Written while on a dirty weekend in Manchester visiting a friend Mat

I’m sitting in Emo Park – this one’s in Manchester but every big city has got one in its centre somewhere. The teenagers that surround me are given the blanket term ‘Emo’ but I suppose some would identify themselves as Skater, or Goth, or any number of terms. To me they will always look like exactly what they are — the bastard children of every sub-culture of the last 30 years.

The boys have sweeping fringes of perfectly conditioned hair that — I bet — smells of coconuts, skin tight jeans, and over sized jackets with expensively alternative prints on them. The girls, pretty much the same. To my old, slightly hungover, eyes their enthusiasm seems borderline hysterical and the hugs they use to greet each other surprisingly tender.

It was late nineties when everything got fucked up. Bands like Rage Against The Machine, Cypress Hill and Limp Bizcuit (led by King Dickhead) started a rap/metal hybrid hastily called Nu-Metal (most trace the first instance of this sort of sound, not to the overplayed novelty record Walk This Way by Aerosmith and Run DMC, but to the album Judgement Night. A soundtrack to the film of the same name;  throwing up collaborations like Filter and Crystal Method, and Dinosaur Jnr. and Cypress Hill — I urge you to find it, it’s as wonderfully mad as it sounds). This Nu-Metal overlapped with bands like Korn, Deftones, and At The Drive In who used the same sound but bought a sincere musical and emotional depth. All of a sudden songs were about loss (see: One Armed Scissor from ATDI), memory (see: My Own Summer by Deftones) and even child abuse (see: well pretty much the whole of the self-titled first album from Korn), the most Metal-as-a-genre could have hoped for before was angry political stuff, the best of which is RATM, or songs about cars, titties, or the notion of ‘partying’.

The Metal-heads, once branded with long hair, denim, leather, and band T-shirts, could then start incorporating the Americana of sportswear (Addias mostly, but hockey and baseball shirts were OK), baggy jeans and Dreads. At the same time Goths started to wear the dayglo colours of the flourishing club kids, and fans of the punk-rave band Prodigy didn’t know what the fuck to wear.

Nowadays being ‘alternative’ isn’t a matter of not fitting in, no looking for a subcultural group that will have you then drawing a musical circle in the sand around yourselves with your own uniform and language. Now, being ‘alternative’ is a whole platter of styles and choices from a buffet of subcultures. And being sold those choices in the same ‘alternative’ shop that has outlets in every shopping centre in every major city.

My friend is next to me, sleeping off last night where he may or may not have done a hip-hop headstand on his own in the middle of the dance floor. So I have time to watch the Emo herd and I can’t help but compare.

The groups I was once part of were smaller for a start — and while the atmosphere here is friendly and even festival like, there are noticeable cool kids and losers round the edges. That is not to say there were no snobs back then, there is nothing more bitchy than a elitist punk. It’s just that even on the most bitchy days we were all one group, a bunch of people that had found each other and looked out for each other. Not just one hundred or so individuals dressed the same.