A skinny white boy dressed with long black hair, a tight-fitting vintage t-shirt, a pair of torn black skinny jeans and checkerboard converse sneakers walks on stage, strums his skull-covered guitar and sings. Emo is a subculture that heavily relies on emotion, mostly sadness and depression, and takes the emotions to an extreme; emo is short for emotional hardcore. The people in the emo subculture focus on emotion because they do not want to conform to the laid-back popular culture. They express their emotion through a unique music genre, fashion, and a melodramatic attitude in order to distance themselves from the common pop culture.
The emo subculture originated from a style of music that mainly focuses on expressing man’s emotions through lyrics about love, anger, and hurt. The music genre conveys women as sexual muses, victimizing the man. While the music of the pop culture welcomes and encourages women sexuality, emo music has made women the origin of emotional pain for men, depicting them as “heartbreakers.” The music also creates messages about emos feeling isolated. For instance, the image of the album cover for the emo band, silverstein, shows a boy with long hair, wearing tight jeans, sitting alone, and weeping. In their album, Silverstein sings about, love, anger, hurt, and isolation, so the album cover reflects what the music in the album is about. Along with love, anger and hurt, emo music also sings about violence. Blood, kill, dead, hate, and pain are some common lyrics that are used in emo music and are usually directly related to women. The lyrics suggest that women cause pain for men; however, in the common pop culture, men are the ones who are inflicting pain on women. The emo subculture breaks away from this by reversing it. This rebellion is expressed through the emotional music and lyrics of the emo subculture.
Along with music, the emo subculture expresses their emotion through a unique recessive fashion. The