Music: Emotional Rescue

Chris Carrabba has a fine, high voice and looks like a genetic cross between Luke Perry and Jason Priestley. But these attributes have little to do with his success. Frequently, Carrabba--who goes by the stage name Dashboard Confessional--doesn't even sing during his performances. He just strums an acoustic guitar while the audience of mostly middle-class white kids shouts every word of his desperate, heartbroken lyrics in a sort of primal-scream karaoke. "It's almost cultlike," says Carrabba of his fans' spooky intensity. "I know they're endearing songs, but there are a lot of endearing songs."

You might think Carrabba is a rock star. He's not. He's an emo star. Emo--short for emotional--has been around since the mid-'80s but is only now developing into a broad cultural phenomenon. Major labels are scurrying to land emo talent, just as they once pillaged Seattle for grunge. Emo is heavier music for heavier times, and it's starting to sell too. According to Nielsen SoundScan, Carrabba has moved 175,000 copies of his album The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most--a phenomenal number for an independent release--and in April MTV taped a Dashboard Confessional Unplugged, the first time the network has unlocked the gates of its signature music show for a non-platinum-selling act. "Obviously, we think this kind of music has a really big future," says Unplugged producer Alex Coletti.

Emo might be even bigger if anyone knew precisely how to define it. The standard line is that emo accentuates the emotional content of a song with screaming confessional lyrics over rising and falling guitars. "It's not music that follows any pattern," says John Szuch, founder of emo label Deep Elm Records, based in Charlotte, N.C. "Some of it's real accessible; some of it's not. Some of it's 10 minutes long and filled with all kinds of loud-soft dynamics, and some of it's just kind of normal." Carrabba puts it more succinctly: "I have no idea what emo is."

Part of the problem is the word emo. With punk or grunge, you know where you stand. But emo? Isn't all music emotional? Emo fans (and we will get to them in a minute) say comparing emo with mainstream rock is like comparing The Bell Jar with a Hallmark card.

So how can you know emo when you hear it?

--EMO HURTS

The first emo band was Rites of Spring, a punk quartet named for the Stravinsky composition that caused a riot after its 1913 debut. When skinheads took over the Washington punk scene in the mid-'80s, Rites of Spring singer Guy Picciotto decided to change punk from a medium that glamorized aggression to one in which strength was measured by a band's willingness to share its pain with its listeners.

Rites of Spring lasted all of two years, but emo, a name that everyone detested even then, stuck. Now emo is musically broad enough to include country, thrash, acoustic and traditional pop sounds (no rap emo yet). The subject matter has gradually narrowed from the general pain of being an outsider to the specific hurt of a bad relationship. "When I'm talking to one of the singers in a band," says Szuch, "and he's broken up with his girlfriend and really depressed, we know there's a great record on the horizon."

--SENSITIVE KIDS LOVE EMO