Scream-o Bands: The System behind the Shrieking

I apologize for my recent blog inactivity; I have been channeling all writing towards my ever-mounting stack of graduate school applications. My beautiful wife has done a fabulous job of keeping you posted on the day-to-day in the Pippin’s world. However, as my friend Dave Baker would put it, “I have no interest in posting pictures. My purpose is to write what I want.” And so it is with me. However, unlike my friend Dave Baker, I will not wax philosophical about the vast intricacies of NFL fandom. Rather, I will share my thoughts on music.

I recently heard the new single from 30 Seconds to Mars and thought it was a fantastic song. In keeping with my good friend David Harding’s tradition, I will claim the song as “Song of the Month” for November 2009. I have since stopped listening to X96 for a brief time as a counter-attack to them ruining the song for me with their usual “hey, this is a good song, let’s play it every 40 minutes” assault. Although this song is less characteristic of a scream-o band, the band’s previous album is much more typical of screamers. For this band, all other things equal, I would take the screaming over the signing. I have taken the liberty of embedding the song (I found it on this cool website called You Tube). Give it a listen and notice that he sounds horrible when he uses his uber-sexy voice. Nothing against Jared--I’m sure there are loads of thirty year women who fell in love with Jared when he was on My So-called Life. But listen to the song and just notice that he sounds so much better when he’s screaming.

The same goes for many other similar bands. Albums from Senses Fail and the Used are full of classic screaming. I think we tend to peg these musicians as products of this ridiculous emo movement and assume that these people are screaming because they’re unloading years of bottled up angst against their dads and high school principles. The truth is that they scream because they sound better screaming than they do singing. It’s that simple—don’t read too much into it kids. Do you think John Fogerty from CCR screamed because he was really angry about Willie and Poor Boys down on the corner? Of course not, he screamed but it worked for him. Enjoy the song and stay classy … planet Earth.