“I’m writing a teenage symphony to God.”
- Brian
Wilson on the composition process for Smile
The most reliable method music has of getting noticed and
beloved is to be emotionally relatable. Unlike aesthetic appeal, which is
subjective, or technical ability, which can be off-putting in its virtuosity, a
song that contains emotional rawness based around love, pain, or some other
primal human emotion will almost always find an audience, and a devoted one at
that. If a listener can connect to a song emotionally, they will forgive almost
any flaw or shortcoming that may occur to a more objective critic; a belief in
a song’s message will outweigh almost everything else.
There’s a reason, after all, why the first wave of
mainstream pop was orchestrated pocket symphonies built around love stories,
sad or otherwise. The early 60s were filled to the brim with aching, ‘young’
stories: tales of rebellion, squashed ambition, star-crossed lovers, or even
simple hobbies like surfing and driving. That first wave of pop appealed to
young folks (the market most likely to be buying singles and hanging around
radios) with stories they could find relatable, either by some core detail or
through some massive-in-scale emotion. When you’re a teenager, after all, every
defeat, victory, and heartbreak has an intense poignancy. It all feels like something
out of the movies, mainly because moviemakers decided to tap into that idea.
That pop ideal of appealing to the emotions of the young
never really went away, but the scale of those appeals has varied wildly. The
afore-mentioned pop symphonies died shortly after Brian Wilson’s dream of a “teenage
symphony to God” did, and both for arguably the same reason: The Beatles giving
birth to psychedelic rock via Sgt. Pepper. Genre descriptions aside, the
Fab Four altered the course of pop by putting more of an emphasis on the music
itself. Rather than being a backdrop wall-of-sound, The Beatles moved their
experiments into the foreground, and were followed in this, most immediately,
by Jimi Hendrix, and arguably topped by the dawn of progressive rock.
There were other factors in that shift as well. Synthesizers
and drum machines offered a brave new world of tightly controlled, regimented
music, foreshadowing the dance crazes of later eras. More importantly, they
provided a novelty that was grounded in musical experimentation rather than
emotional appeal. Pop slowly began to shift, expanding itself to include the
novelty of robot rock and art music.
As music began to move into the deep, pretentious end of the
pool, punk and New Wave arose to attempt to swing things back to the emotive
end. Bereft of the massive budgets and studios that early-60s pop had enjoyed,
punk musicians simply screamed in order to make themselves heard. They made
their music as loud and as fast as they possibly could in order to mimic the
scale of pop symphonies. It worked well enough, with punk setting the stage for
the 80s, a decade largely focused on making “relatable” music to go with the
dance hits.
The next pushback was done by the people who weren’t being
related to by pop; the misfits and outcasts. Whenever a musician makes music
with the focus of being relatable to some demographic or group (for example,
hair metal’s focus on oversexed LA party-goers, a market that would later be
latched onto by Jersey Shore) they risk alienating a complementary group of
people. This wasn’t as large an issue with the emotionally-focused music of the
early-60s, simply because it was too milquetoast to really offend anyone. As
anyone who’s listened to “Rocket Queen” or any Motley Crue song will attest,
hair metal and other such genres often offended more people than it ingratiated. Other genres born in
the late-70s and 80s were similar in their perceived exclusions, with metal,
rap, goth rock, and disco all getting shamed in the mass media for being
sub-cultural phenomena.
The largest pushback (alternative and college rock both
predate it) to these small-group-focused genres came in the early-90s with
grunge, music that stressed alienation and, often, a complete lack of humor.
Grunge appealed to the jaded miscreants in colleges across the nation who
scorned the large-scale, appealing music that clogged up malls and clubs, and
the genre enjoyed a brief surge of popularity. However, like those 80s genres
before it, all grunge really did was create a counter-market for music with a
broad appeal, the contemporary R&B of our modern radios. Like early
electronica, this is music where beats and inventive production have replaced
human emotion; music that has chosen to appeal to dancefloors instead of
individuals.
Thanks to these current musical trends, as well as a
lingering sentiment from grunge that we should be suspicious of overly emotive
music, epic-in-scale emotion has become a subject of mockery. Take emo, for
example. Emo is essentially a marginally poppier version of screamo, a type of
hardcore punk focused on yelling about things slightly louder than typical punk. Emo tends to be more accessible,
as well as more focused on the type of boy-doesn’t-get-girl stories that are so
essential to teenage angst.
Emo is essentially a more crass version of the sad bastard
vocal jazz songs that Frank Sinatra made so popular in the late-50s. The lyrics
are simpler, the music is rougher, and one can barely detect melodies behind
the singers’ harsh yells, but the core idea remains the same. It’s grunge with
a bleeding heart.
Taking Brand New’s The Devil And God Are Raging Inside Me
as an example, we can see the same sudden shifts between loud and quiet that
the Pixies developed and that Nirvana popularized. This album takes them a bit
farther, using such shifts in ways that resemble the scare chords from horror
movies more than the choruses of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”; the sudden leap in
volume near the end of “Luca”, for example. The album also shares grunge’s love
of pounding drums and extremely distorted guitars. The de-emphasis on virtuosic
solos, a holdover from grunge and emo’s punk origins, is also present.
That being said, emo stretches many of those techniques
farther than the popular grunge groups of the early-90s ever did. The roots in
symphonic 60s pop I mentioned before can be seen in how exaggerated the album
can be, starting with the album title. Like Roy Orbison or the various artists
under Phil Spector’s watchful eye before them, Brand New seem to have
disregarded the idea of subtlety and like Pearl Jam they do so with very little
humor or lightness. Luckily, Jesse Lacey and Vincent Accardi don’t have the
same overbearing quality as Eddie Vedder; there isn’t any grunge-scatting on this
album, thankfully. The subject matter is also radically different; Pearl Jam
tended to sing in stories, first-person or otherwise, while Brand New sing in
broad strokes about lives and emotions. Again, there’s a difference in scale.
The most obvious difference between Brand New’s emo and the
baroque pop practiced by Spector and the like, however, is simply popularity.
Though they’ve had a few moderate successes critically and popularly, Brand New
never really made a dent on the mainstream outside of their most recent album, Daisy,
which debuted at number 6 on the Billboard 200 chart. Both in terms of rawness and
emotional appeal, emo is hopelessly out-of-touch with present-day pop.
More curious than its lack of success is the lack of respect
emo gets in most musical communities. Emo as punchline has been a cliché for
almost as long as nu-metal has been despised, and both can probably be traced
to the emotional honesty at those genres’ core. It’s much easier to most an
honest feeling or opinion than it is to mock the apathy of grunge or robotic,
habitual joy of plastic pop, and while mocking twee’s cheerful randomness can
get you labeled an asshole, mocking the outsized angst, apathy, and anger of
teenagers, at worst, gets you labeled as an adult.
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