SATURN'S BARDS: DEPRESSIVE EMO LYRICISM & MELANCHOLY ROMANTIC POETRY

I am an eclectic listener, and for the past few months one of the genres of music I've been getting into was emo music. I'd always been a fan of it in a small way, but never investigated it beyond the surface. One of the reasons I caught the emo bug was because I'd become a fan of this group from Halifax, Nova Scotia, idialedyournumber, that I discovered on YouTube and Bandcamp. There music was pure ear worms for me. Then I read an article in America's only newspaper, County Highwway, about the band American Football, and I started listening to them. Being a midwesterner, I related to the story of "midwest emo" told in the article, and how the fusion of math rock, indie charm, and emo sensibility all fused together in an era, time and place where affordable rent and small homes made playing music in basements and garages the place where a new hybrid of rock music could percolate up out of the underground and infect anxious listeners. 

I also got into emo because it is so blatantly emotional and irrational. It wears its heart on its sleeve and is a perfect antidote to the coldly logical world of the technocracy. I also like emo because it is something of an underdog in terms of genre. It's not something many people seem to want to cop to liking. I always root for the underdog, and so this got me to liking the genre even more. If it ever was cool, its not so cool anymore. I've also been following along with the idea of the New Romanticism being written about by critics and thinkers such as Ted Gioia, and the crew of writers on the Romanticon substack. 

As all these things swirled in my mind, I got the idea that emo songwriters were quite similar to the depressive poets of the Romantic era. I thought that notion was worth exploring, and that's how I came to throw my own hat into the New Romanticist ring. Emo music has a place in this revival, and its focus on human emotion is a sure antidote to the unfeeling tendencies and lack of empathy at large in the digital age.  

I am not really a big fan of trigger warnings, but here I think it is warranted. This article talks about cutting, self-harm and suicide so it may be distressing for some readers. 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.

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Emo musicians and Romantic poets are the bards of Saturn. Since classical times the planet has been associated with melancholy, dreariness, dark oppressive clouds, and hunchbacked intellectuals withering in cold dryness at their paper strewn desks. Many of the poets of the Romantic era inherited the melancholic disposition from father Saturn and imbued their words with the sadness of their sensitivity. Emo kids became the latter day inheritors of this tradition as they struggled to get out of their depressive bedrooms in borderline suburbia.

Nowhere has the connection between Saturn and the malignant temperament of melancholia been more thoroughly explored than in that mighty tome Saturn and Melancholy. The book was researched and written by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl over a period of thirty years in association with the storied Warburg Institute. First published in 1964, we can forgive the authors for leaving out the goth music subculture and emo music as subsequent heirs of Saturn’s pernicious moods, and of the Romantic tradition that helped translate those feelings into expressive lyricism.

The connections between the goth subculture, and Romanticism are well documented in books exploring the subculture, such as Lol Tolhurst’s somber reflections in Goth: A History. Goths themselves often revel in these connections, clutching their tattered volumes poetry as they go off to the cemetery to drink wine and smoke clove cigarettes. The connections between the emo music scene and Romanticism are not as well documented, if they are even thought of at all by fans or artists involved. Those tracing the afterflash of the Romantic moment in the hopes of once again stoking its fervent flames have also overlooked emo as a repository of the Romantic impulse.​

Whatever else may be said of emo, no one can deny that it caught the imagination of at least two generations of teenagers and young adults looking to express themselves fully. At the core of the commonality between emo and Romanticism is how they both reveled in the wild landscapes of our inner emotional nature. The Romantics rebelled against the original onslaught against nature at the dawn of industrialization, and at the vagaries of the Enlightenment as reason, rationality, and science gained ascendance to dominate culture at the expense of being in touch with our emotions and souls. Emo kids rebelled against a sick society who would have their darker emotions medicated and subdued while the country at large continued a way of life destructive to the environment at home, while they dropped bombs and interfere with the destiny of foreign nations abroad. Medicine, and the products advertised in magazines, were supposed to keep them happy while they went to school and prepared for a life in corporate America. Except they were courageous enough to not have it, and in the process of bared their souls and inner lives. In showing their vulnerability, they found the kind of strength needed to survive life in the too-late capitalism of an overspent Empire on its way into ruin.
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The confessional mode of emo is one of its defining characteristics. Instead of needing to go to the confessional booth at a church, to some intermediary given the power to absolve a person of feelings of guilt and shame, emo singers shared their shame and guilt with the community. In the process of sharing, they wrestled with their issues and made them known, and found they weren’t alone. In baring themselves in front of their peers, they found they could bare the pressures of the modern world in a healthier way than the official ways of coping offered by the establishment.

As a style of music emo came out the D.C. hardcore punk scene, following the lead of Rites of Spring, whose lyrics were more personal in their anguish, than the usual political turmoil expressed in punk. As the style was adopted and spread, it gave voices to lonely teens bored with life in faceless tract houses. The original phase 1980s and 1990s the confessions of doomed poets like Thomas Chatterton and John Clare, and the distorted sound of the music can be heard as corollary to what the Romantic painters were doing with blackened canvases and gray skies. Both the poets and the singers let their words boil over from the writhing cauldron of their inner lives in a focused exorcism of darkness. What had been pent up in times of keeping a stiff upper lip could now be released like dynamite set to a dam. Emo and Romanticism allowed those mining its veins to acknowledge the world in its sorrow and sadness. They became bards of Saturn, poets and musicians who could allow the current of melancholy to flow without suppression.

Sadness is a part of the human condition. Artists have long sought to treat it and express it in their own ways, ways at odds with what has been deemed correct by the brutal and sadist field of psychiatry. With its past penchant for lobotomizing and other dubious means of torture, er, therapy, the track record of psychiatry is questionable. In our time it has long been in league with the pharmaceutical industry who push the chemical imbalance theory of depression while ignoring the inner lives of those patients they rely on to line their pockets. On one point we can perhaps all agree, that leaving depression to fester does no good for anyone. Probing the inner wound to expunge its poison is as legitimate a treatment as Prozac, and saner than the barbarism employed 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. These bards of Saturn have their own wisdom to share.

Our understand nothing of the mutual affection between Romanticism will remain impaired if our cultures continued obsession with rationality is not addressed. These days it seems like every other bro on the street wants to optimize their every experience. Influencers and techies alike would have us think we are all just machines, who if programmed correctly could operate without a glitch. It we just used the right product, took the right pill, or followed the correct routine, would never have a bad day or get down in the dumps. If we followed these people, there would be no moments for quiet introspection, but only to grind away at work, or in a losing struggle to go viral, or in an all-consuming effort to live your best life, no matter who it hurts, or what gets lost along the way. Emo and Romanticism both reject an ethos that places almighty reason and its bottom line above feeling and intuition. It rejects impersonal science and the industry who became its master, and emphasizes the felt experience of individual lives. Romanticism and emo are both predicated on profound reactions against the overly organized life of a technocracy just being born at the time of industrialization, and its later after as the factories lose their bloom and slip into further decay. Humanity and our fellow living creatures in the world have all suffered the cost of this efficient, expedient, and optimized industry.

Just as happened with its immediate predecessor in punk, the first wave of emo gave kids permission to start something on their own, and do something together when they were bored without thoughts of making it big or commercial success. Singing and playing the kind of songs they wanted to write in the kind of band they wanted to be in, perhaps playing some shows around town, to a group of appreciative listeners. Emo music bears the traces of this antagonism between something you do in your basement or garage with your friends for fun, and this wallowing in extreme emotions and then wearing those emotions on the sleeve, of singing to strangers about deep secrets and dark inner plight on the public stage.

For many people emo might have just been “a stage.” For many of the people making it, the music never made it big. In the same way, there were plenty of lesser known and unknown romantics who painted their pictures and penned their poems in private, who were in it just for the fleeting energy of the moment. There were posers too, people whose lives were less lived according to Romantic ideals, but who wore a mask of anarchy that appealed to them only during the flower of their own youth. Those personas were then abandoned when it became time to “get real.”

This emotionalism had great commercial potential. There were lots of teens out there who had a desire to cut themselves and to self-harm. These emotions could then be exploited by what Douglas Rushkoff the “merchants of cool” to orchestrate the rise of certain bands whose inverted sentimentality could then be used to milk the cash cows of the teenage population from their parents hard earned money. Marketing all of this stuff back to the slightly younger teenagers who had been excited by what the people a half a generation ahead were doing was a clever strategy on the part of the music business. Prefab emo kids became caricatures of themselves alongside the mall goths who they rubbed elbows with when buying their My Chemical Romance shirts at Hot Topic.
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People worked themselves up into a frenzy over kids cutting themselves as they wallowed in darkness while listening to Fallout Boy. Centuries before, Goethe had unwittingly unleashed an epidemic of suicides after The Sorrows of Young Werther was published, hitting a nerve in European culture. The suicidal contagion brought on by the novel even earned it a name for itself, the “Werther effect.”

All that said, for those who didn’t succumb to their dark emotions in such extreme way, the music itself can be heard as a kind of catharsis that leads to healing. Their inner life, skewered by the compromises of the typical American family under the conflicting projected shadows of capitalism, was heard and reflected in the voices, distorted guitars, and aching melodies and pulsing rhythms of the collective emo. Other people who were its fans felt this way too, and the relational alienation at the heart of the suburbs could then be endured a little easier.

These genuine feelings continued to energize the genre. For every band who sold out and made it in the corporate music industry, there were dozens of other bands who continued to do it for the sheer pleasure and catharsis of expression. Most of them remained local or regional in the stamp of their influence, with minimal recorded documentation. At a time when the internet wasn’t the sole arbiter of whether or not something actually happened or not, these moments can be considered pure and unadulterated, because of that very lack of documentation. Yet traces do remain. In listening to the music now, and in the contemporary emo it still inspires, an authentic aestheticism can be heard. The sound is one where our emotional lives and emotional intelligence are placed at the foreground, and concerns for getting ahead on the board game of life were set aside, when they weren’t thrown off the table altogether.

There was a spirit moving in emo, and that spirit made all the whining, all the intense confessionals, and all the navel gazing into dark subjective moods, not only tolerable, but a beautiful release valve that in its greatest moments achieved rare beauty and could be elevated into high art. It took elements of math rock and made them serve the irrationality of human passion, and not just the masturbatory tendency of virtuoso guitar noodlers. Strange time signatures disoriented and defamiliarized standard rock rhythms. Distortion and fuzz on soft and loud guitars and bass gave the proceedings an impressionistic sonic palette. When emo broke into screamo it could work itself up to the point of nihilistic destruction, but there were often redemptive qualities at work as well, as self esteem was rebuilt from the ashes.

Romanticism allowed minds under the yoke of Enlightenment rationality to get in touch with their darker drives and the troubling things they found when staring into their own minds. Thomas Chatterton wound up dead, his poetry torn up and littered around the room where he was found. John Clare arguably wrote some of his best poetry while he was locked up inside an insane asylum, sadistic as places were. Likewise, the taste for mascara, the interest in childhood trauma, the probing of wounds and emotional hurts and the subconscious associations produced by the same remain part and parcel of the of the appeal of emo. Many teens who have been abandoned by the adults in their lives, whether emotionally abandoned or otherwise, by parents or by teachers, also ended up dead or institutionalized.

Emo and the Romantic revival offer a different path. Our feelings don’t have to be shut up, turned off, or locked away. They can be explored or transformed into a medium of meaning, offering a light to others who are also struggling in darkness looking for a way out.

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In my next post on Friday this week I will have a mix and playlist of some essential emo tunes. In the meantime I will leave you with two songs as a jumping off point for your own further explorations.

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