Philosophy Colloquium

Emo, Sincerity, and Performing Self-Hatred

As far as so-called ‘sad music’ goes, a defining feature of emo and its close cousins – emotional hardcore, screamo, pop punk, sad indie – is its strong lyrical preoccupation with feelings of negative self-worth. Yet in emo it is often beside the point whether one is sad about the fact that they were dumped by their partner or abandoned by a parent; more important is acknowledging one’s complicity in the relationship falling apart, in the parent bailing on the family, and then having the appropriate response, namely hating oneself. My aim in this paper is to explore a certain puzzle that arises for both the practitioners and appreciators of emo in virtue of the thematic and expressive predominance of self-hatred. According to what I call the problem of lyrical sincerity, if emo lyricists are merely enacting self-hatred without sincerely feeling and expressing it, then there is a worry that the music is both aesthetically cheap and morally irresponsible. Thus, for the music to be aesthetically worth anything, the lyricist must actually hate themselves, and, more troublingly, fans should want this (otherwise the music is insincere). But no one should want that! 

            Drawing on work by Tolstoy, Cavell, and C. Thi Nguyen, I develop the notion of a sincere performance and offer it as a provisional solution to the puzzle. In a sincere performance of self-hatred, the artist embodies an acknowledgment of what drives individuals to hate themselves without either taking that attitude toward themselves or endorsing it as fitting of any of their fans. As a sort of conclusion, I raise a general question about whether emo’s negative aesthetic values – like the one discussed here – give us reason to challenge Nietzsche’s criticisms of artforms that deny, rather than affirm the value of suffering.