Hope I Die Before I Get Old?

Emo?

Fucking emo? What in the name of Jesus God Bastard Christ is wrong with kids today? You pustulent little shitbags can't even rebel properly!

You've allowed the record company marketing whores to take what was (let's face it) a pretty bloody wimpy sub-culture and achieve the seemingly impossible ... they've made it even more wimpy, they've made it even wetter.

I mean, those of us who were goth kids back in the day: deep down inside we knew we just didn't have the flat-out balls to be punks, we couldn't muster the casual, testosterone-laden sexism to be metalheads and we just had too much care for personal hygiene to be crusties.

So, for us, goth it was, then. It wasn't all that much of a rebellion, but it was ours and it was enough.

But emo? What the fuck is all that about?

We'd sort of like to be goths, but we can't be bothered. We'd like to paint our bedrooms black, but it's too much like hard work. We're going to go to nightclubs and stay out all night ... well, until Dad comes and picks us up, anyway.

If you were any wetter, you'd be puddles, you dismal streaks of piss. I find myself praying for a strong wind, because it's very clear that every last one of you would blow away, you snivelling little shits.

Don't give me any of that crap about subcultures evolving, about each generation finding its own voice. This emo shite isn't an evolved subculture, this isn't about like-minded individuals finding disparate bands that speak to the same unnamed, unnameable yearning, a musical expression of a shared experience.

This is about the record companies' marketing departments targeting the pasty-faced, eyeliner-wearing demographic. This is about second rate bands who are tedious corporate puppets mouthing meaningless pap; pop with alternative trappings, to tap into the alienated youth market.

Am I showing my age? Am I falling victim to the flaw of every generation as it's superseded; to the "it was better in my day" way of thinking?

So ... the unfettered, heart-rending melancholy of Joy Division? The brilliant, dazzling intelligence of Bauhaus? The black, black wit of the Sisters of Mercy? I can get that from Villi Vallo moping about in a beanie hat with his shirt off, singing about lurve, can I? That God-Bothering slapper from Effervescence duetting with Linkin Fucking Park? I can find anything on a par with the brittle, crystalline beauty of Siousxie and the Banshees?

No. I don't think I can. I looked to you, to the next generation, to surprise me. To find something new, to find something exciting, thrilling.

It's not just the emo kids, mind you ... it's all of you. You cut your hair like a punk, but you wear a Blink 182 hoodie ... you have no fucking clue. John Lydon wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire, and Henry Rollins would actually snap you in half.

Take your Nirvana sweatshirts and understand this: Kurt Cobain was the moderately talented frontman of a band that mercilessly recycled other peoples' riffs and -- and this is the important bit to understand for anyone under the age of 14 who wears a Nirvana shirt -- who topped himself before you were born.

Nevermind is a pretty decent album, but Cobain ain't Jesus and you need to find some heroes who aren't dead, and weren't drugged-up fuckheads who slept with talentless slappers. Or, if you're unwaveringly set on having a hero who -is- dead- and -was- a drugged-up fuckhead who slept with talentless slappers, might I offer John Lennon or Jim Morrison as alternatives with infinitely more charm, ability and material?

We handed you the future, and said: "Go ahead, rebel" and, in return, you said "Do we have to?"

No. No, you don't fucking have to. But you don't get to moan about the world you live in if you never even tried to change it.