taken from
http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=3375
Emo Kids
To refer to emo as an entire subculture centered on being vain, melodramatic, pathetic, self-absorbed, and emotionally histrionic would be unfair. There’s more to it than that. There’s also all the terrible music, stupid haircuts, and fantastically complex MySpace profiles. While we can all conjure up a mental image of a stereotypical Emo kid, with a tight sweater, hair dyed black, tiny jeans, and converse with “deep” lyrics Sharpied on, it can be difficult these days to tell emo kids from any other scenester morons. Asking vanilla hipsters and emo kids to list their favorite bands would net similar results: a list of bands you’ve never heard of. However, an emo kid’s band list would contain telltale patterns. First of all, watch out for bands with melodramatic, complete-sentence names, like “I Die in Agony” or “His Heart is Sour.” Secondly, the list of bands will quickly transmogrify into a diatribe about how the emo kid doesn’t really want to be there because he or she is feeling very depressed over a girl/boy and Hawthorne Heights really helped him or her out during tough times and maybe you’d like to go back to his/her place and see his/her zines and maybe make out a little bit, no big deal. The great thing about emo kids is that they’re both promiscuous and emotionally crippled (except for the weird Christian ones).
Musical Taste: A broad banquet of crap. Some emo kids hate the other emo kids because they listen to new fake mall emo instead of the “good” stuff which was by bands from twenty years ago who never actually released any albums but were quite good nonetheless, according to third-hand recollection. Other emo kids listen to the fake mall emo and love it. I’ve met quite a few who never actually admit that they listen to emo: “oh, they sort of used to be emo, but they’re basically just indie pop now; oh, that’s not emo, it’s just sort of slightly emo-ish hardcore.” Jesus, you idiot, if you listen to six hundred bands that skirt the borders of emo, you basically just listen to emo. Fuck.
How to Tame an Emo Kid: Leave them flattering comments on MySpace. Listen to their problems. Be a member of the opposite sex and reject them (they love unrequited love more than most people love sex, so they’ll hang around you for-ev-er).
Benefits of Friendship: They’ll listen to your problems (for about three minutes, before turning the conversation back to their own problems). They’ll write you really bad poetry if they fall in love with you, which you can share with your sane friends for a classic chortle.
Drawbacks of Friendship: They are really, really into the terrible music they listen to. This is true of any hipster subculture, but a lot of emo kids have absurd tunnel-vision taste: they listen to only their shitty little niche of emo, and you’ll never get a moment’s respite from it. Regular hipsters will turn off the Wolf Parade once in a while and throw on some David Bowie, but emo kids will offer no such breaks: it’ll be straight from His Dying Words to She is Cruelly Dying to This is My Pain Area to He Cuts Me Deep.