Recently, I've been getting into an album I recently purchased "A Promise to Burn" by Tennessee uprising Emo icons, Framing Hanley. I'm in love with the passionately heavy riffs from Ryan Belcher and Brandon Wootten, which effectively emphasizes the message tragedy on tracks like "You Stupid Girl" and "WarZone", or the contrasting message of hope, on tracks like "Wake Up" and "Back to Go Again" the band deliver., delivered similarly in Kenneth Nixon's powerful vocals, also helping to get their message across. I consider "A Promise to Burn" to be an excellent example of an Emo album, with it's hard rock style and confessional lyrics and I still think Emo is very relevant in the society of rock music today. This is why I was annoyed when I saw Framing Hanley as K! cover stars and they were referred to as a "Post Emo" band.
I've always been annoyed by this generic term "Post". It is absolutely unnecessary but is used in order to create a group of modern contemporaries. Well first of all, I don't need a genre name to tell me if a group is modern or not. I have the "Year" section on my iTunes library and information about when they formed on Wikipedia to tell me that. Furthermore, I believe the whole idea of using the phrase "Post" to describe a band who performs a genre of music after the most said genre's most popular days is over is insane. There must be hundreds of bands out there who have been dubbed a "Post Grunge" because they play with grunge's heavily distorted sound and angst-y lyrics after Nirvana fell apart. "Post Hardcore" is particularly annoying. So that's a band that creates music similar to hardcore punk after the days of Black Flag and Dead Kennedys? For fuck's sake! Use the term Grunge and Hardcore for the more modern bands as well. Especially with hardcore since some bands labelled "Post-Hardcore" actually sound more hardcore that the Hardcore bands themselves. Big Black, for example have been labelled "Post Hardcore" but they really ought to be seen as heroes of the Hardcore Punk scene. Anyways, for every "Post", there needs to be a "Pre". But how can you have a "Pre-Grunge" band? This is just getting deluded.
My final problem comes from my disgust of seeing Framing Hanley labelled a "Post Emo" band. "Post" has been used if a band makes music of a certain genre, following the genre's decline. There is no evidence of Emo declining from mainstream popularity. Emo pop is still incredibly popular with bands such as Jimmy Eat World, Panic! At the Disco and Paramore (although criticism towards them grows increasingly per day) managing to attract masses in mainstream rock culture. The harder sounding derivative with the term I really hate "Screamo" is doing particularly well due to bands like Thrice and Thursday, who receive lots of attention from magazines and rock channels. Wow, this is rambling at it's purest.
However, it's obvious that the term "Post" has no real sense in the world of music labeling. Many bands produce all kinds of music that has past it's time of popularity earning them the title of "Post" in their description. Hardcore, Grunge, Garage Rock, Britpop, Punk. And many of these "Post" band's music is just as good as those who made the genre popular. I therefore don't believe many newer bands deserve to be labelled as "Post". Instead, give them the title of genuine creators of a genre.
No comments:
Post a Comment