Brian Boyd on music
'It's a suicide cult; its followers wear tight jeans, studded belts and wristbands. They have dyed-black hair and long fringes obscuring their faces."
Which musical movement is the Daily Mail, that well-known home of reason and tolerance, describing? Deathgrind? Norwegian death metal? Unbelievably, the Mailhas stopped blaming society's problems on single mothers and immigrants for a day or two and put the emo music scene in its sights.
To very loosely paraphrase the newspaper's editorial stance on emo: if ever you find any of your nice middle-class children playing a My Chemical Romance record and wearing black clothes, you should put them under immediate house arrest before they are kidnapped from the streets by a deranged suicide cult which will probably use them as a human sacrifice to Satan.
We've been here before, of course. Elvis gyrating his pelvis on US telly in the 1950s provoked bouts of moral degeneracy that still exist to this day. The Rolling Stones were in league with the devil, and if you let your daughter marry one of them she would end up being comprised in a drugs/confectionary situation. There was the "filth and the fury" of The Sex Pistols and, more recently, all those heavy metal bands with hidden demonic message in their lyrics.
What is most remarkable about the Daily Mail's hysterical and uninformed coverage of emo is that they've picked on a musical movement that has an almost exclusively middle-class following. The only remotely threatening aspect of it is the amount of gel that emo kids put on their hair.
Emo - or "emotive hardcore" to give it its correct description - is a sort of south California punk rock that is lyrically distinguished by lashings of teen angst and frequent references to inner torment and alienation.
As with all musical movements, you have to be careful about who you count in and who you count out, but over the years acts such as Sunny Day Real Estate, Jimmy Eat World and now, My Chemical Romance have all been used as typical exemplars of the emo sound. It is the latter band who have provoked the Mail's latest witch-hunt (sorry, reasoned analysis). Emo glorifies self-harm and romanticises death, according to the paper.
Emo fans managed to set aside their inner torment and alienation for a moment last Saturday to gather outside the paper's head office to protest its coverage of their music. They were encouraged to carry balloons and soft toys (!) and placards stating "Don't Blame My Chemical Romance".
The 100-strong crowd (all other emo fans were busy walking around Temple Bar looking pissed off ) sang MCR songs and made a huge effort to dress in brightly coloured clothes. Those who had organised the march had requested that emo fans "not dress stereotypically".
"I love MCR, they save lives" said one 14-year-old fan at the protest. "The Daily Mailare liars and all they want to do is put the youth against the adults; they just hate us and it's really unnecessary, it's just wrong. I've read a couple of the Daily Mail articles and they've actually misquoted lyrics and the research was so badly done, it was unbelievable. I actually thought the story was a hoax when I found it on the internet."
Responding to the protest, the Daily Mailsaid that its coverage of the emo movement was "balanced, restrained and above all, in the public interest. We published an opinion piece written from the perspective of a mother concerned for her children. Our music critics admire the music of the band."
And here's the money shot:
"We note that all this provides wonderful publicity for Warners and the impending release of My Chemical Romance's latest album."
Gosh, would a music label actually stoop so low as to manipulate a bunch of teenage music fans to create publicity for an album release? Ban this sinister cult behaviour now.
