Jim Hates Emo, Chapter 23
For some reason, I found myself at the Nintendo Fusion Tour at Roseland last night. Basically, this is a bunch of emo bands with a few Nintendo kiosks set up so kids can play video games between the bad music. I'm sure if I was 15, it would have been a blast. If the Yankees had made it into the ALCS, believe me, I would have been home in front of the TV.

First of all, I was immediately reminded of why I hate Roseland. My ticket said doors at 6 pm, but at 6:20, there was still a line of kids that stretched from Roseland on 52nd Street down to Broadway, around the corner and all the way up the block, and then halfway up 53rd St. I don't do lines; so I took a walk and had an ice cream cone, and when I came back at around 7 pm, I could walk right in.

The first two bands had already played but that was fine, I didn't know or care who they were. I was really only there to see Boys Night Out, whom I had just interviewed at Maxwells for the new Jersey Beat. The group did a commendable job of filling the massive Roseland stage (a benefit of having six members, although the horrid sound system and acoustics turned their set into a mushy mess. Seeing a band at Roseland is always a little like hearing music played in an airplane hangar.

If Saturday Night Live did a skit about emo bands, they couldn't come up with more ridiculous caricatures than Motion City Soundtrack: There's the geeky frontman with the fright wig hairdo; the effeminate keyboard player flouncing around the stage like a male cheerleader; the inevitable chubby guy, dressed like a gas jockey in a trucker's cap; and the ham-handed drummer who couldn't find a groove if Stevie Wonder walked in and hit him over the head with one. This was all compounded by the ludicrous Star Wars theme music they played before taking the stage, and a set in which all the songs sounded exactly the same (including the parts where all the kids clap in unison or take over the vocals for the lead singer.)

As bad (and unintentionally comic) as they were, The Starting Line were in a way even worse: These guys obviously feel they are above the emo scene, dressing in plain black tees and jeans with normal haircuts. But the rock star air they effect and the singer's arena-rock stage patter suggest they're really clueless about how derivative and unoriginal their music is. I especially liked it when the singer shouted, "I hope everybody here gets laid tonight," a swell thing to say when half your audience is under 15. I'm sure all the parents in the room (and there were a lot of them) appreciated it. But I'm also sure this band is totally in denial about who their audience actually is; if they realized that they are just playing bubblegum music for millennial middle-schoolers, they'd all go home and shoot themselves.

Letting 'tweens listen to this crap can't be any better for them than letting them eat Big Macs (or smoke cigarettes) but it probably won't do any long term harm. Someday all these young'uns will look back on emo as just another embarrassing rite of puberty, the way their soccer moms no doubt remember with horror the big hair and spandex they sported in the Eighties.