If it’s even remotely possible to talk about laws of rock music, these might be two:
1. In their never-ending quest to express themselves in meaningful musical forms (and to drive the adults in their lives crazy), young people invent new genres of popular music with stunning ease and frequency;
2. And by the time journalists, parents, and youth workers know enough about it to begin discussing any particular genre, it may have already run its course, only to be replaced by the next new musical thing.

The Next Thing
Currently, this process of rapid change is transforming the world of hardcore rock, where a genre called “emo” is evolving into something people are calling “screamo.”

Emo, which has been around for a few years now, is a lot like some of the kids you work with—rough and potentially threatening looking on the outside but warm-blooded and emotional on the inside. Or as New York Times critic Kelefa Sanneh put it, emo is characterized by “ringing guitar riffs and cry-me-a-river lyrics.”

Screamo is a newer form of hardcore rock popularized by bands such as The Used, Thursday, Glassjaw, Vendetta Red and Poison the Well. It features screaming guitar licks combined with vocalists shrieking out lyrics that are sometimes disturbing, sometimes challenging and just about always deeply felt.

Screams have been a regular feature of rock music for decades. Today many hard rock songs, particularly those in the death-metal sub-genre, feature a mixture of screams, yells and growls. Perhaps one of rock’s most famous screams was Roger Daltrey’s lengthy howl in The Who’s 1971 classic, “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” but that was just musical window dressing. Many of the vocalists in today’s most popular screamo bands seem to be descendants of the John Lennon school of emoting. Lennon’s 1970 solo album, Plastic Ono Band featured the song, “Mother,” which found the thinking man’s Beatle spilling his guts about his grief over the loss of his mum, who died when he was a child.

Death, loss, despair and the pain and confusion that are a regular part of life are recurring themes in contemporary screamo. “I’m choking on nothing, and I’m screaming for something,” yells Bert McCracken, the lead singer of The Used in “On My Own,” one of the songs from the band’s 2002 debut album.
Geoff Rickly, the lead vocalist of Thursday, covers similar ground in “A Hole in the World”: “There is no such thing as whole. There is a hole in the world.”

The Music
McCracken and Rickly aren’t incompetent vocalists who use screams to conceal any lack of talent. Both are intriguing singers who have more skill than many rockers. Many of the songs they sing are articulate and intelligent odes to various manifestations of teen angst. Much of screamo is surprisingly melodic, and many bands play an intelligent and sophisticated style of rock.

They don’t scream all the time. One common technique is for the vocalist to sing a verse straight, then scream it the second time through. At other times, vocalists use screams to add an extra emotional oomph to a particularly poignant chorus, or to add an emotional counterpoint to normally sung lines, like a fractured kind of harmony.

Here’s another way to look at it: At the point in a country song where you might expect a crooner in a big cowboy hat to insert a yodel, screamo singers typically let go with a blood-curdling howl.

So is screamo just another musical fashion signifying nothing? Maybe in some cases, but probably not in most. As with any genre, there’s a danger that the more popular it becomes, posers and copycats will mimic the outward affectations without grasping its artistic core; but according to New York Times writer Jonathan Dee, The Used is the real deal. Dee wrote an intriguing article called “The Summer of Screamo” for the June 29 issue of the Times Sunday magazine (the article is available on the Times‘ fee-based, online service, Nytimes.com).

In the article, Dee described a typical Bert McCracken performance: “…his performance is less about singing than about a ritual of giving himself to his audience; by exhausting himself emotionally and physically—jumping, sprinting, diving off the stage into the arms of the crowd—he makes himself into an offering.”

Dee said many of McCracken’s performances conclude with the wearied singer vomiting on stage, and the journalist said these displays convey “a kind of declaration of emotional unguardedness, a risk-taking intimacy” and a “purity” that’s rare in much pop music.

The Spirituality
Thursday releases its first major label album War All the Time in September. Full Collapse, the band’s 2001 debut, was released on the independent Victory Records label; and it’s full of intriguing clues about the spiritual state of at least some contemporary young people.

The album opens with “Understanding in a Car Crash.” Unlike the video for P.O.D.’s hit song “I’m Alive,” which uses an auto accident as a setting for a message of hope, Thursday’s song is all about hopelessness, despair and “the music of a broken window.”

“Cross Out the Eyes” describes a city full of screams and bemoans the differences that keep people apart: “The sides we take divide us from our faith, and the morning dove gets caught in the telephone wire.” “Paris in Flames” expresses equally distressing sentiments: “We all sing the songs of separation, and we watch our lives bleed out through our hands.”

Theological issues show up in many screamo songs (and two members of The Used thank God in their liner notes), but most screamo bands don’t preach. Rather, they cry out for a God who appears to be missing, unreachable or nonexistent.

Still, screamo isn’t entirely nihilistic. A hint of hope creeps through even some of its darkest lyrics. As Thursday’s Geoff Rickly put it in one published interview, he’s all for kids being idealistic, but it doesn’t make much difference why. “I think what they’re idealistic about is less important than the fact they’re idealistic at all.”

Within a few months or a few years, screamo may be as outmoded as disco or the Macarena. So while it’s here and popular, it might be worthwhile to consider some of its deeper meanings.

For one, screamo is probably too rough and ragged to ever be a widespread, mainstream success; but some of it sure does seem a whole lot more authentic and heartfelt than much contemporary pop music, including the vast majority of contemporary Christian music. (One wonders, by the way, how long it will take for battles to break out in churches over whether there can be a sanctified use of songs that contain sounds that make some elders cringe and cover their ears.)
Even more important, screamo indicates that for at least some young people today, the world is such a frightening and inhospitable place that one of the most appropriate responses they can make is to let loose with a primal shriek. That may be a frightening thought for some adults, but at least we can say this—kids who are screaming are at least aware that there’s a problem in the world. In some cases, that deep dissatisfaction can be the beginning of a process of spiritual rebirth, or at least some meaningful conversations with friends who care.

For another thing, kids who are screaming about death and destruction aren’t dead—at least not yet.