Andy Greenwald, at the ripe old age of 27, spends a lot of his time in his Brooklyn apartment, listening to Dashboard Confessional, alone. He’ll catch up on Livejournal, post on his message board and respond to a girl’s questions about the boy in eyeliner who broke her heart over MSN. While this behavior is not so different from say, the average Hot Topic customer, Greenwald considers it research. He is an emo-journalist, a newly necessitated niche in the world of music reporting.
Greenwald, who jump-started his career with a junior-year internship at SPIN Magazine, writes frequently as a freelancer for Entertainment Weekly, Blender and GQ. This past year, Greenwald’s services were required for cover news on Panic at the Disco!, Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance-the last of whom he interviewed twice in the span of six months.
His first book, 2003’s Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers and Emo was a cultural examination of the rise and history of the genre. The book’s research process involved interviewing multitudes of histrionic teenage fans and chilling with Chris Carrabba on tour.
In his 2005 novel Miss Misery, Greenwald spins a yarn about a New York music writer who encounters his evil scenester doppelganger-online.
“Livejournal can’t help but hit you on a gut level,” waxed Greenwald over the phone on a Tuesday afternoon.
“There are some people who I’ve been watching online for years. I started reading their diaries when they were freshman and now they’re finishing college. And, I think, that’s really exciting, but yeah, really strange.”
Even though Greenwald and the fans he interviews are less than a decade apart in age, he finds a vast differences between his Generation (X) and and theirs (Y). For Greenwald, who grew up at a time when a single was on-sale for twenty bucks instead of illegally downloadable, this gap in technology has been the most fascinating discovery in his descent into the cultural abyss of those who wear studded belts.
“I can’t imagine having access to everything,” he says. “Generation Y has a level of communication and accessibility that is amazing, so I’m constantly inspired by even the most banal livejournal post. Even after four years, I still feel like an interloper.”
What’s unique about Greenwald’s writing is his ability to humanize his subjects while hitting all the ironic strides of a glossy magazine feature. This mixture of celebrity journalism and realism-writing about who a lead singer has on his Blackberry and what a loser he was in high school-blurs the line between typical hype and honest vulnerability.
“Well, I feel that if a band is going to be featured on a magazine cover, there’s [got to be] something interesting about them. Or, they look good with their shirts off,” he joked. “My goal is always to get past the obvious, to try and find something out about the band as people. You can always use the celebrity stuff, which is why so many stories about My Chemical Romance feature their drug use and mental health.”
Greenwald has been in the emo business long enough to see the genre mutate from the (bleeding) hearts-on-their-sleeves likes of Mineral, Christie Front Drive and Jimmy Eat World to the latest concept album (featuring Liza Minneli, no less) by My Chemical Romance. And while bands like Panic At the Disco! and Fall Out Boy may feel emo to some, it’s becoming harder to tell what emo really is.
“Something is truly emo if it means something to you. If you’ve had a real experience listening to an album or hearing it live at a concert, then that’s emo, because emo prioritizes the fan relationship,” said Greenwald.
“With a band like My Chemical Romance, everything they do they absolutely mean. Which is why I like them.”
However, not everyone is a fan of sincerity, particularly those flighty scenester types. In fact, some people downright think that emo sucks.
“Emo is lame,” Greenwald confesses. “But I think that people go into it with the wrong perspective. You have to think of your own teenage years, of the heightened experience of everything, where even the slightest contact with the opposite sex seems important. That was my own ‘in.'”
“I was not a fan of any of the bands I ended writing about at first. So when I started my SPIN feature on Dashboard Confessional, initially I wanted to learn about its societal presence and the cultural aspects of communication.”
Echoing the criticisms of emo-hating laymen, Greenwald laments the way emo acts often seem to blend together into a homogenous fog-an ethos of similarity he, in a Colbert-like turn of phrase calls “saminess.”
“So many of these bands just develop into a kind of saminess and sameness…” Greenwald sighs, adding: “I do prefer it when Chris [Carraba] sings in his own register.”
Still, emo pays the rent. And if, every so often, Greenwald gets to inteview the lead singer of one of America’s hottest rock bands at a five-star hotel in Milan (like he did in 2006 with MCR’s Gerrard Way), well then, that’s probably okay too.
“By having a niche, even one designated to you, it kind of solidifies your work. I’m happy that the emo community seems to embrace what I’ve been working on.” So Greenwald can’t complain about his work.
“It’s steady work,” he says, “even though I’m running out of Myspace and Hot Topic jokes.”
