I don't want to feel this way forever.

On Thursday, New Sincerity, and the Internet.

“I don't want to feel this way forever 

A dead letter marked return to sender”

--”Understanding in a Car Crash,” Thursday

I listened to an old interview Chris Ott did with Geoff Rickly of the band Thursday over the weekend. I’d hardly listened to them when they seemed ubiquitous in the “self-mythologizing adolescent” marketing demo I belonged to as a teen, but Ott’s a great interviewer, and I had to clean house. In it, Rickly talks about his aspirations when he formed Thursday. He wanted to be dangerous, but he didn’t want to be macho like Swiz, or the typical straight-edge fare. Instead, he wanted to ditch the postmodern irony that had gathered steam since the 1970s and take up David Foster Wallace’s “New Sincerity.” Ink & Dagger gave him some clues for a way forward. Maybe, he thought, being direct, sincere, and vulnerable could be its own kind of dangerousness? And maybe it could create a new, transcendent we?

If anything captures the “third wave” of emo, that’s it: an arch-romanticism, an operatic register, and an almost threatening emotional vulnerability that grew out of the New Sincerity.