Rockpedia
Rock branch Full entry · 1985

Emo

Emerged 1985 Origin Washington DC, USA Subgenres 4 Vocals Sung and screamed
Heaviness
3
Speed
5
Melody
9

Sung and screamed. Clean singing and harsh vocals trade off, often chorus against verse.

In short

Hardcore in which the lyrics turn confessional and the voice cracks. The term started as an insult and became an entire decade of fashion.

How it sounds

  • Quiet-to-loud dynamics, with the voice cracking at peak intensity.
  • Open tunings and arpeggios instead of full chords.
  • First-person confessional lyrics, sometimes embarrassingly sincere on purpose.

Hear what that means

  • Where the voice breaks

    Rites of Spring - Rites of Spring

    The 1985 record the word was coined for, made by hardcore musicians in Washington DC. Listen for the point where the singing gives out and turns into shouting: putting that break in the right place is the genre's whole technique.

    Open on YouTube
  • Two guitars, not playing together

    Sunny Day Real Estate - Diary

    Neither guitar is accompanying the other. They play separate parts that meet occasionally, with open strings left ringing so the chord keeps a note that does not belong in it - the sound most people mean by emo before the word meant a haircut.

    Open on YouTube
  • The odd metre nobody points at

    American Football - American Football

    It is in 6/4 against 4/4 and sounds relaxed rather than clever, which is the opposite of what progressive rock does with the same information. Midwest emo hides its arithmetic; that is the difference.

    Open on YouTube

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Each opens at the start of the recording.

The specifics

Tempo
120-170 bpm
Song length
3-5 min
Tuning
Standard, with the interest in the voicings rather than the tuning — open strings left ringing against fretted notes, so a chord keeps a note that does not belong to it.
Production
Close and unglamorous, with the vocal left slightly imperfect. A pitch-corrected emo record would contradict itself.
Written about
Failure at intimacy, Memory and place, Shame, Self-accusation rather than blame

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Two parts playing different things at once, arpeggiated and clean, using those ringing open strings to keep the harmony ambiguous and unresolved.
  • Bass Melodic and mixed up front, filling the space where a rhythm guitar would sit in any other post-hardcore band.
  • Drums Loose, with a habit of dropping the downbeat, and often playing in an odd metre the guitar simply ignores.
  • Vocals Sung until it can no longer be sung, and then shouted — the break in the voice is the structural device, and putting it in the right place is most of the songwriting.

What it isn't

That emo is a 2000s fashion — the fringe, the eyeliner, the mall. The genre starts in 1985 in Washington DC, among hardcore musicians who had exhausted what shouting at the government could do and turned the same intensity on themselves; the word is a contraction of "emotional hardcore", and it was an insult then too. What most people mean by emo is a commercial wave nearly twenty years downstream, which this tree files separately as emo-pop. Both are real, and they are not the same music.

Told apart from

  • Screamo Screamo takes the break in the voice and makes it the whole record: shorter, faster, and screamed throughout rather than arriving there.
  • Emo pop Emo-pop keeps the subject matter and rebuilds the song around a chorus designed to be heard on the radio. The confessional voice, professional architecture.
  • Post-hardcore Emo's parent, and the difference is what the intensity is aimed at. Post-hardcore points outward at institutions; emo points inward at the person singing.
  • Midwest emo The Midwest variant is where the interlocking guitars and the odd metres come from, and it is far more instrumentally intricate than the word emo usually implies.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

The word appeared in Washington DC in 1985 as 'emocore', a reaction to hardcore's emotionally flat toughness. Rites of Spring came first; Sunny Day Real Estate brought the formula into the 1990s on a grunge label. The term started as an insult and is rejected by nearly every band it describes.

Descended from

Branches into

On the timeline

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.