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I guess this is what happens when young people have questions about the world and the only answers that adults can come up with is 'God'?
Not to credit 'emo' (or whatfuckingever) as being a secular movement, but take what the last "psychologist" woman said in the interview: "they need to look at the clothes they're wearing....they need to look at who they associate with...are they associating with the kids who are enjoying life and doing the nice things that young people do? or are they associating with the young people who say life is bad and I can't handle it?" If this doesn't scream good ol' Xtian values, I am not sure what does.
I think that we've been seeing this phenomenon ever since...hmmm....1950s pop culture? Not that teens were not confused/rebellious/whatever *before* 1950, but the 50s heralded a very strange time in modern America, at least. Suburbs were arising, racial tensions were brewing, and post-industrialization and war, children were no longer being drafted to work on farms and be mere utility around the home. Kids were being educated more than ever and with pretty much only education to occupy their teenage years, they did what they could to express their confusion. Lots of youthful "movements" have arisen since, but in essence, each of them has succeeded in doing what it has at least in some way or another, intended to do - scare adults. To be set apart from the crowd is a pretty big component to individualism - something which most educated minds would like to achieve - but to be apart, yet belong to something else entirely is like getting the best of both worlds. So we see bandwagoning and style subscription and imitation, we see people acting and dressing 'punk' and 'emo' and 'stoner' and 'goth' and 'grunge' and 'rebel' and 'rocker' and 'rapper' and whatever other stupid fucking term you want to come up with to slap a label on what's pretty much just confused people all doing the same thing with the same goals in mind living in the same world and often in the same community just all with different influences.
Where this shit breaks down, I think, is not when kids turn to phony movements just to get the answers they want, but because of the very fact that the alternative is just so fucking stupid more often than not. Adults give shrugs and point to archaic scribblings, demanding that they adhere to what is primarily illogical conduct, and teens see what's on the news and they see what's right outside their window and their now educated and grossly underestimated minds (callow as they may be) start to understand that the truth they seek probably doesn't lie in Jesus and in eating their Wheaties everyday and in joining 'the squad'. I guess it's a frightening thing to older generations and it pretty much always has been - to lose control over people who are deemed inferior - and that is exactly why these little subcultures succeed and proliferate like they do: not because they instill fear, but because older people are fearful and afraid anyways.
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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
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