Rites of Spring
Rites of Spring
1985
Yes, yes, we know, Joe, you're fascinated by emo music and want to know more. Ostensibly, this is why we're covering another emo album in this column, and perhaps a foundational one this time. Shit, man, I could do two emo album every week for A Year of Blind Spots and still feel like I'm not at the bottom of this fucking thing. Let us continue the tour.
Some of these albums are chosen as PoYB Blind Spots years in advance, and I forget how exactly they ended up here. Based on some light googling this week, I'm assuming that Rites of Spring find themselves here based on a cool Ringer feature about the most important emo song of every year (written by Arielle Gordon and the godfather of Music Critics Taking Emo Seriously, Ian Cohen). Rites of Spring is right there at the top, with the song "For Want Of," in 1985. And so one might consider this song, album, and artist the "start" of emo as we now know it.
A few interesting things happen when you trace emo back to its mid-'80s DC roots. The first is that it doesn't technically sound like emo as we'd describe it today. It instead sounds like hardcore punk. That's because it is that too. But I put the word "sound[s]" in italics twice in this paragraph because the definition of emo wasn't based on "sound" at this time. That would come later. It's based more on the lyrics. Pretty simple: Rites of Spring took the sound of hardcore music, and changed the lyrics from "violence" to "emotional." Or, to put it another way, the lyrics go "inward" instead of "outward."
The second interesting thing is that Ian MacKaye seems to have his hands all over this shit. If you go back to that Ringer list, he's mentioned in the first five songs over those first five years of emo (two as producer, two as frontman, and one as older brother of a frontman). His Dischord Records was all over the scene, and integral to "Revolution Summer," a conscious effort during the summer of 1985 in Washington D.C. to take back hardcore music from the violent skinheads. This is the second time MacKaye has come through A Year of Blind Spots, after Minor Threat and Fugazi. I spent a healthy chunk of this week thinking MacKaye was in Rites of Spring too, but no, he just produced. This band was in between those two major MacKaye bands (and adjacent to his own band from in between, Embrace, which I'll get to eventually).
The final interesting thing is that all these bands didn't really give a fuck about the word "emo" or "emo-core" or whatever. The band comes before the genre tag—that's how it always goes, and it's no different here. The argument is that other non-"emo" hardcore bands had emotions too, even if they were expressed in this very specific way. Fair enough! I don't make the rules, though, and neither do the musicians. That's the music critics and curators of music history to decide, and if someone like Ian Cohen is calling Rites of Spring "emo," then I'm considering it canon.
For the record, I seem to like first-wave emo music, even if we're basing it just on this one album. I like it in a different way than I do second and fourth waves. It's not as "mysterious" in tone, which is fine! Punk music is just as fulfilling, but in a different way. And this is all supposing that punk and emo are separate entities, and not emo as a subgenre of punk, which was originally how it was defined. Listening to Rites of Spring, and you start to understand why that original genre tree stood. Listen to it in one way, and it's punk. Listen to it another way—retrospectively, knowing everything that sprouts from this one seed—and it's pretty easy to hear it as emo.
And plus... none of this matters, right? The genre classifications, the pushback against the documentation of history, whether emo was a conscious or unconscious decision. It all just comes back to how it makes you feel. That's what emo is really about. I listen to Rites of Spring, and I feel something. It's emo.
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