Okay, I know that emo’s been sputtering at best for at least the last four years or so, but I don’t think the last nail was in the coffin until now. Plenty of groups have jumped on the bandwagon and rehashed stuff with what is at best a slightly personal touch. It’s been old for awhile. When A New Found Glory released Nothing Gold Can Stay, I could take the sappiness. It was a far cry from Dag Nasty or Rites of Spring or even Promise Ring, but it was still pretty good in its own right. I could, or at least wanted to, relate. By the time Sticks and Stones came out, I was tired of hearing it. But even then, it wasn’t quite dead. Jimmy Eat World didn’t really manage to kill it either. Nor did All-American Rejects. It took Hawthorne Heights to finish it off.
I’ve heard “Ohio is For Lovers” before, but I never paid close attention. It’s just another generic emo song, right? Well, yeah, but in the worst way. In a sense it fails because it’s such a perfect facsimile of emo. Everything from the melodic versus growling call-and-response of the chorus to the “cut my wrists and black my eyes” drama of the lyrics is so disgustingly fake and empty that there’d be nothing to relate to even if I tried. The bottom line is that the term “emo” is derived from “emotional” and the idea was simply to be bold enough to inject real emotion into hardcore instead of relying on dumb anger and bravado. Some bands took the “emotional” part too far perhaps, but it’s only when the emotion was gone altogether that emo died.
Hawthorne Heights uses the phrase “you kill me” eight times in this song. If only someone would…