>>8
Huh....MY schooling was obviously an exemplary one in comparison with yours.
It was brought firmly and clearly home to ME at school, for example, that terms of sociological and cultural classification are always to be applied in awareness of their precise historical limitations.
That is to say, I know that it's impossible, by definition, for a band like The Smiths to have been "emo" because the latter term has only come into circulation in the last ten or fifteen years.
The way we used to see it back in the early 80s, what the bands we were into were all about was encouraging audience-participation sing-alongs ("Sing me to sleep, sing me to sleep, I don't want to wake up on my own any more") and strengthening family ties, which were crumbling at the time due to mass unemployment and Margaret Thatcher's relentless assault on the Welfare State ("Oh mother, I've tried please believe me, I'm doing the best that I can, I'm ashamed of the things I've been put through, I'm ashamed of the person I am").
I think the virile, robust and cheerful English Neo-Nazi-ism that Morrissey has been propounding since the break-up of his first band should have dispelled by now any faint cloud of suspicion of "emo-ism" as may have hung, with hindsight, around his work with The Smiths.
And though I've no idea what Ian Curtis is doing these days, I'm sure it's nothing that bears the least taint of emotional instability or self-indulgence.