#I somewhat plan on doing the others (I already have the ideas for vbs and l/n) but seeing how far I progressed with gog? yeah...

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[83gigsof90semocore-blog]

An introduction, plus 0-9 review

Part 1: background

The idea behind this blog is to listen to all of the long live emo google drive, a drive containing “emocore” music from the “90’s” (more on this later), and comment the process. I found this archive while browsing some semi-obscure facebook group dedicated to emo music and decided to listen to all of it. I did this in part because I wanted to learn more about music, in part because it seems interesting to not have as much of a filter when listening to music as I’d only ever hear the most popular 90’s emocore otherwise but mostly because why not??

The E-word

(Feel free to skip this section if you already have a solid idea of what the hell “emocore” means)

(The rest of the section is basically just emo 101)

I like trying to categorize things, even though I’m aware that every categorization falls apart when you start really pushing it’s boundaries. I like strange cultural artifacts. Because of this, I am fascinated by emo. Emo is older than most people expect with it’s roots in the 80’s and that has meant several very different things both to different people and in different points in time. The part of emo that most people are familiar with is the one that was commercially successful maybe 10-15 years ago, and that is not even considered to be “real emo” by most people immersed into the subculture.

Emo started as an outgrowth of hardcore music in the 80’s and was pioneered by bands such as Rites of Spring, Moss Icon and Embrace. At the time it was referred to as “emotional hardcore” which was later shortened to “emocore” and finally just “emo”. During the 90’s a different style of emo was developed known as Midwest Emo which was much closer to alternative rock or indie rock while only maintaining some of it’s hardcore roots, with bands such as Sunny Day Real Estate, Mineral, the Promise ring and american football. During the 00’s there was more of an effort by record companies to make money of emo music which lead to more listenable and widely market music being created often closer to pop-punk and sometimes post-hardcore. Notable examples are The red jumpsuit apparatus, My chemical romance, Fall Out Boy, Taking back Sunday, Brand new and Jimmy Eat World. For a lot fans of more underground emo, most or all of these bands are considered fake emo. I’m gonna call it scene emo instead because that is a less loaded term. During the late 00’s, the so-called “emo revival” movement began to make more underground music with a more 90’s midwest sound. Some important revival bands are Snowing, The World is a Beautiful Place and I am no Longer Afraid to Die, Empire! Empire! (I was a lonely estate) and the Hotelier.

Basically, for some reason people consider Orchid, american football and Panic! At the Disco to be part of the same genre. To clear up any confusion, I’m using the word “emocore” to indicate that I’m talking about the more traditional “emotional hardcore” definition of emo. Note that the most common definition that you see in emo communities on the internet, or among more recent bands that call themselves emo is one that includes emocore (although this aspect is somewhat downplayed), 90’s midwest emo, a select few scene emo bands (specifically Brand New, Taking Back Sunday and Jimmy Eat World) as well as emo revival. This is also the kind of emo I am personally most familiar with.

There is however a contingent of people instead use the emocore definition, which you might recognize if you’ve ever seen the infamous real emo copypasta. The author of the long live emo archive, Лобынцев Артем, also seems to use this definition, although they probably actually know what they’re talking about.

“90’s” “emocore”

So some of the music on this drive isn’t actually from the 90’s, there’s also music from the 80’s and the early 2000’s. I’m calling it 90’s emocore because it paints a better picture than just emocore, even if it technically isn’t true. On a similar note, I’m calling it emocore even though there may very well be music that some genre nerd might argue isn’t actually emocore. As previously discussed, emo is a hopelessly broad term so I’m using emocore to give people a better idea of what to expect, not because it’s necessarily 100% accurate.

Part 2: The archive

The entire archive is 83.8 gigabyte which is more than 10% of my harddrive. I’ve spent several hours just downloading files, and I’ve only gotten up to the letter D. In the root of the folder there is a file called “List of folders.txt”. According to it, there are 1671 albums, 69.76 GB (this is presumably just the music without the image files also included? Maybe that’s what I should have called the blog) 12496 songs, and 19:00:26 hours. That’s in the format DD:HH:MM by the way.

This is an absurd amount of music. My plan is to try and finish it within one year, or before 2019/7/20. To do that, I would have to listen to an average of 4.6 albums, 34.22 songs or 1.25 hours a day. We’ll see how that goes.

Part 3: The review: 0-9 (finally!)

So this is the format: The drive is divided in to folders based on the first character of the band name. Every time I finish one such folder I will post a review like part 3 here (don’t worry, I wont spend hundreds of words talking about emo every post). I will talk about my favorite artist under that letter, my favorite band name, my favorite image (as I said, there are images included under some of the bands, mostly of their album covers and such) as well as anything else I find interesting. I might shake up the formula a bit as I go, who knows. Before writing this post I’ve listened to the first folder, titled “0-9”. This is one of the smallest folders in the compilation, despite technically containing ten different characters, with only 160 songs. For comparison, the letter a has 831 songs. A careful start in other words.

Here are all the songs, albums and bands I've been listening to: https://pastebin.com/Xm5b4ZN1

My favorite band

125, Rue Montmartre

So after all this talk about emocore I ended up picking the maybe least hardcore band, figures. Commenter Kyle Cornwell on Sophies Floarboard says that they’re emocore at least so we’re still good.

125, Rue Montmartre is a German band named after a street address in Paris. They where active between 1998 and 2000 and they released 1 EP, took part in 1 split with Maggat and appeared on 2 compilations. They have a female singer who not only sings but also speaks and whispers. The guitars mostly play short, catchy riffs or arpeggios with some occasional chords during more explosive parts. The bass is comparatively loud and often contributes to the melody of a given song more than the guitars. Their style is clearly closer to the Midwest style of emo with it’s arpeggiod guitars, more indie sound and more melancholy mood. Here are the lyrics to their song Disco Hijack along with it’s English translation, which are very emo:

My favorite band name

30 second motion picture

I didn’t really find any name that was all that interesting under the number category (although I expect to find a lot of good ones down the line) but this is the one that spoke to me the most for whatever reason

My favorite image

This is from 309 chorus’s 1994 demo.

There’s just something really endearing about this grainy picture of this nerdy-looking dude with arm tattoos playing in front of a sign that says “haymarket collective” and has a fist and a circle E. Makes me happy inside.

Expect a new post in maybe two weeks? I’m not sure exactly how long time everything takes yet