. MONDAY,AUG.19,2002 MUSIC --- THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN - 9D Punk with heart: emo music gaining mainstream popularity The Associated Press It's called "emo," short for emotional — music with punk roots but more personal lyrics, sometimes painfully so. And it's catching on. Some serious fans even have a "look" — short, greasy hair, dyed black with bangs cut high on the forehead; glasses with thick black frames; thrift-store clothes and chunky black shoes; and makeup, on anyone. Nathan Johnson didn't even know what emo meant until he looked it up on the Web a few months back. Now he has the clothes and the glasses and likes some of the bands considered "emo," Fugazi and Sunny Day Real Estate among them. "It was as if all of the sudden emo was the 'cool' phrase on everyone's lips," says Johnson, who's 25 and from Dallas. "Drop it among your more mainstream friends and you achieved a sort of instant cool." Not that emo is necessarily new. The term has been around since the mid-1980s when bands such as Rites of Spring and Embrace emerged from the Washington punk scene with more introspective lyrics. Terms such as "pop-pop" or "emotional hardcore," or "emo-core" followed. Now the music and the term are And this time, the buzz is surrounding bands more popular with the mainstream. Bands being called emo include The Promise Ring, The Get Up Kids, Pedro the Lion and Dashboard Confessional, whose repertoire includes such acoustic gut-wrenchers as "Again I Go Unnoticed" and "Screaming Infidfulness." Unhappy purists call much of it mall emo" and worry that its diluting the genre to the point of meaning-ness. Marissa DiMeo, an emo fan from New York, understands the angst over labeling music that she says mixes a few genres — punk, hardcore and "indie" rock, music from independent labels that's played more often on college and Web stations than mainstream. But she does hear common thread in emo. "At its heart are emotionally charged lyrics — love songs with attitude and edge," the 24-year old DIMeo savs. Alan Shum, 18, agrees that emo is certainly not "stuff you could easily mosh to," a reference to the body- crashing mobis that often form next to punk concert stages. "Emo is softer, gentler music, where artists sing about unrequited love or depression to more mellow guitar chords," says Shum, who'll be a sophomore next fall at New York University. He says it can be so soft that his friends use the term to insult one another and hang it on any song they deem "unnecessarily emotional." Maybe that's why bands — even those getting attention for having an emo sound — are shunning the label. Several, Including Dashboard Confessional and The Get Up Kids, declined to be interviewed for this story. Such a response isn't surprising to Jonah Matranga, a San Francisco-based singer-musician who performs as onlinedrawing — and who, in the late '90s, was dubbed the "emo king" by a British music publication. A hit weary of the term, he says emo doesn't even mean what it once did — music that was "aggressively heart on the sleeve." "Now it's more like 21st century Bay City Rollers. It's kind of party music with a sour face on," says Matranga, who prefers to call what he's doing "eccentric pop." MATH 101 PROBLEM $ ^{\#}32 $ : If person A has too many phones,too many numbers,and too many bills,what can person A do to save some money? SOLUTION: 1 PHONE +1 NUMBER +1 BILL = ONE SIMPLY AWESOME PLAN GET MORE 3000 NEIGHBORHOOD WHENEVER MINUTES $59.99 NO LONG DISTANCE OR ROAMING IN KANSAS, MISSOURI ARKANSAS, OKLAHOMA, TEXAS OR LOUISIANA will be broadcasting live at our 6th Street store from 12-2 on Sat, August 24th. Come join the fun and register to win great prizes and concert tickets! 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