Critical Theory, Emo Music and the Struggle for Transcendence

Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s The One Dimensional Man discusses the way modern-day society and the way it is administered limits human beings, reducing what they are capable of doing and even thinking. There is an established order, an enforced order, and having grown up within that order, we are incapable of seeing outside it, do not even want to, and do not even consider the possibility of other orders.

A quote:

“In the most advanced areas of this civilization, the social controls have been introjected to the point where even individual protest is affected at its roots. The intellectual and emotional refusal 'to go along' appear neurotic and impotent.”

I am reminded of the reaction against emo music. When emo became a designated genre, I lived in Japan, mostly unplugged from American popular culture. After some years back in the U.S., I began to run across the term, always used disparagingly, and I gradually came to realize that some bands I liked were considered emo--My Chemical Romance, Saosin, Paramore, Thirty Seconds to Mars--even though the bands themselves often reject this label and declare emo to be crap.

What’s so bad about emo that even emo bands hate it?

Part of what stirs revulsion is the emotional displays from which the genre has received its label. The bands wear their hearts on their chests and accentuate this with their own style, a mix of Goth, punk, neon pop and teenage bric-a-brac, making a spectacle of and confronting us with their disaffection with the world. They care too much, show it openly, often with fatalism, while ours is a society that prefers to confess caring only in measured tones and hidden behind success and aloofness. But how much do you really care if you’re aloof?

Emos are despised as a defense mechanism against the reproach their refusal casts at the status quo--the people who have it together that we fancy ourselves to be or be on the way toward becoming. Identifying real problems and sincerely bemoaning them is so gauche.

Another quote from The One-Dimensional Man:

“‘Romantic’ is a term of condescending defamation which is easily applied to disparaging avant-garde positions, just as the term ‘decadent’ far more often denounces the genuinely progressive traits of a dying culture than the real factors of decay. The traditional images of artistic alienation are indeed romantic in as much as they are in aesthetic incompatibility with the developing society. This incompatibility is the token of their truth.”

Replace “Romantics” with “emos” and the passage above is perfectly applicable to the sneering attitude many have toward emo music and its fans. Yet it is the emos and Goths and punks and what have you--the subcultures, the counterculture--who, finding themselves deeply out of place in society, struggle most viscerally for a critique, for a measure of transcendence beyond the pressures forcing them into a single acceptable mold.

No doubt, however, their endeavor is a confused one from the get-go and largely doomed to failure. They too, like those who turn their noses up at them, will one day be working stiffs, whether as slaves in a cubicle, slaves behind the broad desk of a CEO, or a slave scrounging away in the margins of society.

A final quote:

“They [the Romantics/emos] are invalidated not because of their literary obsolescence. . . . What has been invalidated is their subversive force, their destructive content--their truth. In this transformation, they find their home in everyday living. The alien and alienating oeuvres of intellectual culture become familiar goods and services. Is their massive reproduction and consumption only a change in quantity, namely, growing appreciation and understanding, democratization of culture?”

No effective means of protest is open to most of the disaffected but what finds approval in the mass market. Think of image makeovers effected through trips to Hot Topic. Their means of resistance against the system, our means of resistance, are all part of the system. It will take a much more massive and painful effort, and a more coherent message than recent countercultural movements have provided, to open up multiple dimensions for humankind.