DOWSING THE DOUR MIDWEST MOOD

​Having presented my argument on the affinity between emo music and its subculture, with Romanticism in my last post, I will now proceed to present just a small amount of the evidence of the shared affinity between emo lyrics and Romantic poetry. Part of the joy in doing this, is to share in the pleasure and relief these words bring to those who read and hear them. I also have a mix you can listen to above of fifteen primo emo songs for those times when you are just in a mood. I have the track list below, and as always, if you like the artists, consider picking up one of their albums. A few of the groups have some really great reissues out from Numero Group. I threw in a space-rock song and a slowcore piece for good measure.
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And as I mentioned before, I am not a big fan of trigger warnings, but here I think it is warranted. This article and the music talks about depression, cutting, self-harm and suicide so it may be distressing to listen to and read. If you find such material distressing you may want to read about something else. If you need help, you can talk to someone. Call the number 988 on your phone for the 988 lifeline. They understand that life's challenges can sometimes be difficult. Whether you're facing mental health struggles, emotional distress, alcohol or drug use concerns, or if you just need someone to talk to, their caring counselors are there for you. You are not alone.

The two songs I analyze below, by Grandview and Sorority Noise, are included in the mix.
I was inspired to make this mix and write on these themes, based on the burgeoning revival of Romanticism we see here on substack from writers like Ted Gioia and Romanticon.
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First up let us take a look at the poem by John Clare poem I Am!, perhaps his most famous, sometimes known as Witten In Northampton County Asylum, where he was remanded while it was composed:

I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?
My friends forsake me like a memory lost.
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish, an oblivious host,
Shadows of life, whose very soul is lost.
And yet I am—I live—though I am toss’d
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dream,
Where there is neither sense of life, nor joys,
But the huge shipwreck of my own esteem
And all that’s dear. Even those I loved the best
Are strange—nay, they are stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod,
For scenes where woman never smiled or wept;
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept
Full of high thoughts, unborn. So let me lie,
The grass below; above the vaulted sky.

Clare was known as a peasant poet. He was unschooled and came to the art of poesy untrained, and brought with him his world of joy that he had experienced working as a farmhand in the English countryside. He was thus celebrated as a nature poet in his time, but also for his works that evoked the unrequited love he had for Mary Joyce, who due to class differences, remained forever unattainable to him. These feelings were shown in his poem “First Love,” but the sense of melancholy that resulted from his prolonged heartbreak at never being able to live a life with his love, contributed to the lengthening of his depression and his later descent into delusional states of mind. He had gone on and had a family with a milkmaid he married and had children with, but he was forever torn by the literary life he aspired to live with his fellow poets and patrons in London, and the realities of his work on the land needed to feed and clothe his six children. After various illnesses his bouts of depression worsened, aggravated by alcoholism, and he was eventually sent to the madhouse, where, ironically, he had the quietude and privacy to write some of his best works.

His poem “I Am!” Externalizes his bleak desperation and loneliness at having been abandoned and institutionalized. It is an evocation of deep loneliness compressed into three perfect six line stanzas, as if all the pain he had suffered and experienced in his life had been distilled. His away from his family, and his friends in the literary circles would now have nothing to do with him. What little faith he had in himself has now been shipwrecked, and he longs to be taken away from the world and into a heavenly realm where at least the Creator will acknowledge his existence and worth.

It is romantic laments such as these that we find echoed in the world of emo music, such as the song “To the Sun” by the band Grandview. “It was the timing, and the bags under my eyes / It was the look on your face when you said I look tired / I’d rather watch you turn away / ‘Cause you don’t look at me the same anymore / And I don’t blame you for a second / You’re giving up on me.”

The jangly guitars chiming out in minor keys, alternating between desperation and aggravated aggression show a moment when lovers or friends betray the promise of their former selves even as they go on to acknowledge how everything they built was made up of dysfunction. It is a denouement in the underworld. For the singer of Grandview, unlike Clare, even the thought of God does not bring solace to the sense of desperation and personal failure that is also at root in bringing their personal relationships to ruin.
“I keep trying to fight and trying to run / But I hate myself for changing / Every step of the way / And I can’t help thinking / That if we’re made in his reflection / I’m curious / I’m curious / Did God drink himself to sleep the night he created me?”

As with many great things in this world, the band only put out an EP and one album, and then they disappeared. Perhaps generating and expressing such a level of emotion, and musical craftsmanship, is too much. Bands of course, are notorious for being combustible, but I do wonder what happened to these people who made great art together.

The poet Thomas Chatterton who died by suicide at the age of seventeen was another who was here and then quickly gone. The way he left the world and the poems he left behind contributed in no small way to his legend. There were many who discounted him, but the godfather of the Gothic, Horace Walpole, did much to rescue his reputation.

In Chatterton’s poem “Picture of Autumn” we get a fleeting sense of the melancholy mood that pervaded his life.

When autumn, bleak and sun-burnt, do appear,
With his gold hand gilting the falling leaf,
Bringing up winter to fulfil the year,
Bearing upon his back the riped sheaf;
When all the hills with woody seed are white,
When levying fires, and lemes, do meet from far the sight:
When the fair apple, rudde as even sky,
Do bend the tree unto the fructile ground.
When juicy pears, and berries of black dye,
Do dance in air and call the eyne around;
Then, be the even foul, or even fair,
Methinks my hearte’s joy is stained with some care.

The song “No Halo” by Sorority Noise provides a useful contrast, when considering Chatterton, his short life,
and the work he left behind.

“I’m placing bets against myself / And honestly, I’m a mess / With the car engulfed in flames / I am a wreck / Things I should have said through call or text / Just really been so busy and I regret / ‘Cause if there’s no rest for the wicked / I’m as evil as it gets (thing I should have said) / So I didn’t show up to your funeral / But I showed up to your house / And I didn’t move a muscle / I was quiet as a mouse / And I swore I saw you in there / But I was looking at myself.”

The band themselves called the album this came from, 2017’s You’re Not As _____ As You Think, “an emotional bulldozer” whose writing and composition followed the death of close friends and their own struggles with depression.

This is why I call emo musicians and romantic poets the bards of Saturn. Since classical times the planet has been associated with melancholy. Nowhere is this connection more thoroughly explored than in that mighty tome Saturn and Melancholy by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl issued by and researched at the Warburg Institute. The book may not cover emo music, or much else from contemporary pop culture, yet even in this realm the influence of the saturnine influences is present. Sadness is a part of the human condition. Artists have long sought to treat it and express it in their own ways. This has often been at odds with the way it has been viewed by psychiatry.

On one point we can perhaps all agree: leaving it to fester does no good for anyone. Probing the inner wound to expunge its poison is as legitimate a treatment as Prozac, and far more sane than the barbaric and frankly sadomasochist techniques used by psychiatrists in the past. The world of beauty and art may most often be ascribed to the influence of Venus, who is rightly praised for her youth, charm and grace, but old man Saturn, dry and desiccated as he is, also has his vessels in the world of the arts, who sing of melancholy and the bitter fruits born of harsh experience, and the wisdom it breeds as the flowers of youth wither in old age.

DOWSING THE DOUR MIDWEST MOOD MIX

1. Northstar - Cinderella

​2. idialedyournumber - I Found A Pulse

3. Microwave - Keep Up

4. American Football - Uncomfortably Numb

5. Jejune - Regrets Are Unanswered Dreams

6. Joi de Vivre - Magnet

7. Everyone Asked About You - Letters Never Sent

8. ​The Appleseed Cast - Forever Longing the Golden Sunsets

9. Siverstein - Giving Up

10. Trophy Eyes - Sean

11. Grandview - To the Sun

12. Dowsing - Midwest Living

13. Duster - Feel No Joy

14. Hum - Why I Like the Robins

15. Sorority Noise - No Halo