How do you feel about emo songs? More than likely, you found some communion with them at one point. Maybe it was after a harsh breakup or that all-encompassing awkwardness that comes with being a teenager. But have you outgrown emo? Have you discovered it to be a shallow and one-note genre filled with cloying, bespectacled frontmen?
Well fear not. Unbeknownst to you, you have been listening to some of the greatest emo songs of all time without knowing it. Let’s run down a list of some of the greatest emo songs by non-emo bands.
Modest Mouse – “Trailer Trash”
Probably the easiest choice of the list, as Isaac Brock is something of a non-emo emo hero, but “Trailer Trash” is the song that emo kids think about when they romanticize their childhood. “Short in love with a long divorce … I hope I can pass high school.” Its balladeering soul and a scream-loud breakdown, Brock proved that early Modest Mouse days weren’t just indie stretching.
Built To Spill – “Car”
There’s one line here that really defines “Car,” one of the most popular songs by an unsung original indie rock band, as a defining emo statement. “I wanna see it, when you find out what comets, stars and moons are all about.” Something Corporate would cop the line later, but that wasn’t the point. The point was the nonsensical accusation that once our subject finds out what “comets, stars and moons are all about,” she will immediately realize the mistake she made when she left our narrator. In the emo world, the one singing the song is always the one who’s been done wrong.
Kanye West – “Welcome to Heartbreak”
One of the key tenets of the emo lifestyle is that suburban kids complain about problems that wouldn’t phase someone from less auspicious means, yet the suburban voices are all the louder. You tell me that doesn’t apply to Kanye West, the suburban Chi-town rapper who has become the biggest thing in rap. Yet his auto-tuned fourth LP, 808s & Heartbreak, is a prime example of the great suburban emo parable. Yes, Kanye is making fun of himself in the opening song of the record, but lines such as, “My friend invited me to a wedding on the lake/Now I can’t figure out just who I wanna take … Welcome to heartbreak.” I mean, c’mon. You make it too easy, Kanye.
Leonard Cohen – “Hallelujah”
Emo is, above all, dramatic. It’s self-important, obsessive and convinced that the most important thing to sing about is the heartbreak one feels over the loss of another. There have been millions of songs like this. Cohen’s seminal “Hallelujah” is less directly about the loss of loved ones than the minstrel metaphor, but there is where the emo melts in. Even though both emo and Cohen (in this song) endeavor to talk about someone else, it all boils down to writing about writing a song. Solipsistic narcissism, the ultimate emo trait, is evoked in one of the more heartbreaking songs of our generation.
The Beatles – “Yesterday”
You didn’t think The Beatles would make the list? You could argue for any number of the seminal pop band’s emo catalog, including “Julia,” “I Want You” or “Eight Days A Week.” But “Yesterday” practically created the emo genre, with wistfulness for the past, for the days when things were so much better. And of course, the girl: “Why she had to go, I don’t know, she wouldn’t say.” A profound inability to understand why the woman of his dreams left — what part of Paul McCartney’s band-altering single isn’t emo?
