By Andrew Benjamin

Music plays an important part in many people’s lives. It helps us to relax, unwind and to form friendships with those who have the same tastes.

It’s also a form of expression. Unfortunately, there are always those who use it as an opportunity to jump on the bandwagon to fame and stardom.

It’s inevitable, however, that these bandwagons will eventually collapse, giving way to new trends and leaving many in the wake of a suddenly uncool genre.

Once again, this is the case, with emo nearing a breaking point after years of exploitation.

Emo began as a subgenre of hardcore punk sometime in the mid-1980s in Washington D.C.

It’s abbreviated from the term “emotional hardcore,” a term mainly credited to the band Rites of Spring.

In the ’90s, Jimmy Eat World helped bring emo into the mainstream with their album Clarity.

While it didn’t have the hardcore sound of the original emo, the lyrics were still very personal without being whiny.

In the following years, many bands have emulated this style, creating a new style in the process. This resulted in the current state of the genre, which counts Long Island and New Brunswick, N.J., as its two biggest scenes.

The latest wave of the genre is led by bands such as Hawthorne Heights, All American Rejects and Aiden.

By this point, the genre has degraded so far that these bands represent a cold, lifeless shell of what used to be known as emo.

Rather than communicating genuine feeling, they employ a mechanical likeness in an attempt to target emotional weakness and “relate” to it, a process that’s nothing short of exploitation.

Lyrical evidence can be drawn from the song “Silver Bullet” by Hawthorne Heights from their album The Silence in Black and White, which states “Got a single Silver Bullet / shot right through my heart/ to prove I can survive, / without you.”

This is not what the originators of emo had in mind for their music. Lyrics from “Die Romantic” by Aiden show a similar style.

“Die romantic, romantic … / I watched your lips turn blue, your eyes went cold and all, / with all the rest… / you can illustrate your death in romance.”

The images of death are an easy sell, and smack of laziness on the band’s part.

Worst of all, these songs manage to put across all the surface qualities of emo without any of the actual emotional content.

Such exploitation stands as a tried and true form of musical prostitution.

What made the original emo a unique genre of music was its honesty, not an aesthetic over-attachment to style.

By this point, all the positive qualities have been replaced, leaving only the image, which itself conceals a hollow shell.

Unfortunately, now just like nu-metal did to metal, this new trend of emo has done what the originators of the genre never intended. In many ways, this transformation is a signal of the death of the genre.

It won’t be long before another “cool” genre takes over and the cycle begins anew.