The knock on DJs has historically been that they don’t create anything original, and just recycle what others have done in the laziest possible way. But today, the DJs at Emo Night Brooklyn have put their money where their mouth is and released an original song via Alternative Press called “Back in Time.” And even as a skeptic myself, upon listening to it, I have to admit it’s a surprisingly impressive, thoughtful take on a genre that nah I’m just kidding this shit suuuuuuuucks major ass.Aside from the obvious musical shortcomings of the song—namely that it sounds like something an automated bot created after jamming a bunch of 2002 Drive-Thru Records sampler CDs into it—the fact that Emo Night is releasing original music is one of those things that would trigger a future Terminator to be sent back in time to destroy it for the good of humanity. Which makes the title of the song fairly prescient.The mid-aughts bro scene Emo Night celebrates was objectively bad, and continually proves itself to be even worse in hindsight. The entire Emo Night culture is centered around celebrating tomorrow’s outed sexual predators of the past, today. And now, by putting new material out into the world, they’re only prolonging its reign of terror. There’s something very Inception-y about Emo Night self-parodying itself, like trying to take a photo of a camera, or, more appropriately, trying to throw a trash can in the garbageEh, maybe I’m just overreacting and this song won’t kick off the apocalypse. (Here’s hoping, though!) It just sucks to be falling down a never-ending set of cultural stairs while some dude in an oversized SAD AS FUCK™ shirt soundtracks the whole thing with his AutoTuned whining about his girlfriend’s dad not accepting him.Since I’m truly at a loss for words on how thoroughly soul-crushing it is to be stuck in this perpetual time loop of parole officer-core, I’ll just end on something Ben Gibbard said about emo culture when I interviewed him last week:
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Update: The Emo Nite LA DJs wanted us to clarify that they are the Emo Nite that tried to trademark the name "Emo Nite" and have no affiliation with Emo Night Brooklyn, who made this awful song. Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.I’ll speak for myself, but from the very get-go, I was very disinterested in being attached to that music. Because a lot of it was just really bad. A lot of it was some pop-punkers who heard Pinkerton and decided they wanted to start talking about feelings. Seriously, listen to some of that stuff. It’s like they were into NOFX and then heard Pinkerton and were like, “Oh man, I got feelings! I’m a suburban white kid but I don’t really have the intellectual capacity to express these feelings in an interesting way so I’m going to speak about them in the most straightforward manner possible.” And a lot of it is just really cringey to me.