Oh geez hahaha the makeoutclub kids will HATE this. (Also attn: Maura)

(Not that I'd personally be any more keen on spending quality ethnographic time with the youth of the emo "cultural movement.")

Regards, Andy

We didn't know your e-mail. Anyway, hello. :-) You've heard the objections, now you must provide the justifications! ;-)

(Or is it just that whenever you ego-surf and find people talking about you as a cultural entity rather than a person you're triply inclined to read everything as dripping with antipathy?)

(Now that I think about it a lovely linguistics-meets-cultural- studies monograph could be written on what "emo" meant and then what "emo" meant after that and what "emo" means now and why: but this seems outside the scope of what you're talking about.)

In a related note, my father thinks I'm writing a book about "emu" which would perhaps have more basis in scientific fact, but I don't get outside nearly enough to do the appropriate field research.

In the end though the thing you'll have to tackle most to keep people from having the emo-"ick" reaction is this whole celebration of the mundanities and pseudo-soap-operas of personal life that comes along with emo-as-culture now: on one hand its reprehensibly solipsisitic and seems naively blind to the fact that other people have personal lives too, only they're self-assured enough to try and deal with them without needing attention or congratulation for it; on the other hand it feeds (possibly admirably?) into that "everyone will be famous for 15 people" formulation, whereby people arrange "elective" communities for themselves to be important in (people who despite their usually progressive rhetoric one gets the sense would have been happier living in rural 1950s towns where other people, for lack of anything else to turn to, would actually be interested in their lives). Of course the latter has been happening to greater or lesser extents since the birth of modernity; the internet just makes it much, much easier.

In terms of timing -- yes, true. My rightnow will indeed be backthen by the time the book comes out (prolly Spring of '03). But I think that rightnow is a time of particular interest in regards to the world I'm writing about. If it's a timecapsule of 6-12 months prior to publication, I can deal with that.

Who is this for? Well, I'm not writing it as a field study of emo teens in their natural environment. I hate generalizations, proclamations, and wonkery (wankery too) as much as the next guy. If you want some of that, check out last week's Time magazine piece on emo. I'm quite fond of the people I've interviewed -- and I'd like to think that they'd be interested in reading about themselves, people like themselves, and the bands that they obsessively follow. (Although this is partly wishful thinking, a majority of them have told me that they would want to read something like this. Maybe they're just being nice. I'm sure I'll find out.) I can imagine this being appealing to all sorts of people interested in the web as a cultural phenomenon, to music snobs like all of us, to people looking for valid examples of me being self-indulgent. The list goes on.

Why does this sound like a "preppy handbook?" Seriously, I want to know. Otherwise that sounds like a pretty baseless jab. Which is OK too. Don't worry -- I've been rubbing my notoriously thin skin with coarse salts and rough paper for weeks in order to toughen it up in time for publication.

As far as theorizing go: that's not really my main point here. That's just what I do when I let myself get going -- which tends to happen when I'm seriously procrastinating from the writing bit. At heart, it's just a look around. It's a rock'n'roll book. I hope. We'll see.

But I'm not writing this as a celebration or even validation of the music itself. Some of which -- actually, a lot of which -- I find pretty unappealing. It's mostly focusing on the kids. Now, this isn't groundbreaking stuff, and these kids are mostly male, mostly white, mostly suburban, mostly lower to upper middleclass. But I'm really fascinated by the ways in which they respond to these bands. Has anyone on here ever been to a Dashboard Confessional show? It's a pretty incredible (meant literally) experience. Hundreds of young kids -- many of whom look like the jocks that used to pick on me and I suspect all of us back in the day -- singing/screaming every word, occasionally harmonizing, crying, and hugging one another. That venting becomes much more about the kids than about the performer. Some of the kids then go home and purge their own miseries on the web. These purgings get their own "fans." And so on. It's not just that it's self-indulgent -- which a lot of music, if not just lyrical content is, let's face it -- it's a sort of mass self-indulgence. Everyone relates to the one person's songs. But the reason I'm interested in the web is because it allows this relating to be more than one-sided. This is a world where *really really really* baring your innermost pain (even if it IS just pain about a bad breakup or whatever) is treated like currency -- he who cries the most, wins. Even on a superficial level, as a music critic I find that interesting. But also, the communities that exist online to talk about these things are very self-protective and nurturing. And yes, foul-mouthed and abusive, and random and witty and dumb too. But a lot of the concern is genuine. So . . . anyway. Once again I've ranted with lots of tangentially connected ideas. But I hope someone sees where I'm coming from. Heck, I hope I do.

OK. I have to get back to work now.

This may be beyond the range of what you want to tackle, but a study of the relationship between emo (in the broad sense you're using) and Christianity would be interesting as well.

4. If this was a "nice" deal, then I'd hate see what a not nice deal looks like.

-- Andy Greenwald, Monday, June 3, 2002 12:00 AM (5 years ago) Bookmark Link

I actually learned the answer to this question the other day: there is nothing less nice than a nice deal!

- "nice deal," $1 - $49,000
- "very nice deal," $50,000 - $99,000
- "good deal" $100,000 - $250,000
- "significant deal," $251,000 - $499,000
- "major deal," $500,000 and up

r u in negotiations????

No, I just finally bothered wondering what the PL scheme meant!

Now I have to restrain myself from figuring out how much money various MFA friends have

What abt "sweet deal?" In my experience it is just a phrase said a lot by stoners.

This site is still going!

Not as good as Only Undies Club

http://stet.editorially.com/articles/dont-be-a-stranger/

But what if a social network operated according to a logic as different from computer logic as an underground punk club is from a computer lab? Once upon a time this social network did exist, and it was called Makeoutclub.com. Nobody much talks about Makeoutclub.com these days, because in technology, the only things that remain after the latest revolution changes everything all over again are the heroic myth of the champion’s victory (Facebook) and the loser’s cautionary tale (MySpace). Makeoutclub didn’t win or lose; it barely played the game.

Makeoutclub was founded in 2000, four years before Facebook, and is sometimes referred to as the world’s first social network. It sprung from a different sort of DIY culture than the feel-good Northwest indie vibes of Urban Honking. Makeoutclub was populated by lonely emo and punk kids, and founded by a neck-tattooed entrepreneur named Gibby Miller, out of his bedroom in Boston.

The warnings of social disintegration and virtual imprisonment sounded by today’s social media skeptics would have seemed absurd to the kids of Makeoutclub. They applied for their account and filled out the rudimentary profile in order to expand their identities beyond lonely real lives in disintegrating suburban sprawl and failing factory towns. Makeoutclub was electrified by the simultaneous realization of thousands of weirdos that they weren’t alone.

lol i didn't realize until after that dude refers to the same book author from the o.p., guess this is a pretty small wheelhouse