Emo

published 28 January 2008

By all counts, this weekend was a rocking one.

Friday, of course, was when foreign band My Chemical Romance was in town. My children Beatrice and Joshua, 13 and 12, who sometimes claim that the song “Teenagers” was written for me, had been starting to hint of wanting to go to “the gig in Taguig.” Fortunately, their school scheduled a retreat in faraway Tanay, Rizal, so even though it was only the sixth graders who were going this time, I was spared the unpleasant chore of making the “not just now, kids” discourse.

But Josh was back Saturday morning and on Saturday night there was a Battle of the Bands competition at the village basketball court. When he arrived, he mumbled something about having had lunch already along the way. So he just dumped his bag on the living room floor and scurried off to his favorite hangout—Soundgarden, a band rehearsal studio just at the corner of our street. See, my son plays bass guitar for Cradle—he is the youngest member, by the way, and all the rest are his ate’s classmates—and they would be Band Number 17 for the night. He sent a text message after a minute: “May practice kami. Na-plantsa na po kaya ‘yung black T-shirt ko?”

I once thought that if you married young and had children early, generation gap, that scourge of parenthood, would miraculously disappear. Relatively younger parents would be able to talk the same language and appreciate the same things their children did. Because of this, I sometimes wonder why I hear myself yelling at them to turn down the volume of the CD player when it blasts songs from groups I’ve never heard before.

Why don’t I understand why they blow a whole week’s allowance for a brand of drum sticks when we didn’t even have a drum set in the house? Why does it sometimes get on my nerves that those sticks protrude out of their school bags or tap on anything, from the dining table to the pseudo-leather upholstery of the sofa? And why do I wonder that on a weekend morning at 6 a.m., I wake up to the sound of guitar strumming? Aren’t these supposed to be growing kids, wanting to get as much sleep as they can?

Anyway. On Battle night, I asked my younger sister to chaperone Bea who wanted to be there to cheer her “bro” (and her classmates, too, no doubt) during the competition. I had resigned myself to waiting up until, perhaps, midnight, because at 8:15 they had texted me to say the show had not started yet.

All else in the house quiet, I flipped through the channels and settled for Quest, a magazine-type show on CNN. The host, Richard Quest, was talking about how rock music usually came with a package—frizzy hair, the screaming vocals and the disturbed personal lives of rock stars. The stereotype had contributed to parents’ general aversion to anything remotely related to rock. Quest was interviewing 48-year-old Nikki Sixx, who said that while the ’80s were the best years of his life, they were the worst, too. He had been a heroin addict and had needed a tremendous willpower—and a lot of time—to get back into shape. His words on the typical rock star: “The narcissism gets in the way of the music.”

I was eager to find out the rest of Sixx’s story, how he finally sobered up but kept music in his life—when the doorbell rang. The children were early. I opened the door to dejected kids, and Bea was hitting those drum sticks against each other. “What happened?” “We backed out.” “Why?” “Emman was a no-show.”

Now, this Emman, 16, lead guitar and vocals, was the oldest in the band. He was supposed to have organized it all. I asked them why he did not show up. An emergency? My son said: “Emo kasi ’yun.” As if that was supposed to explain everything.

I’ve made several readings on emo, and they confirm that there is no clear-cut definition, only notions. The safest thing to say would be that emo—short for “emotional” or “emotional hardcore”—is a sub-genre of rock music, but of course I would not be in a position to expound on the musical nuances. It has become, though, more than a music type. Emo-ness, as is best understood, is a fashion style and a stereotypical disposition.

The Urban Dictionary, a Web site that culls definitions from its readers, now has more than 400 definitions of emo. Among them are:

“Unenthusiastic melodramatic teenagers who don’t smile, in tight wool sweaters, tighter jeans, itchy scarves (even in the summer), ripped chucks with favorite band signatures, black square-rimmed glasses and ebony greasy unwashed hair covering at least three-fifths of the face at an angle.”

“A group of middle-class kids who find imperfections in their lives and create a ridiculous, depressing melodrama.”

“They consider themselves much more in touch with their emotions than anyone else; actually, they really just feel sorry for themselves. Most emos claim to be depressed or misunderstood. If you’re a hardcore emo, you’ll cut yourself occasionally.”

The emo has become an icon of sorts that in some social networking sites like friendster and mySpace, one can actually have an emo in the same way one had a tamagochi a few years back. My daughter has one in her site. She feeds her emo hamburgers, gives it time to write on its diary, or fixes the angle of its bangs.

Claiming to be, herself, an emo girl, Beatrice suggested on Sunday morning that we drop all our after-breakfast plans and together watch a DVD she had borrowed from a friend. The movie turned out to be “School of Rock” from several years ago, starring the stocky and animated Jack Black, who pretends he is someone else, invades a private school and encourages affluent 10-year-olds to challenge authority, express themselves and celebrate their individuality through, what else, rock music.

***

Last Christmas, the children’s gift to me was their studio recording of an acoustic OPM song. No, there was nothing hardcore about it at all. Josh was on guitar and Bea was on vocals, singing “Turete” and sounding like an almost-grown woman I can hardly recognize. It’s playing on my computer now as I beat my afternoon deadline for this column.

In fact, I’ve played it so many times over that they now think I am the quintessential stage mother—and a bit too young for the part. Not really, I tell them, though I’ve had some epiphanies myself in the last few weeks.

For example, since you can’t be with them 24/7 and can’t possibly know the backgrounds of all their friends, you worry that they may be looking up to the wrong role models or get exposed to the wrong habits. At the same time, you don’t want to be too restrictive because you don’t want them to lie to you. You realize that no matter how much you want to keep them home, they’ll want to go out and spend time with their friends.

And yet, they always do come home—whether it’s to eat or to beat their curfew. Sometimes you are surprised they just stay home and do nothing, even peek into the stuff you’re writing or ask what you’re cooking. It has also dawned on me that it’s not necessary to like the same things. You have a right to feel differently, as they do. They don’t have to behave according to stereotypes just to be “in,” because they know they have a home where they can just be free to be themselves. And even though you are 18, 20—even 36 years—apart, you can still watch films together and laugh at the same jokes. Generation gap doesn’t always have to be a bad thing.

At the end of the day, when they shed their black shirts and put down their cell phones that seem to beep constantly, this thing called Adolescence, too, goes to bed. Sometimes I am jolted, surprised that one rests his head on my lap and the other asks that I scratch her back, pretty much what I did to put them to sleep when they were yet babies.

That’s enough to get me emo, in the traditional Webster sense—even though I don’t have the bangs, the tight jeans and the ratty sneakers.