News

Local Newscast Exposes Evils of Emo

Parents throughout Salt Lake City, Utah had the living daylights scared out of them this week when a local news channel ran a hard-hitting expose about "a teen phenomenon that involves... self-mutilation and suicide." The phenomenon? Emo culture. According ABC reporter Reed Cowan, emo is a terrifying and insidious force that has come "out of the internet and into music and the lives of Utah teens." Cowan's report then goes on to explain that emo-obsessed teens tend to wear black, listen to dark music with depressing lyrics, cut their hair in trendy styles with names like "the gunshot wound," and hide their cutting scars under black rubber bracelets. They also romanticize suicide, a sentiment expressed in the lyrics of songs by such popular emo bands as... Death Cab for Cutie. We're not making this up.

Already, several punk and emo sites have called out the report for its hysterical tone and misguided reporting, which frequently treats emo parody sites as the real deal. Even Salt Lake City's alternative newsweekly, New West, has taken the report to task, calling it "the silliest bit of local pseudo-journalism ever to find its way on television—and that’s saying a lot."

You can watch the report here. Do we smell a future YouTube classic?

—The ARTISTdirect Staff
05.23.07