I've been discussing bits and pieces of this post with various people over the past few weeks, and I'm going to try and collect my thoughts into one hopefully-coherent piece of meta. Here goes.

I resisted getting into "emo" music for a long time. A bunch of suburban white guys whining about how their lives are so hard? No thank you. But then Fall Out Boy happened, and all these other bands happened, and now fine, FINE, I admit I dig emo music. Damn you, Pete Wentz.

One of the biggest reasons I resisted it is because it seemed to be so much about guys singing about their ex-girlfriends--seemed to be exclusively male and definitely anti-female. And now that I've listened to it more, I... can't say that my perception of the genre has changed much in that regard.

The thing is, there aren't many individual songs by these bands that I could point to and say 'yes, I find that sexist and offensive'. I don't think writing a song about your personal experiences with an ex-girlfriend when you're bitter about how you feel she's done you wrong is sexist. But it's the collective effect of so many songs about cheating girlfriends that makes me uncomfortable, because I have a hard time believing that EVERY emo song-writer writing lyrics on these topics has had a horrible experience with a particularly heartless bitch--at some point, it becomes clear that many songwriters are writing these kinds of song because that's the kind of song you write in this genre, because that's what all the other guys are singing about. And songs like I Write Sins Not Tragedies or Brand New's Sic Transit Gloria... make that even clearer to me, because those songs present themselves as objective stories about cruel women and sensitive men: not 'let me tell you about my pain with women,' but 'let me tell you how this random guy was done wrong by this random cheating whore,' thus implying to me this view that all men have to deal with all women being whore-brides. It's different, and more problematic to me, when it's not personal.

There's also a condemnation of female sexuality present in a lot of this music, because so many get written about those awful cheating whores, and after a while it's not so much condemning infidelity as it is condemning women as sexual creatures, period. (Again, see: whore brides.) It's not that one Brand New song mentioning short skirts or drunk women making advances bugs me, and it's not that the song title 'Lying Is The Most Fun...' bugs me, but it's the collective effect of so many songs touching on this same stuff. I've met too many guys that think that it's great for women to sleep with them, but women having a lot of sex in general is slutty and bad, and this music reminds me of that mindset. (I want Pete to sign a girl-fronted group that has song titles like Maybe She Cheated On You Because You Whined So Damn Much.)

And as a sidenote, this is one of the reasons I really love Seventy Times 7 by Brand New, because I think it contains some of the most vicious lyrics Jesse Lacey has ever written, and it's about a guy. It's a song about J Layz's gf cheating on him, but for once the ire is directed not towards the girl, but towards the other man involved! The girl is barely mentioned! Of course, the reason this pleases me so much is because it's so rare. :/

The thing is, the subject material of these songs wouldn't bug me at all if there were more women making music in the genre. If it were equal opportunity hating-on-your-ex, I wouldn't have an issue, because songs about whore brides would be balanced out by women making music in the same vein. But there aren't! There's Paramore and The Hush Sound (and Greta only sings in half of those songs, anyway), and that's just about it. The Sounds are swedish. The whole music industry is hugely male-dominated, and the emo genre is no exception to that, but it makes me angrier because I'm more invested in this music, I want to love it all without reservation.

My favorite bandom song, 7 Weeks by Gym Class, is also the one that makes me the saddest because of 'tired boys and wired eyes,' because 'There's a whole subculture of boys driving around in vans'. The song is designed to make me fall in love with the music scene, with touring life, but at the same time it tells me, oh--sorry, this isn't for you. You can't be a part of this. You can love the music, you can support us financially and come to our shows and put up posters on your wall, you can even be the subject of songs if you get close enough to sleep with us, but you can't actually be a part of it. It's insulting and hurtful and exclusive and it pisses me off.

And this ties into the rest of my thoughts about gender and bandom, which have more to do with the fandom aspect than the individual lyrics and songs that we all love. The thing is, I love bandom, I love writing stories and being a fan and being invested in these bands, but I think that sometimes the fannish aspect just encourages that thinking: the idea that, as a girl, you can be a fan but you can't be a musician yourself. We're all really, really into being fans, which on one level I think is great, but it also makes me wonder why more of us aren't trying for anything more. I think it encourages the glass ceiling that women in the industry keep hitting against.

Because why shouldn't we go for it? The music industry is such a tumultuous place right now, with so many people trying new avenues to be successful, and it's working. One of my favorite things about the bandom people is that they're in no way special or blessed. A few years ago Bert McCrackken was drinking buddies with my drinking buddies! Fall Out Boy started out playing shows in their friends' basements! The All-American Rejects managed to get famous even though they're out of a small town in freaking Oklahoma. Pete keeps saying that their stardom is proof that anyone could do this, and you know, I honestly believe that. If a shitty bass player who once drank his own urine on camera can do it, why can't I or any of my friends?

And this is where I again put some blame on fandom, because I think that, by virtue of how we're writing RPF about these people, there's a tendency to put them on pedestals and make them unreal, to practically-worship them as these fantastic amazing people when in reality, they're just like us.

Gerard Way, especially. I get that fandom thinks Gerard is wonderful; I do, too, I adore him, but I don't think the sun shines out of his ass and I don't think he's a savior figure. Gerard is a feminist comic book nerd who's battled depression and used to spend a lot of his time drawing in his basement--he's just like me, he's just like us. Even his talent and his idealism, his messages? Nothing special. The only special thing about him is that he believed he could do it so he went for it and succeeded. I don't think Gerard wants his fans to see him as something apart from them, as achieving something that they couldn't possibly achieve.

Even Patrick Stump, whom everyone thinks is this insanely talented musical prodigy, is not hugely unique. I know plenty of people like him. When you love music the way he does, when you want to make music your entire life the way he clearly does, you DO learn twenty different instruments. You do spend most of your time on Garage Band and learn how to produce and look slightly crazy to the rest of the world. My dad is pretty similar to that type--I recently asked him how many guitars we had in the house, and he sheepishly admitted nine. Yes, Patrick is insanely talented, but insanely talented musicians are everywhere. Patrick is famous because he believed he could do it and he found three other people that were willing to drop everything because they believed they could do it. He is not special or hugely different from any of us.

There aren't a lot of high-profile female musicians right now in any genre. It makes me sad to think about Alanis Morissette and Meredith Brooks and No Doubt and Sinead O'Connor and Hole and other female groups and musicians of that era, because then it feels like the music industry has written off women making music as just this '90s fad. What the fuck is up with that? I listen to a lot of radio and a lot of different radio stations, and I hardly ever hear female musicians on the local alt-rock station, the one that plays FOB/MCR/The Used every fifteen minutes. I hear more women voices on the pop stations, but no female MCs ever. The only time I hear women on the non-commercial independent indie-rock station is when they're playing folk music.

I want Pete to sign an all-girl, or at least girl-fronted, punk-sounding band. I want MCR to tour with a girl group. I want Ryan Ross to stop writing songs about whore brides. I want to see more women make it and sing vicious songs about their ex-boyfriends so that I can sing along with both them *and* Jesse Lacey.

edit: Erk, I guess I should say right out that I'm going to be really busy with my job over the next couple of days, so I don't know how much I'll be able to reply to comments. But I *really* appreciate hearing what other people have to say on this topic, as it is obviously one that's been on my mind a lot.