March against the Mail today

The march/gathering has moved location looks like the police would not accept it being direcly outside the Mail. See here.

The publicity surrounding the march has resulted in a few articles. The BBC has looked into the problem:

Rock cult or nice kids that do their homework?
BBC News, UK -29 May 2008

As she knuckles down to prepare for her A-level exams, Kate Ashford, 17, from Tunbridge Wells in Kent, offers a less sinister explanation for the appeal of MCR.

The theatrical angst and drama of emo is, she suggests, no more than an outlet for a generation creaking under the weight of social expectation.

"Being a teenager has got to be so much more difficult these days," Kate says. "There's a lot more exams and pressure to get into university.

"Listening to a band like MCR is a cathartic thing. And I suppose emo style is meant to be about standing out, looking different - even if all the other emo kids are dressed the same as you."

Matthew Hirons, a 22-year-old web developer from Stourport-on-Severn, is even more phlegmatic. He suggests that the critics take the music far more seriously than the fans.

"People say emo is all about depression and suicide," he says. "But I'm a happy person. I've got a girlfriend and a good job. I just like the music and the fashion.

"I think anyone over 25 will find it hard to understand what it's all about. Even I'm a bit past it for an emo, to be honest."

The Times article is far better however with a wideranging article on the problems of emos in South America. But why no mention of emo attacks in the UK?

Emo kids are under attack.
Times Online, UK - 29 May 2008

Coincidentally, Mexico is one country that has recently experienced a wave of antiemo attacks. The emo cult is growing throughout Latin America, and its followers are regularly subjected to abuse, prejudice and even violent attack. They are seen as homosexual, antisocial poseurs, weird and fanatical. In March antiemo attacks swept through Mexico.

On March 7 a mob of 800 in the city of Queretaro went looking for emos to beat up. On March 15, a silent march against the attacks, organised by a gay rights group, was staged in the same city.

In Chile there are reports of skin-heads attacking emo kids. In São Paulo, Brazil, emo teenagers report regular attacks, especially in the city’s poorer Eastern suburbs. In Lima, Peru, a gang of anarchist punks recently attacked emos, kidnapping one who was kicked and punched before he was rescued.

For South American emos, the appeal is more about identity, means of expression, and style. Especially for those in the continent’s enormous urban sprawls, where the increasing economic boom means that families have internet and cable television but where there are few outlets for increasingly sophisticated teenage youth.

This is clear in the shabby, nondescript Galeria Brasil in Lima, situated on the edge of the city’s drab, grimy, suburban sprawl. It’s one of Peru’s most famous destinations for rock fans. But this grubby concrete mall, with its CD and T-shirt shops, looks like a Hackney tower block. Teenagers idle out their afternoons playing out-of-date video games for 25p an hour. Looking around, it’s easy to see why a cult about teenage identity and isolation might spread so quickly.

Jimmy Carrillo, a Peruvian TV reporter, profiled emos recently. “The emo movement is very strong here in Lima,” he says. “It’s a new movement. It’s very colourful, weird, very estranged from other movements.” Emo is gaining ground in poorer, transitional barrios such as Villa El Salvador and Los Olivos, where people are open to the influence of American rock and MTV. But the prejudice against the perceived homosexuality of emos runs deep. “This is a very macho country. So homosexuality is taboo,” Carrillo says. Anarcho punks particularly hate them. “They hate homosexuals. And they look at the emos as people who stole ideas and music. It’s a double punch.”

Junior Medina, 20, is a singer in Lima’s hottest emo band Ediana. “We are called gays, queers, pussies, faggots,” he says. “The lyrics are one cause, because they are romantic, about heartbreak.” Their followers are accused of being poseurs. “Emos are more concerned about the way they look,” Medina says, fiddling with his floppy fringe.

Yet Latin American emos are fighting back. In March Medina took part in a studio debate for the Peruvian TV chat show Enemigos Intimos, in which emos were heavily satirised. “That was fake,” he says. Realising some of the other emo participants were imposters, he waited until 1am, and filmed two of the vacant emo teenagers – actually channel employees – leaving work. Medina posted the video on YouTube. The national newspaper El Comercio ran an exposé and the show’s producers were forced to apologise.

“Emo isn’t emotional, it’s just queer,” is a popular saying among fashionable youth in Brazil’s most style-conscious city, São Paulo. When the cult hit the city in 2006, homemade “comedy” videos appeared on YouTube showing how to lynch an emo.

The assumption among many Brazilians is that emos are gay, unsociable, and self-centred – none of which goes down well in this conservative, sociable country. Victor Sousa, 20, is a former emo and he encountered plenty of prejudice, he says. “The homosexual prejudice is unfair. People say that, but it isn’t true for everyone.”

Typical of emo’s critics is Ligia Terceira, 30, a salesperson in Shopping Tatuapé, a vast, hectic mall in Zona Leste, São Paulo, where many emos gather and where many are attacked. “Many of them look like homosexuals,” he says. “It seems they don’t like people. They exclude themselves from society. They have closed minds; they’re radical and fanatical.”

Gangs in Australian schools

This article really shows how subcutural clashes are causing trouble in Australia.

Gang culture rife in schools

Article from:

By Paul Weston

April 27, 2008 12:00am

SECONDARY students are dividing themselves up in Queensland school grounds into groups called Plastics, Gangstas, Goths and Emos, pupils say.

Anyone who refuses to join are labelled nerds – or, worse, become nothings or rank outsiders to be bullied or, in extreme cases, bashed and have their home invaded.

An 18-year-old former Gold Coast secondary school student, who has survived two bashings and a home invasion, told The Sunday Mail last week that the school gang culture was on the rise and a direct import from American campuses.

The former student, parents of bullying victims and psychologists pinpointed several reasons for the bully/bash revolution. They included:

• The negative influence of some American films and rap music.

• The internet, which provides plenty of opportunity for cyberspace bullying.

• The failure of working parents to police some sort of moral code for their children.

"The Americanisation in our schools is really bad," the 18-year-old former student leader said.

"Kids even talk in American accents, use their phrases. I've got a friend who has arrived from overseas and she has never seen anything like it. At school, everyone is broken up into different groups like you see in those US movies like American Pie. There's Plastics, the Gangstas, Emos and Goths."

The groups are large and easy to identify from their fashion accessories and their arrogant attitudes, but only one – the Gangstas – presents a violent threat.

"The Plastics pack on the make-up. Their hair is really hacked at, they work on it so much," the former student said.

"They change their uniforms to make their shirts tighter and their dresses shorter. The guys love them, but they're called Plastics because they're so false."

The female schoolgirl obsession with good looks surfaced last week at St Patrick's College in Mackay, where students had ranked themselves from 1 to 21 – they write the number on their wrists – as part of Club 21 or Big 21.

Gothics are identified by their dark clothing and heavy-metal taste in music, and Emos (from "emotion") by being sensitive, introverted types obsessed with depressing rock bands.

But it is the group stealing the US gangsta-style culture, with its love of violent rap music, which students fear the most.

A gang of suburban teenagers armed with bats, machetes and a sword stormed a school assembly at Sydney's Merrylands High School early this month injuring 18 students and a teacher.

Queensland students told The Sunday Mail they were aware of similar gang members carrying pocket knives around secondary schools in southeast Queensland. "They all have baggy clothing, they're all bling, they have the hats with the stiff shades worn backwards and the pants around their knees showing their undies," the 18-year-old said.

"They carry boom boxes (sound systems) around the school. The Gangstas are the ones you worry about. They need to be so cruel all the time."

A parent who has a 16-year-old son at a southeast Queensland school, and an older daughter who recently graduated, has kept a diary of dozens of assaults on her children since 2003.

The concerned mother, who asked not be named for fear of reprisals against her children, described the gangs as "organised groups of thugs".

Some of them had been gang members since primary school as 10-year-olds, following the "career" of their drug-addicted parents by robbing homes before bashing students at secondary school, she said.

"There were six or seven of these students in Year 8 who surrounded my daughter. They punched and kicked her, rammed her into a brick wall. They picked her up and dumped her head-first into a garbage bin. She ended up with renal bleeding," the distressed mother said.

Police from the Juvenile Aid Bureau later cautioned the most violent bully but the other girls, including the ringleader who organised the bashing, escaped without punishment.

It took the school six months to get enough evidence to expel the female gang leader.

"These gang members single out the kids who are good kids, kids who don't want to smoke or drink," the mother said.

She recalls making many complaints to Education Queensland and school administrators, but after disciplinary action the gang would choose a more indirect form of bullying: "It becomes more covert and indirect. The student is usually defamed. This is through verbal abuse in the playground or through the internet."

The parent took notes of conversations. An education bureaucrat told her: "Your kids have to learn to swim in the mainstream. Society has changed. Get over it."

But the impact on her son, a Year 12 student with a promising sporting future, has been devastating and he recently took several weeks off school after receiving threatening emails.

When he considered returning to school this term, he sat down, in tears, and wrote a letter to his parents:

"I don't want to go back to (school name) because I have no friends.

"I get bullied by (group) and teased by (group). When they come out from the office seeing the principal . . . it's all back to bullying again.

"What do I need to happen for me to feel OK about (the school)? The two groups gone, that's what I need."

The concerned mother's diary also includes many entries recording that her children have woken up early in the morning after nightmares about being bullied at school.

She said many gang members roamed the streets as late as 10pm on school nights and appeared to have no parental supervision.

She believes a key reason for the violence in schools is that many of these non-academic children were forced to remain at school.

In previous decades, they would have left by Year 10 for a trade.

"These kids are like magnesium. These kids – they're white light. They're in your face immediately," she said.

"And they're sneaky. They make out they're OK when they go to your place, and then they go up to our local park and club the plover population to death."

Dr Marilyn Campbell, lecturer and psychologist with the School of Learning at the Queensland University of Technology, agrees there is a problem created by having the less academic children stay at school longer.

"I'd agree, and in some ways . . . we are keeping children as children longer," Dr Campbell said.

"We're prolonging their adolescence. You no longer go to work (full-time) at 12 years of age."

Dr Campbell makes two critical points in the gang debate, which provide some balance about the role of schools and parents in reducing the amount of bullying.

She explains that gangs of teenagers are not a new phenomenon, but the lack of parental supervision and advent of the internet and bullying in cyberspace is.

"The Mods, the Rockers and the Beatniks (in the 1950s) had a huge American influence. So I don't think it's an incredibly new phenomenon," she said.

"Young people have a seamless online and offline life (now). Bullying happens in both worlds.

"Any violence is a worry, whether it is imported or home-grown. But if you look at the five groups (including the nerds), only one-fifth of them identifies more with a violent culture and I would say only one-fifth of that group would practice violence."

Part of the solution would be to provide schools with more resources to handle troublemakers, and steer those bored students earlier into apprenticeships and trades.

But working parents could not expect schools, which have their children from 9am to 3pm, to be responsible for teaching them a moral code when their focus was on preparing their class for maths and English exams.

"High schools don't teach violence, but TV and the internet and their parents do.

"Schools aren't the ones to raise children. Parents are supposed to raise them," Dr Campbell said.

What is emo? - Fox News and others weigh in while Russia panics

Russian Region Discovers “Emo” Subculture

February 13th, 2008

Related Post

• Russian University Closed Over Electoral Monitoring Course
  
• A Civic and Patriotic Youth
  
• More Arrests in Nizhny Novgorod
  

Filed Under: All News • Culture

Tags: education • emo • Nizhny Novgorod • popular culture

Nizhny-Novgorod, February 11th:

A subculture known for black fingernails, angled bangs and rock music, popular among some Russian teenagers, is under attack. On Monday, the Department of Education of the Nizhny-Novgorod oblast called for a campaign to combat a movement known as “emo”. The classification, which originated from an independent music movement in the United States, is short for “emotional,” and now relates as much to a fashion style as a genre of music.

The Department’s move comes after the local branch of the Federal Security Bureau Directorate (UFSB) brought forth a report describing repeated instances of “unconventional religious trends, and civic organizations disseminating ideas of a negative youth subculture.” The information first became public from a circular published by the Education Department.

The document, in part, reads: “According to information from the Nizhny-Novgorod oblast UFSB, the oblast is seeing the growth of ideas of the emo negative youth subculture, which are connected with suicidal tendencies of teenagers 12-16 years of age.”

The text then vividly described the emo stereotype: clothing with pink and black colors and two-toned designs. Blue-black hair. Long bangs. Fingernails painted black. Piercings.

The FSB informed the educators that “the emo ideology negatively influences the unformed teenage psyche. According to the ideology, its members are immortal, and each one’s dream is to die of blood-loss in a warm bath, by cutting the veins on the wrist region. Many of the teenagers are depressed, withdrawn in their thoughts, and the girls are very inclined toward suicide on account of unrequited love. The young people drawn to the emo movement imagine that they have an ‘allergy to happiness.’”

Based on the information taken from the FSB, the department called on its teachers to maintain vigilance and to take measures directed “at explaining the negative consequences of entering into alternative civic organizations.”

Meanwhile, the emo subculture could not be reached for comment.

The Fox News report is interesting because it shows a bit about the tedency for emos to be attacked:

Farmington Daily Times - What is emo?

2 Feb 2008

ARMINGTON — The generation gap is only widening.

In 1930s Germany, swing kids defied convention by embracing jazz music and mocking Nazis.

Hippies did the same thing in 1960s America with tie-dyed T-shirts and psychedelic rock.

Then there were the goths, the punks, the skaters and the rappers — all groups of teenagers and young adults intent on expressing themselves through dress and music.

The latest fad, emo, includes dark makeup, tight clothing and a permanent frown. The style has changed, but the phenomenon known as teenagers remains the same. And it's still music that makes the world go 'round.

"I think music really influences people," said 17-year-old Shawn Yazzie. The Piedra Vista High School senior has been part of the emo culture for four years.

"Music is individuality," he said. "It depicts emotions."

The term emo is derived from "emotional" or "emotive." The culture stems from a subgenre of punk music originating in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s and revolves around displays of deep emotion
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in music, dress and attitude.

Emo music often includes screaming, crying or other outpourings of emotion, Yazzie said.

"There is a deeper message in it," he said. "It's different than other music. It becomes more about a personal focus."

Teens dressing in emo fashion often dye their hair black and wear it long over one eye. Other patterns of dress include tight jeans, T-shirts that bear the names of rock or punk bands, studded belts, canvas sneakers and thick, black-rimmed glasses. Heavy eye makeup on males and females also is popular.

Like most fads, emo comes with stereotypes, Yazzie said. The dark clothing and emotional music can lead to beliefs that emo teens are depressed or suicidal.

"It's not true," Yazzie said of the stereotype. "Emo is just another way to dress. It's just like people who like to wear football T-shirts or pink all the time. We like to wear black."

Misunderstood

Despite explanations, emo teens often are misunderstood — by their parents, teachers and peers, said Virginia Nickels, a choir teacher at Piedra Vista High School.

Nickels began teaching in 1990. She has seen teenage fads come and go as quickly as taste in music changes, but she's never seen a style so dark, she said.

"Emos are very withdrawn," she said. "They don't have a lot of friends that I see. They're quiet, and even their posture is influenced. They walk with their heads down and their shoulders slumped."

As a music instructor, Nickels witnesses firsthand how beat and lyrics can influence dress and lifestyle. But fashion and music have taken a darker turn since the leg warmers and moonwalks of the 1980s, she said.

"I see emo as being pretty dark," she said. "I don't know if it's unhappy, but I wonder what's behind the clothes and the makeup."

Being misunderstood is part of a normal teenage life, said David Johnson, clinical social worker and president of New Horizons in Farmington. Johnson treats several emo teens, but said the clothing and music alone are not a cause for concern.

Only about 2 percent of the local teen population is emo, Johnson said. Most belong to upper middle class families and most are between the ages of 13 and 17.

"They're trying to say they're different from the rest," he said. "That's their job from the teen years until they're 20 or 25."

Some teens embrace rodeo; others like heavy metal, Johnson said. Most will dabble in many different things before settling on likes and dislikes. Emo teens are no different than the rest, except they've chosen to focus on their emotions.

The dress — which for some can be disturbing — is both a reflection of those emotions and a way to identify peers, Johnson said.

"The teenage years are a search for identity," he said. "They want to know how they're different, but they also want support from peers who are similar."

As teens mature and leave home, most will grow out of the emo culture and leave their dark phases behind, Johnson said.

"Most kids run within the normal bell curve," he said. "The emo phase is transitional. As they get more input, they grow out of it. You don't see a lot of people in their 30s or 40s dressed like this."

Taking emo too far

The overwhelming emotions that often lead teens to seek out the expressive music and dark emo lifestyle can also be a sign of more serious issues, Johnson said. While most emo teens explore their emotions through poetry, art or music, others are attracted to the culture because of its focus on pain.

"Some kids need to be seen as different because they feel different," he said. "The emo culture brings out the negative, and it creates enough pain that it becomes addicting. When there's a lack of pain, they go looking for ways to experience more."

The danger, Johnson said, surfaces when teens surround themselves so completely with negativity and emotional pain that they turn to self-injury to heighten their feelings. Others turn to drug use or other illegal activities for the adrenaline rush and emotional highs.

"Sometimes kids today have to find a more extreme statement to get noticed," he said. "More extreme behaviors are accepted, so to be noticed, they have to find something really unusual to stand out from the crowd."

Self-injury usually comes into play when a teen experiences deep internal pain. The pain can stem from a traumatic event or from everyday stresses, Johnson said.

One major stress is rejection. When teens are rejected because of the way they dress or act, it becomes a rejection of who they are, Johnson said, and that creates awful pain.

"They cut themselves to change the focus from internal pain to external pain," he said. "It's part of finding an identity that's so outside the normal culture. They collect sources of pain that they can control."

Self-injury often is associated with the emo culture, but the two are not synonymous, Yazzie said. The teen knows many people who follow the emo trends, but not all are gloomy, he said.

"Most of the emo people I've met are more happy than other people," he said. "They have an identity, and if they're sad, it's because personal stuff happens and they start to identify with the music."

All teenagers are filled with angst, Nickels said, but focusing on it to the exclusion of everything else can be detrimental.

"They get so angry or so passionate that screaming is permitted and even encouraged," she said. "It's not simply expressive — it's overly expressive."

An open mind

Yazzie's mother, Cassius Yazzie, graduated from high school in 1980. Back then, she said, she wore parachute pants and styled her hair in a Mohawk.

It didn't bother her at all when her son started wearing black and growing out his hair.

"To me, it's clothes," she said. "It's his image. You have to look beyond the clothes and get to know him."

Cassius took Yazzie shopping for stylish black jeans and T-shirts and helped him with his eyeliner. When his taste of music changed, hers did, too.

"You have to be a parent," she said, "but that doesn't mean you can't understand your kids."

Instead of judging her son, Cassius asked about his changing tastes. He had this to say: "I'm being different toward what is true for me."

That was enough for Cassius, she said.

Yazzie plans to graduate this spring and pursue a career as an architect.

"It's possible I'll outgrow this," he said, "but there's still a part of me that will listen to that type of music, part of me that will wear black T-shirts."

The teenage years are the springboard into adulthood, and it's normal for people to hold on to certain things, Nickels said. The more extreme fads generally disappear with age, and she expects most emo teens will shed their dark sides.

"I think they're going to look back and wonder what they were doing," Nickels said. "But don't we all?"

Gothic Liberation Front

[Sorry for quality click in link below for better version.]

The group Gothic Liberation Front that we mentioned before has since the new year become far far more active and has been putting out a lot of videos on Youtube. A lot of these recount some really sick and terrible incidents. You can see links to them via their site. This recounts a rather horrific sexual assault:

This is a interesting post on fights between goths and emos.

They are also been active in putting out posters, flyers which they are distributing and have an article coming out in a local newspaper in the UK. Looks like they are moving off the internet which is good if they actually want to change things. They have a different stance from the SOPHIE group so it will be interesting to see which of them is the more successful in raising awareness. There is still some flak from disagreements over the GLF's role floating round on the net. It would have better if everyone concerned had just remained calmer in the first place. But it should be interesting to see where they are going to go from here.

New Emo Goth Danger?

We mentioned before this strange saga (More media lies about goths and emos ) in the press from this stupid article EMO cult warning for parents | the Daily Mail which focused particularly on My Chemical Romance. They have often promoted anti self-harm message so pinning the blame on them is stupid.

But what can you expect from the Daily Mail who loved the colour black in the thirties when it was worn by the British Union of Fascists famously running the headline "Hurrah for the Blackshirts!". They frequently said good things about Hitler and Mussolini and supported the appeasement line.

The Guardian interview with My Chemical Romance at the time was interesting:

Alexis Petridis meets My Chemical Romance The Daily Mail says they're a threat to society. Rival bands say they're dangerous. Are My Chemical Romance really as evil as all that? Alexis Petridis finds out

Friday October 27, 2006
The Guardian

"I'm surprised a newspaper thought we were such a threat that they had to write a whole article about us and our fans, calling them a death cult," frowns Gerard Way. His brother wearily points out that we have been here before. "In the 1980s, people thought Judas Priest was promoting suicide," he sighs. "They were like, Dee Snider from Twisted Sister? Dude's in league with the devil, man!"

In addition, they claim not to be an emo band at all: "We're so opposed to it because when we started out there were emo bands all around and we stuck out as not being emo," complains Gerard. "What that translated to is that we couldn't get booked up for shows, no one would take us on tour with them apart from Christian metal bands. We didn't get any of the benefits of being an emo band, our influences didn't come from emo. We just became emo by default, because we became one of the biggest bands from that scene." He quickly corrects himself: "That we weren't even a part of."...

The other factor is the band and their fans frequently have faced rivalry from others like metal bands etc which has led to fights :

The other factor in My Chemical Romance's rise to mainstream stardom seems to have been their appearance at this year's Reading Festival. Plenty of artists have sealed their elevation to the big time via a triumphant summer festival appearance, but My Chemical Romance stole the show at Reading by the unlikely expedient of having bottles thrown at them by disgruntled fans of metal band Slayer, who preceded them on the bill. The Slayer fans were either provoked by My Chemical Romance's music, or Gerard Way's frenetic, mincing stage manner ("right from when we started," says Iero phlegmatically, "people have yelled 'fags' at us"), or the youth of their fanbase. Either way, the column inches most expected to go the Arctic Monkeys or Muse went their way. The hype was increased when fellow alt-rockers Kasabian and the Killers' Brandon Flowers dismissed them in terms your average 14-year-old is likely to find irresistible: the former called them "dark and weird", the latter "dangerous".

Mention of the Reading performance evokes mixed emotions. Iero claims he thought the incident "ruled", but still seems a bit angry - "we have more heart in one fuckin' bead of sweat than most of those people have in their entire bodies". Gerard Way seems positively delighted: "That was our greatest victory as a show," he smiles. "This band was always about facing adversity. We got bottled for being dangerous. We oppose everything that's conventional about rock'n'roll in this country, our home country, everywhere in the world. That weekend, kids were getting beat up in the audience, the guys on stage were getting beat up, and we got through it, just like the kids got through it."

This article covers the same ground:
New Emo Goth Danger?

The band’s young audience is a concern to know-nothing sorts who’ve been campaigning against the alleged persuasive nature of rock music for what feels like forever. Only recently, in August 2006, The Daily Mail ran an article warning parents of the ‘New Emo Goth Danger’ – those are exact words they used, and the piece can be read online here. One of only three bands mentioned in the piece – bands that apparently encourage behaviour such as self-harm – was My Chemical Romance. Gerard doesn’t know whether to laugh out loud or cry silently to himself.

---
"Papers like that will never do their homework, but it is kind of funny to call it ‘emo death cult’, or whatever it was called."

“The funny thing is that I’ve met more kids that have stopped self-harming because of us, than anything,” he says, his face masked with absolute seriousness. “That’s the case with most of the kids I meet, especially in the UK, so I guess it is some sort of epidemic. Most of the kids that I meet, that say thank you, are kids that used to self-harm. Kerrang! was involved, as one of their readers wrote in about it, and I ended up having a very personal discussion with this girl. I noticed she had all these cuts, and it really bummed me out, and I was hoping that she didn’t feel that she needed to do that in order to come to the show. And I ended up meeting the girl and her mother – the mother had written a letter to Kerrang! – and she said because of the band she’s now stopped doing that. Papers like that will never do their homework, but it is kind of funny to call it ‘emo death cult’, or whatever it was called. ‘New Emo Goth Danger’?”

Iero cackles: “Ha! I like that! That’s the title of the next album, New Emo Goth Danger!”

The matter raises a final point, though. My Chemical Romance are superstars nowadays, playing to thousands of kids – and we do mean kids – at each and every show they play. They must come in for a lot of stick from right-wingers who haven’t taken the time to realise that the band’s fantasy-horror lyrics are just that: fantasy. The music's immediate and the lyrics fun: there are no hidden messages calling for kids the world over to scratch their best friend's eyes out. Sure, the five-piece have posed for photo shoots covered in fake blood, playing-dead models lying at their feet, but that doesn’t make them a bad influence. They just like, as has already been mentioned, playing it up, theatrically.

“We live in a very sick bubble, made of concrete and bullet-proof casing,” says Gerard. “If you acknowledged all the ignorant stuff you heard, you’d never sleep, we’d never sleep. There’d be no time. I gotta say I’m not a fan of that Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back movie, but it has one of the best scenes I’ve ever seen. They literally go around to peoples’ houses that have talked shit about them on the internet and give it back to them. It’s the coolest thing in the world.”

Fox 11 News Undercover: EMO SCENE KIDS!

In May 2007 Fox News went undercover to expose a new development in the United States, Emo. As you might expect it is somewhat inaccurate, but it is an interesting report in that it examines the cult of emo bashing, including some online videos of attacks, rather than going on about self harm for a change. It notes the noticeable prejudice from punks, metalers, and even goths against emo kids which is so obvious online.

At first I thought it was more of a US thing in that although in the UK members of other subcultures certainly are often pretty scathing of emo music, they don't go so far as suggesting beating them up is a good idea. (Well the ones I know don't). But looking into it more closely this type of intoleraance is more serious in the UK than I thought. Of course while much of this type of online emo bashing is meant in a humorous way, it seems not just intolerant to me but is absurd. I am not the greatest fan of certain types of Emo music, but why should other alternative people slag them off consistently and even threaten them? This whole hate crime legislation plan is not going to work if it has to be used to stop metalers hating Emos.

The real problem is that the idea of emo bashing has become popular amongst those who are the real threats to alternative people. Certainly if you talk to UK teenage metalers, skaters and goths they generally see emos as allies locally against the townie/chav threat. To add to the problem is the fact that that media when looking for info on Emos often find some of the vast number of anti-emo satire sites, take them for the real thing and believe all emos spend all their time indulging in self harm, suicide and being depressed (which exactly what they said about goth from 1982-2002).

If people from alternative subcultures cannot tolerate each other because of musical differences then they really are in trouble.