Obviously, with Pinkerton being my favorite album and all, I've thought a lot about this, and I think I have a good definition for what "emo" is.
First off, it's NOT A BAD WORD!!! As you're about to see, there are a lot of great compositional elements to real emo, so when you hear me describing a band here that you like, don't be offended.
Emo:A musical genre that mixes post-hardcore time signature apathy with slight indie-rock-infused moments of solace, particularly from the bassist".
To describe this more, there are three periods of emo that I believe have taken place:
Proto-Emo (1989-1994): At this point, emo was mostly just post-hardcore with slightly whinier vocals. That's not to say it's simple, though; in fact, proto-emo is probably the most difficult sub genre here to get into, with math all over the place. Examples: Drive Like Jehu, Cap'N Jazz, Sunny Day Real Estate
Emo (1995-1999): Here, the indie rock elements sink in much more, and these aforementioned elements also add a pop sheen to it. But even then, the post-hardcore guitar structure is easily apparent in most of these bands. Even Modest Mouse. Examples: Pinkerton, Jimmy Eat World, Dashboard Confessionals Brand New, some Modest Mouse :o
Post-Emo (2000-Today): Okay, guys, here's where emo started to get a bad rap, with immature sixth-graders like myself calling every alternative band with the slightest bit of emotion "emo". By this point, almost all of the post-hardcore mathiness has been removed, just leaving crap. Examples: My Chemical Romance, Panic at the Disco, every other sucky band your high school colleagues are into
...Does this make any sense at all? If I got any facts wrong, please forgive me. I've just been thinking about this a lot, and wanted to clear it up.
every other sucky band your high school colleagues are into[/b]
oh, you're not as young as I thought if you're in high school. As for the emo timeline I can't help you much there but it seems like you've classified things well. However, I always heard Rites of Spring as being one of the first 'emo' albums
Emotive Hardcore is a real minefield of a genre to explore, for precisely the reasons you outlined in your timeline. It started off as essentially another branch of Hardcore Punk. Bands like Rites of Spring, Dag Nasty, even Fugazi were still making Punk Rock, just with more, well, emotive lyrical themes and, even more importantly, more complex arrangements and instrumental parts.
For me, I have a hard time understanding how people confuse Goth and Emo--I've always considered Emo v. Post-Hardcore v. Math-Rock a much more difficult distinction to hash out.
The differences between Goth and Emo are fairly straightforward, though I suppose a lot of the confusion comes from they way in which the Emo of the turn of the millenium aligned itself with a Gothic aesthetic sensibility. Even if they dressed the same in 2000, Goth and Emo have very different origins and still sound very different.
If anything, Goth is the older of the two styles, having its genesis almost immediately after the first wave of 70's Punk gave way to the Post-Punk movement. It's associated with really slow, melancholy music, typified by the use of droning synths and whatnot. Bands like the Cure were on the borderline, and honestly, I don't know enough about the core of the Goth scene to namedrop any truly exemplary bands, but I can tell you that Emo, coming from Post-Hardcore wouldn't even be around for another decade or so, and that when it did show up, they played faster and harder, and if there were any similarities at the beginning of Emo, it was largely the introspective lyrical content.
Emo, Math-Rock, and Post-Hardcore, on the other hand, share just about everything besides the lyrical content in common, though I guess it's just a matter of where the focus lies.
Hope I helped rather than confused anyone interested.
As an addendum, I also always got the impression that Gothic music was largely a British scene, while Emotive Hardcore was pretty much American from the beginning, so that could be another useful way to distinguish the two in particularly ambiguous cases.
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