name, and many of them he overlooked when trying to tie these two distinct bands (ROS + SDRE together). Since when do you need to fill in a time blank in terms of bands that came about that were important and led to another important band of the same sound anyway? How many of the new shitgaze (or whatever you want to call them) bands actually took other sounds and used them in their own songwriting? It’s always possible, and often an excellent appeal to change. But I can’t see Vivian Girls having taken lots of notes on IDM when they wrote their fuzzy, 60s surf garage rock sound. (It’s possible, but after the interview where they dissed bands that use a dancey drum beat, I doubt it.)

But there are plenty of bands that “filled in those years.” Just on Dischord there were a bunch (again, Embrace, Happy Go Licky, One Last Wish, Nation of Ulysses, Fugazi, Lungfish, Shudder To Think, Jawbox etc etc). And then there’s Jawbreaker’s take on the sound from DC. And then there’s Drive Like Jehu’s take on the DC sound and it’s impact on the San Diego scene: that whole arty-hardcore-meets-DC-emocore is indebted to the DC scene. Gravity Records, Heroin, Antioch Arrow, etc etc. And all of this in the years between 1984 (Rites of Spring) and 1994 (release of Diary).

That’s a lot of time, and many of these bands aren’t remembered because, in terms of folklore or the progression of a genre, only a few – those considered to be important for one reason or another – are consistently remembered and repeated to the next person, and the next person, and so on and so forth. That is an evolution of a genre, not some influential indie band that has nothing to do with these groups: no offense to The Pixies or Sonic Youth, but those bands hardly share anything with the first wave of emo. And because genres evolve, and many within different spheres and cultures (aka underground or mainstream), it may sound different at different points along the way. So, of course emo sounds different than it did before: it’s not static. Some things grew, other bands made their individual changes, and other bands made changes on other bands’ changes. Though the definition is rather fluid, a general line is fairly recognizable (one that doesn’t exactly include Sonic Youth, who were more no wave affiliated and who’s experimentation is mostly left out of many an “emo” act, or The Pixies, who tend to have a fairly basic pop sound that, as it’s well known, is more a grunge influence than an emo one) and observable.

I do have to give Jacobs a solid round for putting The Promise Ring at the top: considering the type of emo-tive image Jacobs is shooting for, and the band’s impact on the future of the genre. Still, Jacobs does go for the condescending route while observing the genre in list form, even praising Andy Greenwald’s Nothing Feels Good (Jacobs’ perspective was revealed fairly clearly when he called the book a “must-read manifesto.”)

Still, a big odd spot of confusion: Fugazi. Or the lack thereof. Great to mention Rites of Spring (though as proto-emo? Come on, the term was first used to describe that very band!), but not even a hint at Fugazi? And instead name check Minor Threat when describing the band? Yes, they are the go-to hardcore band, but Rites were a post-hardcore act, evading many of the redundancies of hardcore and doing things dramatically different than Minor Threat.

But the real kicker with the lack of any Fugazi-inclusion is Cursive. Alright, I get that most people don’t like to include Fugazi into the whole emo arrangement because that either A) messes with their ideals of the band itself or B) invades their definition of emo with something more multidimensional. But to mention a band who’s entire first record literally sounds like a take on the early part of Fugazi’s discography – aka Cursive – without mentioning the inspirational band is just odd.

And no At The Drive-In? That’s just surprising.

The Promise Ring – “12 Sweaters Red”:

[audio http://leorgalil.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/02-12-sweaters-red.mp3]

Last week Rolling Stone chatted up Rivers Cuomo about Weezer’s new album Raditude. Near the end we asked about the 15th anniversary of their debut single “Undone – The Sweater Song,” which he now admits is “almost a complete rip-off” of Metallica’s 1986 classic “Welcome Home (Sanitarium).”

If you read on, Cuomo mentions that he did not, as the title of the RS piece dictates, “rip off” Metallica, but rather, years later, realized the guitar riffs sound the same.

And it is uncanny. Take a listen:

Metallica – “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)”:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abHUigYaHRw]

Weezer – “Undone (The Sweater Song)” (live):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPA7E3IvbRc]

Obviously, each track undergoes their own transgressions and dips and turns, but that first set of guitar chords and that basic pattern is eerily similar.

If you believe that Cuomo ripped off Metallica, and even if you don’t, it puts another cog in the Weezer ain’t emo machine. For folks who’ve picked up Rivers’ Edge: The Weezer Story, there is a length of material in which it’s revealed that Cuomo was heavily into, well, heavy metal as a child, specifically those legendary licks from the likes of KISS. One of the many things that sets Weezer apart from most of the emo acts before and around their start is their heavy reliance on power-pop tinged heavy metal. Few acts outside of Fugazi wished to channel the same ideas and music of heavy metal in the emo/punk/post-hardcore/post-punk realm, although Weezer’s influence on the emo world since the millennium (along with various other contributing factors) has changed things around drastically.

But, I digress.

Cuomo was always something of a metalhead-loving nerd type, much like Chuck Klosterman, and was never one to hide it. And he managed to bring it out quite well in many a Weezer tune. It wouldn’t surprise me if Cuomo spun Master of Puppets back in the day, as that album still looms large in the metal community. Though he didn’t consciously rip off “Welcome Home,” it wouldn’t be surprising to think that the opening guitar composition somehow popped into his head in a new form while Cuomo wrote “Undone.”

But, as with so many things, we may never know what Cuomo was thinking at the time… or now really.

“500 Days” is, as far as genres go, a hybrid picture, something of an emo version of a romantic comedy: It disdains machismo, futurism, violence and volume in favor of subtlety and heartfelt, if often mumbled, emotion.

The one time Tom really runs afoul of Summer’s feelings is when he throws a punch at a guy who’s been hassling her at a bar (downtown’s highly photogenic Broadway Bar, by the way). Tom is one of a number of emo leading men to emerge from Hollywood this year, joining sensitive types in “Adventureland” and “Away We Go,” among other pictures. As Gawker noted this week, the cineplex has been full of “gentle, sensitive, geeky male outsiders with a love of Lou Reed and snug hoodies.”

With its very particular aesthetic point of view and calibrated tone, “(500) Days” shares much cultural ground not just with indie bands but with emo culture broadly defined — with journals like McSweeney’s (whose founder, Dave Eggers, cowrote “Away We Go”), radio programs like “This American Life” (whose host, Ira Glass, is Tom with chunky black glasses and a decade or two older) and so on.

Well, I wouldn’t expect an architecture critic to have a complete understanding of a cultural enigma like emo, and Christopher Hawthorne certainly proves that idea. He is, in effect, confusing sometimes fluid state of emo fans and indie culture, though all his descriptions match that of indie culture. Most “emos” – be they the Revolution Summer folks in the 80s, Fugazi’s punk-for-one-and-one-for-punk calls to arms of the late 80s through the aughts, hell even My Chemical Romance – don’t match Hawthorne’s description. Even the stereotypes of “emos” today – depressed punk youths with a fetish for self-violence – doesn’t match that description. Hawthorne’s words are of indie through and through, from a love of McSweeny’s right down to the Morrissey fandom from this quick spec on the movie.

Among the many camps, Morrissey tends to be tossed into the indie one, and Regina Spektor without question as well. Emo is always, always land of the punk, even if it is an extremely watered down version of that.

To break it down a little further and call it a night, sensitive does not always equal emo culture. Everyone has feelings, every music has some sort of emotional depth behind it (even if it is a shallow pit, there are some feelings elicited towards how hollow a music can be). THAT is one of many reasons numerous emo musicians diss the term and a reason that so many confuse the two.

Night all.