please no more weedmo

In Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, the philosopher describes the world of the forthcoming 21st century as a realm where consumerism itself becomes reality: “These billboards, in fact, observe and surveil you as well, or as badly, as the ‘policing’ television. The latter looks at you, you look at yourself in it, mixed with the others, it is the mirror without silvering in the activity of consumption, a game of splitting in two and doubling that closes this world on itself” (108).

It’s strange to think that no other subgenre better demonstrates the fulfillment of his prediction better than contemporary emo, but I’m hard pressed to find a current scene that conveys the intertwinement of capital’s authority over personal life and the primacy of market informed self-absorption.

Bad shit happened in the 1990’s. As the USSR, the only geopolitical challenger to neoliberal capital (sort of), succumbed to Western economic and military interference, mass artistic stagnations occurred within the ostensibly counter-cultural music scenes of the West. New Labour’s late 90’s declaration that “We are all middle class now!” comes to mind as the essence of this global shift (Mirowski 118). With class divides veiled, punk depoliticized. And as the neoliberal project’s championing of individualization normalized across the West, punk went inward, into the self, into the 𝖊𝖒𝖔𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓 (emotion).

Now, I don’t want to unilaterally lambast emo. I love the genre and I don’t think writing songs about alienation is fundamentally reactionary. In fact, I think criticism of life under the neoliberal malaise of history’s supposed end can spur some truly compelling and lasting art. Cap’n Jazz, Yaphet Kotto, Burning Airlines, among many others, come to mind as bands that bridged wounds of the self to an overarching external, political reality.

Unfortunately, emo is a scene dominated by white men, the most visible subjects of capital. Because of this, the genre is especially conditioned by its relations. According to Ranciere, “The arts only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them” (19). Emo’s current iteration, the late revival, epitomizes this assertion. By investigating the themes of this wave, one can ascertain how the scene perpetuates the repressions of our postmodern experience, which in turn would hopefully encourage the cultivation of a more robust and revolutionary aesthetic program in present diy. Hopefully.

Let’s take a gander at a representative example, the purest distillate, of late revival emo, which from now on will be referred to by its colloquialism “weedmo.”

“near death fail comp (must watch until end)” by the inveterate Mom Jeans.

At first glance, the mere title itself is an allusion to the unmitigated spectacle of the Youtube stream. Consumption both contextualizes the band’s work and rigidly designates the manner in which their lyrical content is expressed.

“Eating cheetos”

“Watching movies”

“The things that could be helping me get by”

“‘Cause you’re the only thing I need”

This track is an explicit chain of ingestion. Even interpersonal relationships, friendship, romance, and sex, are presented as straightforward transmitters of enjoyable sensation that one desires above all. This latter facet of Mom Jeans.’s songwriting can be better clarified through the fiction of Andrew Holleran: “He wanted to keep his life in the realm of the perfect, the ideal. He wanted to be desired, not possessed, for in remaining desired he remained, like the figure on the Grecian urn, forever pursued. He knew quite well that once possessed he would no longer be enchanted — so sex itself became secondary to the spectacle” (qtd. in Floyd 202). It’s no surprise that within the encompassing American hypermarket, desire, love, sex or whatever you want to label, it becomes the principal, enrapturing fascination that defines the song’s persona. The actually egocentric pleasure of wanting to be desired flourishes as one of capital’s more dominating brands.

Mom Jeans.’s introspection is grievously relevant, falling in line with Baudrillard’s understanding of contemporary interaction with the market forces: “consumption is primarily organized as a discourse to oneself, and has a tendency to play itself out, with its gratifications and deceptions, in this minimal exchange. The object of consumption isolates” (54). It’s very apparent that the central conflicts of Mom Jeans.’s discog relate to the tensions of objectification, and trying to relieve said tensions through the experience and acquisition of objects. Frankly, I’m surprised the band doesn’t have a song dedicated to a tale of trying to assuage depression through an Amazon sale.

Mom Jeans. isn’t the only act trapped within this milieu. The following screenshots demonstrate akin lyrical expressions of weedmo bands and associated peers in the current scene.

Prince Daddy and the Hyena

Remo Drive

Pictures of Vernon

Hot Mulligan

The Cardboard Swords

There are dozens more examples, but I think the above 5 are solid exemplifications of the current popular aesthetic approach in diy emo music. Admittedly, not every song composed by bands of this ilk specifically detail the isolation of consumption. However, angst over the stifling of individual desire remains constant. These lyrical expressions of suppressed want are deeply problematic. As Deleuze and Guattari affirm, “Even the most repressive and the most deadly forms of social reproduction are produced by desire within the organization that is the consequence of such production” (38). The distinguished bands of this scene do not confront their alienation with founded critique or address it with developed imagery. Instead, they tend to continuously reconstrue their basic qualms, denied desires, and many unrequited sexual advances.

If “Revolutionaries, artists, and seers are content to be objective,” if they are aware “that desire clasps life in its powerfully productive embrace, and reproduces it in a way that is all the more intense,” then a diy scene cannot be contented by banal restatements of personal disaffections (Deleuze and Guattari 27).

To be candid, yes I don’t think this wing of the current emo scene offers captivating, well-crafted music. That being said, these critiques apply to far more styles than just emo. Contemporary pop, hip-hop, even avant genres, all engage in reductively rehashing the superficial alienations of quelled desires. I chose to pointedly scrutinize emo because if we are to believe that independent music can empower and enlighten, than we must communally foster and support musicians that oppose accepting the present as a “motley painting of everything that has ever been believed” and strive to reinterpret and reconvey a deeply confounding, challenging reality (Deleuze and Guatarri 34). Or, we can assent to punk’s slow decay into complacency and servility as capital consolidates its command over all social formations, be it political, artistic, or interpersonal.

I’m sure many diy bros would be happy with this arrangement, but as a socialist artist who just so happens to adore emo, I will do what I can to reject the trivialization of the subgenre, and independent music as a whole.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean, and Mark Poster. Selected Writings. Stanford Univ. Press, 2007.

Baudrillard, Jean, and Sheila Faria. Glaser. Simulacra and Simulation. Univ. of Michigan Press, 2014.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari Félix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Penguin Books, 2009.

Floyd, Kevin. The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Mirowski, Philip. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. Verso, 2014.

Rancière Jacques, and Gabriel Rockhill. The Politics of Aesthetics: the Distribution of the Sensible. Continuum, 2011.