‘Rites of Spring’: The album that started emo
From the underground punk clubs of Washington, DC, to the iPods of angsty teenagers everywhere, emo has one of the most unexpected and debatable origin stories of any musical style or subgenre. We all have to start out somewhere, I suppose.
Emo first emerged, kicking and screaming, onto the airwaves during the early 1980s, long before Gerard Way ever donned his black marching band outfit and introduced an entire generation of teenagers to the world of eyeliner and MySpace. During those early days, emo was a niche and emerging sound within the underground hardcore punk scene of the United States, particularly in the hardcore ground zero of Washington, DC.
There, in the nation’s capital, groups like Minor Threat, Bad Brains, and State of Alert honed their furiously abrasive craft, attacking authority, government, and the societal status quo with an equal amount of vigour. As had been the case with the first wave of punk during the 1970s, though, artists quickly realised that there are only so many ways to translate three barre chords into a scathing attack against the establishment, so the hardcore scene began to broaden its horizons.
Namely, the scene became a little more introspective during the mid-1980s; seemingly, the furious anger of artists during the early years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency had developed into overwhelming despair at the continuation of Bonzo’s reign. The first wave of DC hardcore outfits began to either die off or adapt their sound to fit the changing landscape of the scene, from the ashes of which emerged artists like Embrace and, crucially, Rites of Spring.
It was during this time, around 1985, that the ‘emo’ tag originated, with the aforementioned two groups being branded ‘emocore’ by certain sections of the music press. Ian MacKaye, the mastermind behind Embrace, along with Minor Threat, Fugazi, and Dischord Records, wasn’t best pleased with the term, once declaring, “Emocore must be the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life. […] ‘Emotional hardcore’, as if hardcore wasn’t emotional to begin with.”
Still, MacKaye’s outrage aside, those early emocore records did set the standard for emo music going forward; the first album that could truly be classified as emo, in its widely accepted form, was Rites of Spring’s self-titled album from 1985. With the track ‘For Want Of’ being the obvious standout, the DC outfit took the sonic conventions of hardcore or post-hardcore but turned the subject of their anger inwards, offering a more emotional, vulnerable take on hardcore, despite what MacKaye might argue.
While the album cannot really be placed in the same category as Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge or The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me, which both helped to define the landscape of emo back in its 2000s heyday, there is a common throughline between Rites of Spring and those later albums. For instance, the lyrics, “I woke up this morning with a piece of past caught in my throat, and then I choked,” could easily be shoe-horned into any modern emo anthem without causing much of a stir.
Although the hardcore punk origins of emo might have faded over the years, or, in some cases, been lost entirely, the likes of Rites of Spring walked so that the future emo scene could run, or at least, so that the future emo scene could stand behind the PE changing rooms smoking while everybody else in the class runs.
