A wave of anti-emo violence is sweeping Mexico, with 800-strong mobs of 'pop-listeners, skaters ... punks, rockabillies, goths, metalheads and basically anyone who's not emo' putting aside their differences to go beat up kids with big hair and eyeliner.
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"Bloody victims lay sobbing on the concrete waiting for ambulances while the mob ran through the nearby streets laughing and cheering," reported Time.com.
The violence - including mass beatings in city squares by kids screaming "kill the emos" while filming their battered victims on cell phones - has provoked much theorizing. Marxist professors have claimed the government is out to disunite the youth (where is Jimmy Pursey when you need him?). Gay rights groups have claimed the violence is thinly disguised homophobia.
Others claim that emos tend to be middle class and their assailants working class. But comments on anti-emo websites tend to suggest that the violence has its roots in an irrational annoyance with the emotionally ostentatious (combined with a vague notion that emo is somehow inauthentic).
"I HATE EMOS!!! They are not even people; they are so stupid, they cry over meaningless things... My school is infested with them, I want to kill them all!" says one poster.
"Emos, their way of thinking is for crap, if you are so depressed please do us all a favour and kill yourselves!" says another.
Anti-emo theorist Harry 24 is a tad more eloquent on the Anti Emo Death Squad forum: "They do not drink, they do not have sex, they do not have fun, they go to concerts just to cry, they go to parties just to sit in a corner and cry, and they feel victims of everything, it is really, a very stupid behavior [sic]. That's why everybody hates them besides the music situation (stupid mix of goth and punk and other genres)."
Emo in Mexico seems to have become the cultural home for those with an acute need to partake of the following fairly universal teenage activities: dressing like Robert Smith from the Cure, downplaying the positive and accentuating the negative, being sad in public, and exploring one's emotions through bad poetry.
In short, says Time.com, emos are "the kids jocks have been beating up for decades."
But why now and why Mexico? According to press reports, the squares of Mexican cities seethe with the same plethora of youth tribes that took over British towns and cities in the 1980s. Back then, before the Smiths managed to infect the youth culture body politic with the passive-aggressive cod-fey miserableness that would eventually result in emo, the tribal target of choice was mods.
I was once mod-bashed myself. For wearing a parka. The voluminous nature of the garment shielded me from the kicks and punches of my four assailants who desisted immediately after I screamed "I'm not a mod!" They then apologised before going cheerfully on their way.
The emo-hunting has made me a tad nostalgic for the days when one, as a shaven headed youth, one would get beaten up at 2-Tone gigs by either skinheads or mods, depending on whether one was wearing a tie or not.
Ah, the good old days.
As an ex-pat born on the tail of the baby boom, I'm loath to say that an emocalypse couldn't happen in the UK (where, in 2005, the words kanger, wanksta, chavette, chavish, yarco, skater, ned, and nedette were added to the Collins English Dictionary. And I know first hand how annoyed today's allegedly chav-harrassed youngsters become when lectured them about how horrid tribal violence was back in the good old days.
But I'm guessing it's unlikely that emophobia will spread north and west. The baby boom - and with it the urgent need of the media to give a damn if the kids are kicking the crap out of each other - has passed in the west. Meaning that Granny Britannia can toddle off to the shops for thruppence ha'pence worth of mint humbugs (and a bone for her old dog, Togger) relatively safe from the threat of being sucked into a maelstrom of haircut-based teen-on-teen violence.
And that can only be a good thing.
