Who Would Have Thought the Teenagers In the Sesame Street Shirts Would Be So Angry

http://blog.donnawilliams.net/2007/04/26/emo-wasnt-he-on-sesame-street/

Emo kids are funny, but this lady is funnier. She has a frank and open discussion on the effects of being emo, but opens it with a joke about Elmo. Its like ha ha, two kids are dead, but aren't I clever. I appreciate her talk of teenage suicide, which is and always will be a problem, but I have found that the kids who write sad things on their facebook page and dress like Robert Smith, probably aren't the ones to worry about. She kind of understands this, and undresses the idea of Emo a little bit, but at the same time I think she misses out on a pretty key thing.

Here is what I know about being emo, it means they want people to look at them because they are sad. They want the attention of other people, because look how messed up I am. And sure, sometimes they take that attention thing too far sometimes, but I think the ones to worry about are the ones who sit in the back of the class and never say anything, then sprint out of the room, hoping none of the football team catches up to them.

When I was in high school, I was one of those kids. I didn't want anyone to look at me. I wanted to go into my bedroom and shut off the lights and fall asleep. I wanted to pass through the halls of my high school with as little notice as possible. I wanted to be left the fuck alone. So that sure as hell didn't mean posting emoticons on myspace or dressing in all black and putting on eye makeup. I wanted the least amount of attention drawn to me as possible.

This isn't where I wanted to go with this I guess. I wanted to talk about this band I saw last night. They all had floppy hair and they all wore different Sesame Street characters on their shirts. When the music started, they sounded like any other high school garage band, not Earth shattering, but not offensive. But when the "singer" opened his mouth, he let out just a guttural, 115-lbs throaty death growl, for pretty much their whole set. I wanted to talk about how awesome they were in a spectacularly awful sense. I wanted to talk about how we made jokes about how his song was brought to you by the letter "BWWWWWAAAHHHHHHH" and the number "GRRARRGHG". I wanted to talk about eating fish and chips and listening to my sister bitch, but this lady's blog kind of got my mind started on something.