When people ask me what “kind” of music I like, I tend to say something like “I like shit that’s good.” I’m not (usually) saying this in order to sound elitist, but just the opposite. When I was younger, I would probably reply that I liked this or that genre, at various points folk rock, grunge, hardcore, punk, emo, indie rock, alt-country, etc. Of course, I have always enjoyed music outside of these preferred genres, but I always felt that I could identify more with certain genres for whatever reason. As one gets older, I think, one’s musical tastes often broaden, become more “catholic” so to speak. I’m no longer comfortable identifying with particular genres — although I’ll always have particular affections for certain styles and sounds.

Negatively, this broader musicatholicity is due to a realization of the artificial nature of the boundary-drawing that genres represent, often driven by constructed racial and cultural categories in an attempt to make music easier to commodify. Perhaps the less we think of music as a commodity, the less we buy into these easily consumable divisions. More positively, this broadening of musical perspective is the result of what I’d like to call a deeper realization of the diversity of rock charisms that exist. While at one point I would have dismissed entire genres as “not for me,” I have come to see the world’s diversity of music/s, both within “Rock” and outside of it, as exhibiting unique “charisms,” i.e. secular-spiritual “gifts” or, more simply, certain sensitivities, types of perceptiveness, or “things they’re good at.” The wide range of musical families within that larger genre of “Rock” could be likened to the variety of spiritual families within Christianity, each bearing its own charism or gift for the church and for the world. What might these rock “charisms” be? Certainly the charisms are multiple within genres and overlapping among them.

I’ll admit now that it was that puzzling little corner of the rock world called “emo” that brought me to these reflections. And I’ll admit, for as much as I have written about “punk” on this blog so far, my definition of “punk” is broad and I have quite a bit of “emo” in me. A poke through my CD and mp3 collections would reveal as much: At The Drive-In, Boy Sets Fire, Cap’n Jazz, Chamberlain, Drive Like Jehu, Elliott, Falling Forward, The Get Up Kids… And that’s just a quick eye-balling of the A-G section behind me as I type.

Of course, there are debates about what “emo” is or was. Are its roots to be located in the DC spazzy but melodic punk bands such as Rites of Spring, or is it an offshoot of pop punk as seen in bands like The Promise Ring and Jets to Brazil? (These two trajectories are often referred to as “first” and “second” wave emo, respectively. Yes, I’m serious.) For sure, lately the “genre” has come to be associated with pseudo-goth white males singing about how they’d like to die (or, further, would like to commit acts of violence) because of how they feel they have been treated by various young women. (Yes, now we’re into third or maybe even fourth wave emo.) Like so many other rock trends, emo has moved away from its initial impulses (again, not that these are clearly identifiable or fixed) and devolved into self parody, often expressing sentiments that are sexist and self-absorbed.

But could this genre — even this genre — be animated by a rock charism of some kind? As one band that is frequently cited as one of the pioneers of “emo” recently announced a comeback tour, I revisited their music as well as the band’s “narrative.” In doing so, I rediscovered a particular thread of emo and what could be cited as the “charism” that probably explains my own attraction to some of this music.

Sunny Day Real Estate was/is a “post-hardcore” band from Seattle that formed in 1992: “post-hardcore” designating what happens when hardcore bands scream a little less, concentrate a little more on the craft of songwriting, and “open up” a little bit with more “sentimental,” perhaps even “poetic” lyrics. Although Sunny Day’s debut album Diary (Sub Pop, 1994) generated a couple hit singles in the 120 Minutes/Alternative Nation rotation on MTV and a U.S. tour with Shudder to Think, the band kept a low profile with the media. Inspired in part by the “anti-rock” ethics of bands like D.C.’s Fugazi, Sunny Day allowed few interviews, released only one press photo, and for a time even refused to play concerts in the state of California (!!).

The band was/is fronted by the “high lonesome” vocalist Jeremy Enigk who famously converted to Christianity sometime during the band’s early career. Enigk rarely sang about his conversion directly, but hints of a sort of quasi-theology poke through his generally vague but spiritually evocative lyrics. The band broke up just before the release of their second album, LP2, and legend has it that Enigk’s “finding Jesus” was the cause of the breakup. As he wrote in a letter to a fan, subsequently published on the internet in the days before it was clear how “permanent” such internet leaks to the public could become, “I want it to be what Sunny Day Real Estate is about, so that others out there will hear. But there are mixed feelings about what we could do about me wanting to sing about Christ. . . One of the members doesn’t mind me singing about Christ, another is very uncomfortable with the idea of singing about Jesus, and one didn’t mind, but now all of the sudden does.”

After the breakup, Jeremy recorded a fantastic solo record and bassist Nate Mendel and drummer William Goldsmith went on to join Dave Grohl’s (Nirvana) new band Foo Fighters. Sunny Day regrouped without these two a few years later and released two albums, How It Feels to Be Something On and The Rising Tide. After the Rising Tide tour, Sunny Day broke up again, with Jeremy continuing his solo project and forming the band The Fire Theft with Mendel and Goldsmith.

Sunny Day has embarked on (another) reunion tour — this time with all four original members — and has re-released remastered versions of the first two albums, two moves that have been nearly unanimously embraced by fans despite what seems to be an endless series of ’90s emo/hardcore/punk/indie/alternative/etc. bands “reuniting” these days. A very good interview with Enigk and Dan Hoerner, considered Enigk’s co-writer and the other half of what is considered the “core” of the band, appeared recently which discusses the band’s on-again-off-again career, including some significant attention to the subject of Enigk’s faith and the role it has played in the band’s music.

Interestingly, and contrary to the dominant fan “narrative” that has persisted, Dan reveals that Jeremy’s explicit conversion to Christianity was not the reason for the band’s breakup and that he had always approached songwriting as a spiritual discipline. Jeremy then discusses his lyrics with attention to his increasingly inclusive approach to explicitly spiritual songwriting:

After the initial burst died down a bit, I didn’t want to blatantly sing about God from an exclusively Christian perspective, but more from a perspective of spiritual feeling that most people could relate with, and that I relate with. Songs that I’ve written about God, I am singing about in a language of my own heart, not one of an organized structure. I’ve always sought after God on a personal level so that I can understand for myself, and not simply because it was what I’ve been told by manmade religion.

Enigk’s conversion to Christianity mid-stream during the band’s initial run provides a hermeneutic for reading the band’s early output as a sort of pre-apprehension of later spiritual insights and developments in Enigk’s life. If fairly vague, Diary is full of lyrical and musical suggestions of transcendence, grasping for wholeness, spiritual rebirth, “a new face, soul reborn.” I have no idea what particular form of Christianity — if any — Enigk ended up embracing (or if it “stuck” for that matter), but I can’t help but hear echoes of the Catholic sacraments in their first single “Seven,” which features — on my hearing — the almost eucharistic lines “You’ll taste it / You’ll taste it / In time.”

“Seven” from Diary

Dan Hoerner describes Enigk’s lyrics this way:

Jeremy has always been a spiritual guy, and he’s always been a seeker and somebody who was trying to figure out how to be a good person and how to express himself and how to experience the world. I mean, who isn’t trying to figure that shit out, right? [Laughs.] From the first day I met him, he was writing songs about God and spirituality and—I think that’s one of the things that is so cool about Sunny Day, is that we were unafraid from the get-go to talk about incredibly personal emotional things, both from the standpoint of love and the standpoint of trying to find truth and trying to find a higher reason for existence.

Transposing this into Rahnerian terms, it seems to me that Enigk’s lyrics are especially revelatory of his awareness of the human person created as a permanent question with a longing for transcendence. Of course, Christians believe that this radical openness is met by an Other who gives the gift of Self in response. God creates the human person (in all his or her “emo-ness!”) as a longing creature with an emptiness that God, likewise, longs to fill.

Interestingly, I sense in Enigk’s later work an orientation that to some degree has shifted away from himself and his own “seeking” to a wider horizon, a horizon perhaps best described as an eschatological awareness of the communion of all persons and all of life. Take, for example, the passage “But if we try to lift up our eyes / replacing the lies / we own this moment / Everything and everyone / and in the end we all are one / the truth will not be denied” from the Rising Tide track “One,” a track that I am still drawn to and moved by nearly a decade after its initial release:

“One” (live), originally from The Rising Tide

Is it too much to claim that the awareness evoked by “One”’s seamless lyrical and musical gestures constitutes the very “flesh” of the church and of human existence as J.-M.-R. Tillard would have it, a way of life characterized by “the absolute negation of any form of self-sufficiency, or of any kind of self-absorption” (Flesh of the Church, Flesh of Christ: At the Source of the Ecclesiology of Communion [Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2001], p. 3)?

But isn’t the “absolute negation of any form of . . . self-absorption” in fact the absolute negation of emo? Perhaps this ur-emo group is significant for precisely that reason. Again, Dan Hoerner on the band’s spirituality:

[F]rom moment one, our first songs—one of the first songs we wrote as a band was called “Song About An Angel”! Are you kidding me? You don’t get it? We were trying to communicate about things that are deep in our souls, and we don’t even know how to talk about it, and hardly anybody knows how to talk about it intelligently. I love bands that are able to explore those things, that are able to get deep and talk about things that matter. I think that’s what we were trying to do, too.

I hardly think Sunny Day Real Estate was the only first or second wave emo band to have such theological awareness or significance. Sunny Day contemporaries Elliott, Split Lip, and Mineral come to mind as bands coming from generally the same, often unthematized, spiritual “space.” Isn’t it interesting that bands like these inspired — in whichever way we want to connect the dots — what is now known as “emo”?

As a “whole,” then, emo seems to navigate between the extremes of self-centeredness and genuine longing for the O/other, between obsession with the “pains” of what is and visions of what could be. Sunny Day Real Estate represents a unique example of (punk)-rock-as-spiritual-discipline amidst a sub-genre known for… well, something else all together. Could we think of emo — at its best anyway — as having been given a particular rock “charism”: the gift of sacramentalizing in song the radical openness of the human person and the pre-apprehension of the gift of the Other and of others?

Michael Iafrate
Toronto, Ontario
Canada

1 Comment »

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  Wow! Thanks for this post. Some great information and some things to think about. “120 Minutes” is where I was introduced to Sunny Day Real Estate so many years ago. Man I loved that show. It was one of the highlights of my week back then.

  And I love “musicatholicity”! I’ll be using that word from now on. My tastes also span the genres and are better illuminated by certain artists or even specific songs. Plus, I listen to a lot of artists that take too long to list in a conversation.

  Comment by Cadmus — October 30, 2009 @ 5:17 pm

  
  

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