Emo Is Killing Our Kids Well, if you have seen the press reports following the tragic suicide of Hannah Bond then you would certainly think so. The links between Emo music and cutting / suicide are very much like the old stories (also beloved of certain newspapers) of the supposed heavy metal suicides which eventually led to failed prosecution attempts against some metal acts, Judas Priest for one. To the very best of my knowledge, no bands ever advocate self harm or suicide, it really isn’t good for your record sales if you get your fans to kill themselves. I’m not sure that our youth are in any more danger today from the ‘Emo’ phenomenon than they have been from any other musical movement. I work with a great group of positive, happy, friendly teenagers who all seem pretty well balanced. There are obviously dangers though to certain individuals. I do get a slight feeling though apart a small section of the Emo movement. You don’t have to search too deeply on sites like Vampire Freaks to find photos of kids with scars and fresh wrist wounds, and because you can comment on these pics you quickly notice that certainly is not universal revulsion for these acts, a few other kids offer praise and misjudged encouragement for these acts. The main band that the mostly right wing press have had their knives out for are My Chemical Romance. MCR for those that don’t know them are a five piece rock fronted by the good looking and charismatic Gerard Way, they wer a rather natty line in black Adam Ant cast offs and sing songs with quite downbeat lyrics. Growing up I was both a punk and a metalhead in different phases, the music I listened to was often loud and fast and angry, but often in their own way the anthems of the time were quite uplifting and positive. When Judas Priest ripped into “Living After Midnight” or Iron Maiden screamed through “Wrathchild” we were living our life and loving it, fists in the air, heads banging and hair swirling. Or we were pogoing like mental buggers as The Exploited warned us that “Punks Not Dead” or The Dead Kennedys took us on a “Holiday In Cambodia”, they were songs of exuberant life or of pointed rebellion, but they weren’t songs of sadness or self harm. To be fair, I have never heard an emo song that supports self harm or suicide either. I don’t suppose for a moment that in singing “Blood”, “Teenagers” or “Death” that Gerard Way and the increasingly super rich My Chemical Romance are asking fans to harm themselves, it just isn’t like that. The song writer is just putting across some, and by no means all, of his experiences in his own way. Perhaps it is teenagers that are already troubled that are often drawn to the seemingly death embracing goth/emo scene. Teenagers who are already a little lonely, low in self esteem, unsure of their place in the world and their relationships with peers, parents and other adults can easily from what we would see as normal social interaction. Many newspapers have claimed that emo glamorises death. I have a tattoo of a skull on both arms and a tattoo of Death (the Neil Gaiman comic character) on my back, am I glamorising the act of death ? I would say no, but the symbols of death are symbolic, they are strong images and this is what I like about them. I also enjoy a lot of loud music with dark lyrics, but it never makes me sad, quite the opposite in fact, I’m full of the joys of life when circling in the mosh pit and screaming out some evil sounding lyric. One of my most favourite albums is Murder Ballads by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, I listen to it a lot, I go through little stages where I get slightly obsessed with certain tracks (The Curse Of Milhaven, Where The Wild Roses Grow). Murder Ballads is an album chock full of death, pretty much every character you meet in every song dies horribly before the last note is played, I love it, I know the lyrics to every song, and yet Daily Mail readers will find it hard to believe that I don’t want to murder anybody, strange isn’t it ? The final track on the album is a low key number which is fantastically positive and uplifting, it’s called “Death Is Not The End”. Mr Cave certainly has a sense of humour even if it’s as black as a coal cellar at midnight. The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance, the album that has propelled them to mega stardom in the emo and the wider rock world does seem at first glance (which I understand is how many “journalists” work) to be a little downbeat. I actually find the lyrics to be quite dark and introverted, but this loose concept album is based on the words of man with terminal cancer, tough subject matter and never all that likely to be a barrel of laughs. It comes across to me however as a brave attempt by an intelligent and sensitive young man to make sense of one of life’s most desperate situations. Gerard Way uses his lyrics / poetry to explore feelings and experiences he had as a teenager, it doesn’t sound anything like a clarion call to suicide to me. However, your reactions and attitude to a song or poem or work of art depend largely on your own mindset, your own background and set of experiences and your understanding of and relationship to the world. So if you came to MCR looking for a thought pattern that resonates with your own feelings on self harm or worse then you might well be able to read something into the lyrics that the song writer never intended. From “Dead” – “And wouldn’t it be great if we were dead. DEAD!” Context is everything in this case, so if you remember that these words are being spoken by a terminal cancer sufferer it is more understanadable. Here’s a lyric for you…….. Fear and panic in the air I want to be free From desolation and despair And I feel like everything I saw Is being swept away When I refuse to let you go I can't get it right Get it right Since I met you Loneliness be over When will this loneliness be over Life will flash before my eyes So scattered and lost I want to touch the other side And no one thinks they are to blame Why can't we see That when we bleed we bleed the same I can't get it right Get it right Since I met you Loneliness be over When will this loneliness be over Loneliness be over When will this loneliness be over. Could you read thoughts of despair and suicide into those verses ? I certainly could. Those lyrics are to the song “Map Of The Problematique” by Muse, they are as dark as anything MCR have written but I don’t see any weird suicide accusations being levelled at Matthew Bellamy. Your home used to be an absolute haven. If you got bullied at school, or if you were just lonely and a misfit then your home could be your castle, with your parents the guardians at the gates. Today though so much of teenagers social livs take place via text messages and across the social networking spectrum of Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, VF, Scrobbler etc., there is no escape to be had at home if people are tormenting you. A case is going to trial in Missouri where prosecutors will attempt to charge a 49 year old womn with maliciously violating the user agreement of MySpace. Lori Drew’s daughter had an argument with 13 year old Megan Meier, it is alleged that Drew created a fake MySpace persona called Josh Evans. The fake “Josh” then entered into an online relationship with Megan, wooing her online, and the relationship apparently became quite intense. “Josh” then publicly dumped Megan, on her MySpace page, this triggered a flood of abusive messages from “Josh’s” friends and from ome of Megan’s own friends who had believed the things that “Josh” had said. Megan hung herself in her bedroom and died without ever knowing that “Josh Evans” was not a real person. The case of another 13 year old, Hannah Bond, is equally disturbing, although without a more thorough knowledge of her life it is harder to judge her actions. As portrayed (again) by the Daily Mail, young Hannah was obsessed with the Emo ‘cult’ and with My Chemical Romance – The Black Parade in particular. She had self harmed by scratching / cutting and had told her father that this was an Emo initiation. To my mind, if your child if self harming in any way then you have a serious problem which probably requires professional help. Although, as I said above, it’s hard to make judgements about the actions of the people in this case because the reported news has been one the one hand so sensationalised, and on the other so lacking in background. Hannah killed herself following the sort of argument that thousands of teenagers have with their parent every day. She was refused permission to sleep over at a friend’s house and following the row she hung herself in her bedroom. Teenagers are vulnerable. They think that they are ‘grown up’ yet they are not, they are not yet adults (in most cases). Most of them lack any real work skills and cannot support themselves. They nearly always fail to understand that the 9 to 5 work that their parents do in order to provide for the family is a worthwhile and honourable thing, work helps you to place yourself in the world. They live almost in a charity situation, dependant on their parents and often coming to resent them at the same time. If at age 16 someone had asked me what I was, I would have answered “a punk” or “a metalhead” depending which phase I was currently in. If someone asked me that question today then I would answer “a chef”, work defines to a great degree who you are. Teens with their lack of perspective and the wisdom that comes with age feel everything so intensely that they believe all their experiences at this age are the very best, and the very worst, that life has to offer. When I was a heartbroken boy after the bitter ending of my first “serious” romance I thought that nothing would ever again match that exquisite, bottomless pain. Nothing did until the death of my Mother twenty years later, oh foolish youth. Kids worry though about all sorts of things, and because they cannot examine their feelings via the lens of a longer life everything to them feels so much sharper. Victories are sweeter, life is to be lived right now to the full, losses are much, much harder to bear. I think that the most vulnerable teens are probably those with a limited range of interests. Taking myself as an example, I went to Scouts and Army Cadets, I went hiking, camping, caving and sailing, I started a role playing games group, I loved music and went to a lot of gigs. Most of these pastimes took place in slightly or vastly different social circles, so an argument or falling out in one would not seriously damage the rest of my social life. The more introverted teenager with a tighter circle of friends is liable to be much more at risk if a serious incident or disagreement happens within that group. An article appeared in the Daily Mail in August 2006 entitled “Emo Cult Warning For Parents”, written by Sarah Sands it painted a hateful and one sided account (imagine that, the Daily Mail being hateful and one sided !) of Emo culture with wildly over the top trumpeting of the supposed “celebration of self harm” that she claimed Emo embraced. The article was widely mocked by members of the Emo ‘community’, and by Goths who also came in for a bashing in the article. “So the kids are wearing black and writing bad poetry. Would you prefer that they were out mugging old ladies ? It’s just teenage pretension, most go through it and come out fine at the other end, and as for the self harming, some people will do that whatever music they listen to” – J, York. “Because of a side fringe and black clothing, people assume you self harm, it’s like saying that all chavs mug people and all police eat doughnuts” – Suzie, Surry. Both these comments were written on the Mail’s own website by annoyed readers. So is Emo really killing our kids ? Of course not, it’s a musical style and fashion statement that Mum and Dad won’t like and won’t understand, we all rebelled and had our own cliques, it’s part of understanding who you are. Some children kill themselves and they have never listened to My Chemical Romace, Panic At The Disco, Bring Me The Horizon etc. Other child suicides will be immersed in Emo culture, or metalheads, or moshers, or whatever next year’s teen craze will be. Teenagers are a product of their entire experience and environment, just as adults are. If they are self harming or thinking of suicide it is because something in their world, or in their perception of their world, is seriously wrong. A music lyric may even be the final prompt that puts a knife across a wrist or ties a noose in a long unused skipping rope, but what has happened in that child’s life that has led them to see a lyric in that light to begin with ?