(April 10, 2008) -- There really isn’t much one can do with three letters, but there is one word that can cause a great amount of ruckus depending on who you say it to. It used to be a term that defined a genre of music, but it has now been mutilated into a word that some use to describe a group of people who wear a lot of black and have bangs.

“Emo” has become the new black. Emo started out as a genre that took off in the Washington, D.C. area during the mid-1980s. It was defined as a mixture of hard core punk, like Minor Threat, and more melodic bands, like Blondie. This new wave of music started out with very few bands. The pioneers of this genre were bands like At the Drive In and Sunny Day Real-estate. Their music was distorted and loud like their punk roots, but had melody and heart-felt lyrics. This became the new mold for underground music.

There were three emo music waves, the original was in the mid-1980s, the second was around the late-1990s and the third was from 2000 to the present. The third wave of emo music was what caused the misuse of the word. When bands like Jimmy Eat World and Dashboard Confessional gained fame, people looked at them like they were a mold and the only way to “make it” was to conform themselves like what they saw.

It became almost pathetic; bands would completely disregard their roots and follow after music they didn’t even like, just to become famous. They all began to dress the same, sing the same and to some extent think the same. It was like watching a bad 70’s sci-fi movie; I can already see the title, “When the Black Haired Youth Attacked the World.”

Emo isn’t just a musical genre anymore; it now defines a person. It seems as though a haircut and the right type of black jeans will get you entry into Club Emo. Once in the club, you must buy a studded belt and begin to like bands that have names longer thanmost book titles. It has come to the point that if anyone does look that way, people assume they’re suicidal because the word has been misused so much.

I honestly don’t understand it. While I enjoy music that happens to labeled as emo, I don’t listen to it solely on that basis. If music wasn’t emotional and had no emotional tangent, then what would it be? A jingle about buying Clorox? All music is emotional – yes, it is true some more than others – but that would mean an artist would have to be relabeled every time they made a new record.

This all goes back to the fact that labeling is just plain stupid. It’s just a way for record companies to sell records by pressuring kids to want to fit in by forcing them buy music from a certain genre. If My Chemical Romance wasn’t famous they wouldn’t be labeled emo, they’d just be alternative rock. The fact that they’re under the lime light and they have many fans makes them an easy target to label. Now all their fans are called emo and their fans start to only make friends with other people labeled emo, so now to fit in you have to become like them. Think like them. Eat like them. Talk like them. Dress like the. It’s a vicious cycle that probably will never end because most people don’t even see they’re a part of it.