Newspapers blame Emo

My Chemical Romance have joined the ranks of The Beatles, Ozzy Osborne, Metallica, Marilyn Manson, and many others who have had the blame for a suicide, murder, or massacre laid at their feet, and the genre of emo has in the mainstream press’s eyes been escalated from an annoying, overly sensitive, teen sub-culture to international “suicide cult” (The Daily Mail).

The case in question is that of Hannah Bond, who committed suicide at the age of 13 in the autumn of last year. An inquest heard that the young girl tragically decided to hang herself a mere two weeks after becoming a fan of My Chemical Romance (The Daily Mail), and many British newspapers have been eager to report how a British child came to believe suicide is cool as a result of involvement with the dangerous youth cult that is emo (The Telegraph, The Sun).

The coverage, as you might expect, is ridiculous; The Daily Mail quote the line “Although you’re dead and gone, believe me your memory will go on” from My Chemical Romance hit Welcome to the Black Parade, as if it demonstrates the band’s unique and dangerous glamorisation of death (didn’t Elton John say something similar about candles and legends?). The same paper quotes the investigating coroner as saying that the death was “not glamorous, just simply a tragic loss of a young life”, the paper and the coroner apparently both believing he had authority not only in investigation the circumstances of death, but also in matters of glamour. Is the notion that death is romantic an invention of the Emo scene? A cursory glance over the fictions of Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde would suggest not.

The most bizarre thing about this sort of coverage is that every time a case like this emerges, the press report it like nothing like this has ever happened before, like they’ve never before discovered that someone involved in a suicide (or other crime) was a fan of a particular band or artist and put 2 and 2 together.

My Chemical Romance frequently explore themes of romance and death, but their contemporaries… not so much. Additionally their music and performances generally have an upbeat and life affirming quality to them, which makes it difficult to believe for a second that a young girl would decide to commit suicide simply as a result of exposure to what is known as the emo scene.