The Christian Emo Thread: C or D, S/D, Its Merits and Faults

xpost Ha ha, Ned! I figured the Brits would have a good go at some of this shit, considering the time of my post.

Check the lyrics; the clues are there.

I have to go to bed, but I'll try to post more tomorrow.

Real quick:

Copeland- "Coffee" meanders, but "Testing The Strong Ones" actually is kind of catchy.

Anberlin tracks are also your run-of-the-mill emo, not really my thing, but just as sound.

Christian bands, in my experience, have a recurring problem- weak singers, terrible lyrics.

Only Christian bands I've run across that tanscends these problems is 16 Horsepower and the side project Woven Hand.

Dave Edwards- great voice, fantastic lyrics. Very fire and brimstone. Let me know if you're interested and I'll YSI some tracks tomorrow....

Here's where you could also point out the way that straightedge ethics meant that you could be hardcore while also being a "good kid" (no drink, no drugs, no promiscuity)- it would seem that emo's debt to its original DC roots (rites of spring, specifically) also overlap with a scene that had a pronounced moralist bent. In that sense, Christian emo comes as no surprise . . .

"Christianity" is too vague and loose a body of doctrines to map onto music in any simple way, obviously . . .

xpost

Also, excellent point about the moral overlap. This was one of the first things about the music that appealed to me as an eighth-grader attempting to be a Christian and a punk at the same time. There is also an evangelical intensity about both Christians (in the Protestant stripmall youth group sense) and straightedge kids that can make them both endearing and really fucking irritating at the same time.

xpost

Also, to latebloomer, this was similar for me in high school. Lots of church basement shows. I think more modern Prot. churches are willing to donate space to these kinds of events because they see them as nontraditional ways of getting their message out, which is true. I remember there always being a Rock for Life booth next to the merch tables at those shows. There's an organization I was questioning even at that time, mostly by asking, "What about rape?"

So's "emotionality", which is another flag the old bands never deliberately flew. You'd call yourself hardcore and put yourself out there, and that would necessarily involve revealing your emotions and beliefs.

The new "emo" bands seem to come pre-labeled as including a certain set of expressed emotions implied by the wack-ass genre name, so I assume that self-labeling "Christian emo" bands will come along with a certain set of American Protestant Christian doctrines. Which is to say that I think that there's substantial differences between "Christianity" and "emotionality" as signifiers in the world of ideas and "Christian emo" as a genre name.

-- regular roundups (daphim...), March 10th, 2006.

otm, most of the guys i know who were into that scene were huge pro-lifers, which always left a bad taste in my mouth

Also, without prying too much, what do you mean about this being such personal stuff to the point of not wanting to reveal band names? Do you know some of these bands/band members, or were you just referring to the concept of religious beliefs in general?

Yeah, I know some folks.

It's weird, the proliferation of "emo" as a template / scene / style what have you seems kind of similar to the cultural success of an idea like "melancholy" in the 1590s, i.e. sometimes the vaguer an idea is, the more easily and successfully it can go into circulation. It can last longer and become more popular *because* it is loose and slippery and hard to define yet easy to customize / hot rod / adapt. It becomes more inclusive than a perhaps more tightly defined idea or style.

i love pedro the lion.

I think that's the initial attraction for people getting into the music, but it seems to me that both Christianity and emotionality end up being chopped and channeled into something more tightly defined (and thus easily understood and less interesting) for the sake of genre cohesion -- that is, as hardcore (a scene defined by an attitude) becomes a genre (a type of music accompanied by a specific mindset), much of musical and philosophical interest is lost. There's too much boy-girl, I am alone, I wanna die like Jesus, and not enough ambiguity in unexpected places.

(This is to say nothing of the near-complete lack of political lyrical content of most modern emo bands, which strikes me as bizarre given the bands claimed as their inspiration.)

xpost to Anthony... post it. That's what we're here for. Also, PtL has faded fast on me, though I was a huge fan a while ago. And "Control" was a pretty important record for me when it came out.

I'm equally confused by the lack of politics in that scene. I played a show a handful of years ago in the OC where we almost got mobbed but a bunch of young kids with questionable morals. Of course, we were discussing the finer points of the history of modern development and housing...why we are where we are. It didn't go so well.

There was a real hostility there that I'd never seen before. A "punk" show where politics were flat-out not allowed.

Perhaps the reason a lot of these bands shy away from politics in their music is because they know that they can easily get away with right-wing emotions. A lot of teens/fans can latch onto "boy-girl, I am alone"...but I think it'd be harder with the whole, pro-life, pro-Bush thingy.

I myself am not a Christian (at present), but my entire family is.

When I was growing up in the US, the way that would have been written is "I am not a born-again Christian, but my entire family is." The acknowledgment being that "most people" (you know what I mean, don't harp on this) were born into a family connected, however tenuously, to some Christian church. Which included Cathollics.

Nowadays you get the sense that born-agains/evangelicals have coopted the term almost entirely. (Surely no one is discussing any Catholic emo bands.)

I am totally not religiou;, however, this bothers me a more than a little. Roman Catholics are Christians. Eastern Orthodox are Christians. (I used to hate it when people would ask me "Are Russians Christian?" What do you think they are, Muslims? Animists?)

Also, Bobby, I know one of the reasons I shied away from politics as a high school scenester was that I felt disenfranchised by them. I made a conscious decision to be apathetic about politics because 1) I didn't want to be like so many of my peers and claim a political ideology simply because it was that of my parents (or the exact opposite) and 2) politics did not feel like the place any change could be made. It was a classic case of putting hope in art v. politics, and that's what I did. I thought the entire arena of politics "said nothing to me about my life." I think this is also what can be powerful about the Christian ideology, i.e. the idea of a (in evangelical terms) "personal lord and savior" who can immediately affect your emotional life as opposed to some grand sort of social "savior" who can change society as a whole (which, ironically, is what attracts me most about the ideology at the present, and I think it is also the way Christ was originally thought of, at least in the way the story is told).

it always felt to me like the only thing you can really effectively change is that which is closest to you.

Based on the 1989 Minor Threat song of the same name, a miltiatant movement of puritan punks, that conflates the do it yourself lifestyle of punk, with the communitarian anarchist undertones, with a desire against all drugs, sex, meat and animal products. They tend to be fairly evangelical and sometimes violent with this, making them very close to a religious movement. Ths is extended in how it builds up local communities, encourages political resistance, refuses to engage in the commercial culture that has become dominant, and strives for both aesthetic and personal purity.
As well, they began in Washington, DC, as did the hardcore scene of Minor Threat but have many of their belivers in PRvo Utah. Their absteicence couples with their geopgraphy makes them an interesting example of devotion perhaps as an excuse for God.
The lead singer of Minor Threat (the name is interesting, because many of the members of the larger community were under 21, and the band was the first to have all ages show—minor threat here means the threat of young men and women, the threat of adolescents unlistened to, who will be the force for larger change.) Ian MacKaye said that his movement could be founded on three principles: “don't drink/ don't smoke/ don't fuck." An dthe song in question reflects that reality, a grinding ninety second attack on middle class convention and teenage punk nihilism, its message is explict and crystalline if it can be discertined by the insane almost subliminal speed that McKaye delivers his lyrics---which are mostly about drugs, and the loss of autonomy that the usesr of substances achieve—things practical like passing out at shows, to “being one of the living dead”—it ends with a call to arms: “Always gonna keep in touch/Never want to use a crutch/I’ve Got the Straight Edge”
Though MacKaye does not talk about meat, in his triune formation—it is frequently to be considered the fourth commandment, as a contuiion against cruelty, and towards autonomy. Meat is not only murder, it is not healthy. The main arguemetnat that are made by vegan straight edgers, about meat—that it contains opoids, and hormones, that it makes one sluggish, that it makes it difficult for people to work as well as they could, all connect to the larger ideals of purity and autonomy. The creation of the homeless feeding group Food Not Bombs, by SXe and other punks, as an attempt to reuse edible waste from grocery stores to communities who could use it, continues these primary concerns with more communitarian ideals.
Their avoidance of drugs, would seem odd to a genre whose founders loved amphtetinems, heroin, booze and other substances that provided an explicit avoidance of reality-in the words of the sex pistols (ironically) “ a holiday in the sun”—but there must be a memory of heriatige—the SXers were created in the 1980s—after the heroin addiction and murder of Nancy by Sid Viscous, after the drinking death of Darby crash, after hundreds of punks got crazy on smack and speed. They were late enough in the life cycle of punks to pregonzied the problems of systematic drug use. The other thing—was that drinking and drugging were expanses of the middle classes—and it reminded users that they were all still middle class boys and girls.
There is an amazing essay by the english critic Mark Sinker, called Punk—first published in some Routleddge volume in the mid 90s, in it he quotes a 15 year old cape cod teenager named Collette’s undated fanzine titles Tastes Yellow, Looks Red: “if punk means truth and dedication to ideals and saying ‘fuck you’ to the backwards attitudes and customs that hold us back, if punk means kid power and energy and music and sense of community, I would sell my soul for it. If punk means wearing ‘punk’ clothes, having the most body piercings, the oddest hair or the best record collection, if it means competing to be the coolest and the most noticeable or doing the most illegal ‘fuck society’ things, I would rather not have anything to do with it.”—that statement is a religious one, looking for authentic expression of the world, connecting things that are pure with things that are good. IT makes sense that she wrote that in the land of Emily Dickinson and Johnathon Edwards, but punk is universal, and it could (and was) written in Debuque and Liverpool and Edmonton and Paris.
The last sentence written by Collete—doing the most illegal fuck society things, was a call against drugs. Not in the Nancy “just say no” sense but in a desire to become the most honest and pure person that she could be—throwing out genuine resistance to the shackles of the state, and ignoring self destructive practices masquerading as the political. This could go further, and explain the diy requirements—there is something calicifing in finding colletes words in Routledge through Sinker—it seems wrong, a bit, instead of finding it in a fanzine, the text contains its own limits though—and it was found, by academics and critics. (or more likely, academics and critics came to this from fanzines.)
The worries about being controlled by substances, also meant that there was worry about being controlled by the state---kids in DC, with the grinding, third world poverty hidden by the public institutions and government buildings was a great object lesson in facades and who exactly was in charge. To be heard was not asking the channels of power, but doing it for themselves. It was a reaction against the nihilism, the cheap shock of the anglo punks, the boredom of the used up gesture, the spectacle broken, the action had to be moved to something larger and more complicated. Now the world had ended, one had to build.
SXe was the construction after the deconstruction of the 70s. Look at it this way—Johnny Rotten snarling ““No future, no future, no future for you/no future, no future, no future for me…” and acting like he belived it—seeking experenice because he thought the world was ending. Ian MacKaye singing ten years later—well that’s nonsense, of course there is a future, and we are gonna have to surrive it—and this is how we do it. (or again with Sinker: “‘No Future’ was never a threat; it was a promise. It was — it is — a moral fact, a fundamental conundrum: how to behave in the last days, when authority is ended. Life during wartime; how to live happily and decently when this is as good as things may ever get.”)
The only similarity then, was the no fucking compoenet—for something named after prison catamites—punk never really liked sex, maybe that’s because they thought of themselves as something smaller, about the be destroyed by the rampaging phallus of polite manners. It was Sid quoting Saint Bonaventure—how far apart is “sex is nothing but three minutes of squishing noises” to comparing human sex to the work of dogs. Mark Sinker writes in the first person about his life as a punk in the 70s—saying “I was as naysaying as any Puritan Iconoclast, as indirect in my pleasure-seeking as any mediaeval flagellant”—there is something unstated in Sinkers position here, that both the examples that he used sublimated the desire towards sexuality into power positions—the puritans, a nation building exercise outside of England,, and the medieval flaggaalent as a monk, usually---the monstaries a site of contentious restinece between the state craft of rome and the state craft of pseudo secular nationalities and princiapities. Punk then, creates the body as a nother kind of site of restience—SXes requirement of no fucking was then a call towards the celibate life.
Celibacy is a political as well as moral position, though. It dictates that communities have to be deovlped outside the susal lines. It is a way of creating families of groups or pods—social and personal change intertwined in a way that bodies never really can manage. It is a solution to consaldiate power, to extend desire into the world, and to broker radical change. Paul talked about it as an ideal, and marriage for people who were too weak for the fast. In the twelth century, it broke up the power of linear princes in Catholic Priests, but in its place grew an army of brothers and sisters (sisters more, because it allowed for the first time a chance for women to be autonomus together). Ann Lee suggested it as a way of preventing the Shakers from dissolving in prepraion for the end of world. Modern conserative evangelicals give their kids a way to find community and power without fucking—and for many of the teenage kids, the not fucking is a way away from the world. sXers don’t fuck because they have more important things to do—like take over the world.
The most difficult thing to reconcile with the Sxers is that, unlike some of the other movements that have similar motivations, they do not always believe in pacifism, but they also do not belive in the traditional idea of revolutionary violence. The violence that emerges from the straight edge movement in directed towards individual people who do not agree with them, and they way they commit this violence is difficult and hard.
There has been written reports from victims of straight edge communities about the kind of violence that has been imposed on people who do not believe in straight edge. Before I go any farther in this, it must be noted that it is only a small minority who belives in violence in this manner. Most SXers purity runs to a kind of anarcho-pacisfcism that is ubquituous amoungst crusty punks. But the minorties belief in the use of violence is interesting, in how it violates traditional codes, of both punk and actvisim.
The discussion of straight edge violence mostly emerges from Utah—where in Provo they have been described by police “as a violent gang”, one that has been known to burn people with cigarettes, bash bottles over peoples heads, curbstop or attack peole who eaat meat and engage in other kind of explic violence against person. There is almost no similar incidents amongs hard core activities in Washington, Los Angeles, New York or Dearborn.
It’s a radical thesis, but perhaps the straight edge community in provo, gets their moral validation from the radical, violent and imposing LDS fratentity the Danites—something that is not very well known outside of the community of LDS believers. The Danites are usually called the body gaurds of the prophets, or something of that nature. Naming themselves after a prophecy in Daniel 7:8—the founder of this church called the purpose of the Danites as “"The Companies are called Danites because the Prophet Daniel has said that the Saints shall take the kingdom and possess it forever". What they did is controversial, in the extreme, but the general consesnious, was aside from body guarding, and preserving mormon communities in Far West, Missouri, there central goal was to preserve the law of conscreation—or the idea of a united, moral place,outside of sin and strife.
The possession of a kingdom, the call for purity, the willingness to commit violence to get it, and the desire for unity as the first priorty, suggest that the Provo SxE were much more different then the others. They are not only the logical extenstion of the seeking of meaning in Punk Music, but the seeking of explicit community found among the Danites the Provo scene is just another kind of religious thought. Though there is a Muslim and Hare Krsna componenet to the movement---larger then its LDS movements, the presence of new kinds of religious thinkings—in a way tht is remarkably simiar to the way that Jesus is constructed by other people in this book, namely the connectiosn between purity, religon nad politics; the grafting of a lrager gamily structure onta a teenage rebellion, and a transcendent belief in the body (there is something in the Pentecostal dancing, in the new religious crawling, and in the slam dancing of straight edge punks?)
How they have crafted their communities, then is a explicit and holy extension of the kind of religious community building that hs existed from the beginning in America. To be Christian is something they sometimes have in common, but the founders have a heritage that is at least partially Christian, it is a claiming of Christian explicitness in a community that is mostly agnostic or atheist. In America the prsence of aa Christian god is so large, that its presence emerges mimasiticly.

otm, i was raised catholic and this shit always used to piss me off. their vision of 'christianity' was almost entirely evangelical protestant christianity.

fwiw, you might want to correct the year. x-post

This was always one of the most difficult things for me to grapple with about this scene.

a transcendent belief in the body (there is something in the Pentecostal dancing, in the new religious crawling, and in the slam dancing of straight edge punks?)

Another weird thing, because wouldn't a "transcendent belief in the body" carry over to erotic/sexual expression as well? I think the double standard here might be a sense of guilt about "using" the person one is intimate with. This can be traced back to an attitude toward masturbation that makes it out to be an unnecessary and selfish act (whereas, although it's obviously different, brushing one's teeth is not). Thus, the emphasis is negatively put on the moment of orgasm, and so, when this moment is achieved with another person, it is seen as being the same kind of selfish that masturbation is viewed as. Whereas if a focus was placed more on the sort of abandonment of self such experiences offer (which is the kind of thing I think slam dancing tends to emphasize), sex might not be viewed as such an almight evil after all. Also, the idea of losing one's will/self through dancing is interesting compared to the resistance against this effect when it is achieved via substances, although I think I can understand the valuing of achievement of this effect naturally as opposed to using chemical stimulants to do so.

Colin, I loved your band. Saw y'all in a Indiana cornfield at Rock For No Reason (1987) and it rocked my world so hard. Almost nobody except Husker Du was doing what The Hated were doing back then (i.e. loud, distorted, melodic punk w/a debt to psychedelia).

Are there any Christian electronic/idm artists spreading the gospel through the sounds of bleeps and bloops?

I (along with others discussing this issue once) thought this was irony.

Thanks -- but that was while I was briefly out of the band and John Irvine was on bass. I was back in by '88 when we played a basement in Bloomington.

Also, to Anthony: the current violent straight edge scene may have grown out of the scene surrounding Minor Threat, but the bully boy behavior you describe -- violence against individuals you eat meat or smoke -- is something more clearly borrowed from the Skinhead and metal scenes. To the extent that there was violence in the early DC scene, it was primarily defensive, aimed at violently anti-punk townies, jocks, and bikers, who were usually in groups themselves. Check the book "Dance of Days" by Mark Andersen (another Christian, to the extent that word's not be completely co-opted) and Mark Jenkins.

its the very first draft

Wow, I forgot about that one! I saw that too, y'all were totally great (again).

This is re: an anecdote of a friend hearing Fire Theft's "Heaven" on a contemporary Christian radio station at work.