The Brazen and the Queer

David Foster Wallace, on many occasions, wrote about how irony had replaced sentimentality in our culture, and why this was an extremely dangerous trend for art. If you need that idea to be expanded on, then this little diatribe isn't for you.
There is no songwriter alive today who is more actively aware of this than Max Bemis, and his lyrics have reflected it since he was old enough to buy alcohol. Bemis ostensibly writes what we refer to as "emo" music, although that term is all too often used as pejorative and doesn't adequately reflect what the genre is trying to say and do (one needs look no further than the aptly titled "IN DEFENSE OF THE GENRE" available in a store near you). Bemis knows that our culture is on the brink of total annihilation if we don't get back in touch with a very deep and very real, one might say "human", part of ourselves.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that means [*cringe*] getting in touch with our feelings.
See, what separates us from the animal kingdom (apart from the literally hundreds of things that separate us from the animal kingdom) is our capacity for all sorts of different emotions that affect our behavior and decision making. We do not operate on instinct alone, much the way a dog or a cat inherently "loves" that which feeds it, but instead a part of our makeup that allows for a deeper connection with a shared psyche, and in turn use that to communicate in a language everyone can understand. I'm referring to the soul, and that language is art.
However, the postmodern attitude that has dominated since the late 80's/early 90's in American pop culture has all but destroyed the notion of the "emotional" (see: emo) and, with the help of mass media, replaced it with a hip, apathetic, ironic attitude that values individualism to the point of solipsism. While this may sound shallow and harmless on the surface, it is in fact a problem that permeates every aspect of our daily life, even if you don't realize it. But where it is most noticeable is in our art.
Let's all face it: the music on the radio is shit. It's been shit for a long time and we're actually starting to forget when it was ever good to begin with, but it's getting worse. We all hate it yet we keep buying it. On one hand, we cannot be blamed. After all,  it's far easier to listen to what's being effectively marketed to you (make no mistake: it's ALL marketing). Let's pull a page from Kid Rock's book. Love him or hate him, the man makes a good point:

If it looks good, you'll see it. If it sounds good, you'll hear it. If it's marketed right, you'll buy it. But if it's real... you'll feel it. 

And he's absolutely right. But we can seek out that which we feel; we can rebel. We can rage against the machine. That's where the "emo" comes in.
Emo is my favorite genre of music, and Max Bemis's band Say Anything's most recent album "Anarchy My Dear" is my favorite record of the year for this exact reason. No other genre of music today is more in touch with this profound philosophic idea than emo. When I was in high school, I listened to nothing but heavy metal because A) I was a rebellious teenager and B) it made me feel powerful. The lyrics and themes of metal revolve around that concept almost exclusively, which is all well and good, but even that primal force of feeling is dipped in the irony-sauce, and some of my favorite metal bands from my youth seem less majestic in retrospect when I realize how un-serious and superficial it all was.
But Say Anything isn't like that. It's genuine to the point of nauseating. It takes all the things you're too afraid to think and say for fear of being laughed at and ridiculed and expresses all of them in way that's impossible to deny. Max Bemis is the paragon of it. He isn't afraid to say what he feels, in fact, he needs to say what he feels. He knows that saying what he feels is not only important but necessary, and the fans respond to it in a way that's hard to put into words. There's a reason fans of SA are more devoted than any you'll find who are hooked up to the mainstream teat (one of them being that it is actually impossible to be a die-hard fan of a popular band, but that's beside the point). It's the same reason that once a year, Max Bemis personally writes songs for and delivers them to individual fans: because we have a soul, and so does he, and when you put a SA record in your CD player and hit play, those two ethereal balls of light glow fiercely with a vibrant kinetic energy that is immediately heartbreaking, satisfying, cathartic, orgasmic; despite the fact that you and him could not be physically further apart. And for those of you out there who have never felt it, I genuinely feel sorry for you.

So fuck you, emo is awesome.