Teenagers on the dark side

We could already be facing the last days of the emo phenomenon.JOHN McCRONE explains what it was and why few will mourn it.

Why does everyone hate emos? Not just parents and teachers but even other teenagers?

The boy racers throw bottles at them. The metalheads think they are gay. The indie kids - practically indistinguishable from emos to the ignorant adult eye, with the same mop of hair, skinny jeans and cardigans  - look down their noses at them.

"If a group of indie kids pass a group of emos in town, we wouldn't acknowledge them. They're just so whinny and irritating," says 16-year-old Middleton Grange student James Donaldson.

Yep, the emo cult has been a stellar success.

The whole point of teenage rebellion, from the bodgies and widgies of the 1950s, right on down through punks and skinheads, goths and gangstas, has been to outrage polite society.

And emo - all weak, scruffy, effeminate, depressed and self-harming - has really managed to push people's buttons.

Question: How do you get an emo kid out of a tree? Answer: Cut the rope.

Last year, emos were suddenly everywhere. I watched as neighbourhood kids were transformed. My own 14-year-old daughter told of the recruitment campaign going on at her school.

"Come over to the dark side," was the call, accompanied by random outbreaks of hugging.

My daughter was halfway there as a candidate, being arty, unsporty, a little alternative. She even had a floppy fringe that exasperated her mother. At dinner times, we would tease about how the recruitment process was faring. Her 11-year-old kid sister - into jazz dance and ponytails - would toss her hair forward and give us all the emo "I hate the world" glower.

Kids know exactly what is going on. One of my daughter's schoolmates was making the move in stages, blond hair going brown, then black and asymmetric over a number of months. Other braver types just turned up restyled on a Monday morning.

Everywhere, it was interesting to note young teens you knew who had been dressing ordinary, adopt the new emo uniform. The black nail polish and eyeliner. The tight jeans boys buying girls trousers to get the right stick-insect look. The white belt, hoodie and canvas sneakers  - so hopeless in the wet. An important part of the emo imagery was, of course, the sweat bands on the forearms - suggestive of cut marks, the evidence of self-harm, needing to be hidden from prying adult eyes.

There was also the emo attitude to learn. Gaggles of new converts would gather at the swings in our local park or at Hacky Sack corner in town. They had an exaggerated way of talking and hugging, of sudden outbreaks of skittish behaviour, that emphasised their obliviousness their studied obliviousness to the normal adult world around them.

When a teen movement reaches its peak of development, it can warp even physical space it appears, creating a parallel world. We can see them, but they are not looking at us.

So to move or not to move? My daughter's friends were watching her, too, waiting to see if she would suddenly leap this divide. But for her, in the end, it was one thing to be fascinated by a popular-culture movement and quite another to make a committed fashion statement.

As a parent, it was hard to know whether to be pleased or sorry.

Question: What's the difference between emo grass and normal grass? Answer: Emo grass cuts itself.

Parenting teenagers. There is the theory and then there is the practice.

We know our children are at some stage going to out-grow the style choices we have been imposing on them since birth (those cute Osh Kosh dungarees, those practical track pants) and start making style choices of their own.

And we are cool with that. After all, we were teenagers once, into certain music, certain attitudes, certain clothes. Yet as Parents Inc seminar presenter John Cowan says, what seems fine in principle can become alarming when it happens for real. Especially when it is a new style like emo.

Is it just going to be a phase, a pantomime rebellion? Or has a door opened on some dark and irreversible life path?

Anyone who knows will tell you that emo has been around for ages. Way back in the 1980s, it was a post-punk brand of music in the United States labelled "emotional" for its histrionic style.

But modern emo is something quite different. It mixed dress elements from goth and punk with splashes of colour and cutesy graphics drawn more from Japanese street culture. The music became poppier, more targeted at young MTV viewers. In 2006, it finally became a clear mainstream phenomenon with stadium-filling bands like Panic at the Disco and My Chemical Romance.

Again, this has all happened so many times before that you would have thought society would have grown immune. But the young keep finding fresh formulas to generate a moral panic.

So what is it about emo that has been so polarising, that has managed to prompt so many insults, so much angst? The answer must also tell us something about society at the moment.

In various ways, the breakthrough youth movements of the past have touched a sensitive nerve with their aggression, their sexuality, their risky behaviour. The original bodgies and widgies were the local version of Brylcreemed rockers and their "easy" girls. The famous Auckland "juke-box killing", a flick-knife altercation in an Auckland cafe hang-out, became a national scandal.

Then there were the hippies, dropping out, taking drugs, indulging in free love. The punks promoting anarchy. The skinheads looking for a fight.

The goths, the most immediate predecessors of emos, shook people up with their fetish wear, their piercings, their satanism - remember the vampire blood-drinking craze in Europe a few years back?

Goths are still going strong in New Zealand. But fetish wear, piercings and body-art tattoos have now all been mainstreamed, assimilated into the general wardrobe. Besides, the goths are mostly a polytechnic-age crowd, old enough to be allowed to make their own fashion mistakes.

Question: What is the difference between emos and goths? Answer: Emos hate themselves, goths hate everyone. Emos want to kill themselves, goths want to kill everyone.

They will always deny it, of course, but getting a rise out of society matters. For teenagers feeling their way into the world, actions can seem meaningless unless they provoke an equally strong reaction. In this way, the evolving social landscape reveals itself.

And emo has worked because it has packaged up so many fears middle-class parents now have for their children.

What do we want for our kid's futures? We want them to be optimistic, energetic, involved, competitive, happy achievers in life.

The pressures are much stronger in countries like the United States and Britain, where exam stress and peer competition have created a teen rat-race. But Kiwi parents are also anxious about how they will steer their adolescents towards a path of eventual adult success.

The old symbols of a child veering off course makeup and skimpy clothes for the girls, aggressive posturing for the boys are not as challenging as they used to be. We can imagine how being a girl who wants to be attractive, or a boy wanting to make a mark, will translate into being a positive, assertive, person once they hit their stride in their 20s.

Emo, however, threatens us with the image of kids who have lost hope, who are turning inwards and slipping away, who are confused about their sexuality rather than moving towards a confirmed identity, who are on the doorstep of depression and self-harm, who are giving up on the whole show, too low to even fight back. And all this at 13 and 14. No wonder even the boy racers and indie children have taken offence at the transgressive imagery. Weakly giving up on life's race has become the last taboo.

Waikato University psychology researcher Dave Snell, who has made a study of bogans and heavy-metal culture, says androgyny is hardly a new theme in youth culture.

You have had glam rock and the new romantics in the past, he says. And feeling out of kilter with the consumerism and conformity of the adult world is the very stuff of teen rebellion. But the passivity seems new and worrying.

"I think that's why emo gets labelled whiny. In heavy metal, for example, a lot of the themes revolve around crisis or struggle, but also about overcoming that. From strength, you overcome adversity. Emo seems to be much more an expression of the struggle, the actual depression, itself," Snell says.

Question: How many emos does it take to microwave a burrito? Answer: Four. One to write about it on LiveJournal, one to post a MySpace bulletin, one to take a picture of himself in the mirror with the burrito, and one to write a poem after it's finally cooked.

Overseas, emo has now brewed into a genuine moral panic. In April, two Melbourne 16-year-olds were found dead, hanging from a tree in Dandenong Ranges National Park in an apparent suicide pact. The Australian media made much of claims they were emos.

In May, the British tabloid The Daily Mail stridently linked the death of a young London girl, Hannah Bond, to "the sinister cult of emo" and the music of the emo band, My Chemical Romance, in particular.

"Hannah was a happy 13-year-old until she became an `emo' - part of a sinister teenage craze that romanticises death. Three months later she hanged herself. Her devastated mother tells other parents: No child is safe," wrote the Mail, provoking in turn a march on its offices by angry fans of the band.

In June, the Mail followed this up with accounts of a 13-year-old boy who hanged himself in his room after being bullied online for his "alternative appearance". Although perhaps mentions of Good Charlotte and Blink-182, two pop-punk bands, as the boy's favourite "emo music" did little for the tabloid's thesis.

Mexico has had its anti-emo riots, Time magazine describing how emo youths gathering in town squares had offended local machismo.

In Russia, conservative politicians are trying to push through a bill banning the "negative ideology" of emo. You really could not make it up.

There is no doubt that many teenage girls' bedrooms sport a teddy bear hanging by a cord a good way to freak out mum. And that generally, self-harm is an issue, like anorexia, something teens are constantly referencing.

"It's said that in any classroom, there's probably two that are cutters. And this is definitely something new in youth culture _ this whole fascination with the scarlet scream, as some call it," says Parent Inc's Cowan.

But as ever, the link between a new youth style and the behaviour it portrays is rather tenuous, he says. For some, going emo might be appealing because it confirms mental-health problems that already exist. For most, however, it is a phase, a social tease.

"They will slide through it and look back on it as a giggle," says Cowan.

Question: How many emos does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Answer: None. They'd rather sit in the dark and cry.

Now that we have had the sermonising headlines elevating emo to the status of a genuine threat to society, the bandwagon must be pretty well over anyway. And if Christchurch is a guide, that may be the case.

Steve White runs Zebedees in Blenheim Road, a charity venue for youth bands. Like others, he saw emo really taking off in late 2006 after My Chemical Romance released The Black Parade _ a concept album about the death of a cancer patient. Frontman Gerard Way sang: "A world that sends you reeling from decimated dreams/ Your misery and hate will kill us all/ So paint it black and take it back." The heavy-rotation video pushed a bubbling movement into becoming a full-blown cultural phenomenon, even though Way then denied any connection to emo, saying: "I think emo's a pile of s...".

White says emo dress and emo bands were big down at Zebedees last year. It became such a thing, with boy racers cruising past to chuck bottles and insults, that the venue had to keep the kids round the back, out of sight.

But in March or April, it began to slow abruptly. Local emo cover bands, like Take Back Thursday, broke up to head in new directions. White's own 16-year-old son, James, more recently underwent a fashion change. "He cut his hair about six weeks ago," says White.

James, a chirpy lad, tells me he was never properly emo. He had the fringe, but his hair was undyed. He had the black skinny jeans and Chuck Taylor trainers, however never managed to be down and depressed. It was just a style.

He says the relentless abuse, the anti-emo sentiment, has probably helped kill it for many. Uncool can be cool. Or it can actually become uncool when it draws so much fire.

Anyway, says James, he and his friends are a bit older now and looking to more individual styles. He is into a retro look winklepickers, double-breasted suit and tie, slight mohawk hair-do. More 1940s.

His dad says if anything is on the rise at Zebedees, it is the metalheads. A rougher masculine identity again. Though Bon Jovi prancing around in spandex and fluffed-up hair is the most popular DVD request he gets.

Donaldson, the indie kid, agrees emos are fast going out. But then for him, with their MTV music tastes and derivative US style, they were never in.

He says a sign of terminal decline is the appearance of the wemo - the 11 and 12-year-old wannabe emos whose bedrooms are shrines to Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz.

Will emo leave behind a hardcore? Waikato's Snell reckons emo might lack the well-defined musical style that has seen metal, punk and other mass market movements persist so long. "I don't know what an adult emo would be like because I've never seen one," he says. So emo could be one of those trends that does get consigned to the dustbin of history, or else folded back into a more generic goth and punk look.

These style questions are all part of the fun and games. Who is out, who is in? What is going to be the next big thing?