Emocosms: Mind-Forg’d Realities in Emo(tional) Rock Music

Abstract

The Romantic “obsession with the self and with self-consciousness” (Simpson 2007) is clearly to be found in modern pop and rock music, especially in highly emotional music genres. Among those, “emo” is notorious for its direct expression of the Weltschmerz felt by its singers. This chapter on the tradition of Romantic poetry in “Emo(tional) Rock Music” traces the influence of British Romantic poetry on its modern descendants who carried the Romantic poet’s self-centeredness to extremes and created worlds of pure subjectivity, partially through their use of the pathetic fallacy. Such projections of the self and the projection of the “mind-forg’d” realities of the songwriter into emo music can be found in the lyrics of bands like AFI, La Dispute, and Finch.