Unless you’ve also spent probably too much time on the internet exploring the intricacies of various niche punk rock subgenres, the words “screamo” or “emoviolence” might mean nothing to you, or sound quite bizarre. The root word of these music styles – emo – has penetrated the lexicon of Western popular music more thoroughly, and thus will help to establish the cultural context of a song I will discuss in detail later in this piece. Before it evolved (or was appropriated, depending on who you ask) to describe any kind of music that conveyed moodiness, emo was originally shorthand for “emotional hardcore” or “emocore” (Greenwald, 2003, p.14). This musical movement first started in the mid-80s hardcore punk scene of Washington DC, where bands like Rites of Spring, Dag Nasty, and Moss Icon began writing and performing rock music sonically indebted to hardcore punk’s fast hard and heavy style but with a lyricism pointed inward about one’s feelings (Blush & Petros, 2001, p. 157) instead of one’s disgust with life within consumer capitalism or, less eloquently, “society, man.” By the beginning of the 90s, some groups would twist the yelled vocal styles prominent with hardcore and its melancholic emocore offspring into mangled throat-shredding shrieks. This is when “screamo,” a portmanteau of scream and emo, would begin to take hold. The late 90s and early 00s are perhaps the golden age of screamo. Alongside esteemed contemporaries like Orchid, pageninetynine, and Neil Perry, the early output of Jeromes Dream would become essential listening for anyone interested in the genre. There are many highpoints in Jerome’s Dream artistic body of work, but there is a passage in their 1998 song “Everyday at 3:06” that I believe is one of the pinnacles in intensely emotionally-charged vocal performances within rock music at large.
If you pull up old footage of the band’s shows prior to their 2001 breakup, you’ll see that in none of these performances is bassist/vocalist Jeff Smith using a microphone to amplify his voice. Despite the presence of big loud amps for him and guitarist Nick Antonopulous, and drummer Erik Ratensperger showing no mercy as he beats his kit to a pulp, you can hear Smith’s voice. It’s very difficult to make out what he is saying, but still, this band plays very loud and very hard and you can hear Smith’s voice. There are two reasons for this: one being that Smith is projecting his voice with extreme intensity, and the second being the high pitch of his voice. His shrieks, yelps, and wails stay well away from thick low frequencies of his bass and flitters barely above the searing chords Antonopulous lashes out from the bottom of his guitar’s neck. It is a dual set of extremes with a delicate balance: overwhelming blasts and swells of instrumentally-induced volume and a voice that refuse both to be swallowed by it or receive any technological assistance in cutting through the din. The same is the case for the music the band recorded and released on split EPs and the 2000 album Seeing Means More Than Safety. Amidst the jagged guitar riffs, Smith’s tortured wails, and beefy bass that rattles the ears as it syncs up with the punches of Ratensperger’s kick drums, Jeromes Dream often sounds like the sonic equivalent of seeing a man on fire run, change direction hairpin turns, slow down, and then sprint again towards and off a cliff. Even when the drum-driven momentum cuts out, wails of feedbacking amps keep the flames alight. There are only a few moments where the distortion is shut off and one can find relief from the intensity. A select few passages of clean guitar melodies reveal a delicate fragility that is always there but hard to detect amongst the chaos. Reading Smith’s lyrics reveal further this delicacy, the “emotion” that counterbalances their particularly “hardcore” emotional hardcore.
In Jeromes Dream’s discography, there is one moment where the intensity of vocals and instrumentation do not match each other. Interestingly, this appears on their first ever release – a 1998 split EP with the band Amalgamation. “Everyday at 3:06” opens with the frenzied musical intensity that characterizes much of their releases, but it is the bridge of this song that I want to draw attention to. In the clean guitar passages I mentioned earlier, never are there any vocals to accompany these parts. But this bridge is an exception. Antonopulous plucks out a soft yet tense melody while Ratensperger exercises some uncharacteristic restraint in gently beating out a rim click on each downbeat. After a couples measures they are joined by Smith, who hollers feverishly:
“Waiting
For you to kill you
Waiting
For you to kill me
Watching
My love hate me”
Never again would Smith’s voice sound so intelligible and unobstructed on a Jeromes Dream song. It is an especially dramatic and intense verse, in subject matter but also with the conviction through which it is delivered. When vocals are screamed or yelled, the gritty character that the voice takes on can reduce the clarity of the words being exhumed. While this might blunt the content of the message that is being delivered, we can adapt a slogan from McLuhan (2001) and consider how “the medium is the message.” The screaming itself is just as important as what it is screamed in conveying the vitality of what is felt by the screamer. Yet, I believe a very intentional choice was made by the band to strip things back musically here, and make these words more intelligible.
We can hear Smith straining against the limits of his own lungs and vocal chords. His voice slides in and out varying levels of coarseness and drops in volume at the end of the first line. There is space for him to provide a fourth line but this becomes swallowed up by a squall of guitar feedback before the band kicks the intensity back into full gear. Ironically, following this vulnerable display of emotional performance and songwriting, Smith delivers a line, made blurry by the volume of the band, that seems like a response to what just happened. “Never let your guard down” he wails, despite having just done exactly like that. On the word “down” his voice breaks into an anguished cry. It sounds like he has become overwhelmed by the emotions he expresses so intensely. Every time I hear Smith on this song, I am taken back by how painful his screams sound. This is someone channeling the pain of negative emotions into the physical destruction of their own vocal chords. I’m not even trying to be sensationalist. In terms of sheer extremity, this is the most powerful vocal performance I’ve ever heard.
Smith’s body would not be able to keep up with the intensity of his vocal performances and his decision not to use a microphone. Legend says that some recording sessions resulted in him coughing up blood and passing it out from the strain he put on his vocal chords. Smith would refute these stories in a 2021 interview, but did admit to throwing up after a couple performances. By the time the band began writing their second album Presents (2001) Smith could no longer scream and had to change his vocal to a staccato yelp amplified on recordings by a megaphone. There is something irresponsible but noble in how he risked his own wellbeing for the sake of art and self-expression by taking it nearly to its logical conclusion.* Yet it begs the question, why? Smith explained about performing in the early years of the band:
“there were times [during performances] where I was really affected. I was young and I was very angry, and [had] a lot of traumas in my childhood. I would go to a very dark place in my head when we would play, I think we all did. And so I would just let it go.” (quoted in Hughes, 2021, para. 22)
Regarding the extremity at which they performed, letting everything go seems like a logical goal for what Jeromes Dream did in the early part of their career. The lo-fi recording, the noise and distortion, the feverish speed and whiplash rhythm changes, and a vocalist shredding his voice to express an overwhelming darkness felt inside all combine to create something very raw, ugly, uncomfortable and not subtle in the slightest.
In closing a spoken word verse with the lines “we’ve put too much in to let it go, tonight I scream for you,” before he and fellow vocalist Jen Wiley shriek for the rest of the song “Tonight I Scream” (2000), Brian Dingeman of screamo band In Loving Memory essentially puts forward a screamo mission statement. He announces the attempt to achieve catharsis through the act of screaming to music that matches the overwhelmingness of emotions that seem like too much to overcome. That Jeromes Dream and “Everyday at 3:06” would become part of the canon of this niche subgenre/subculture that emphasizes placing emotion at the forefront of artistic expression is proof that there are people who appreciate when we let our guards down for each other.
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References
Blush, S., & Petros, G. (2010). American hardcore: A tribal history. Feral House.
Greenwald, A. (2003). Nothing feels good: Punk rock, teenagers, and emo. St. Martin’s Griffin.
Hughes, M (2021, July 30). Screamo Pioneers Jeromes Dream Revisit Intense Early Days, Polarizing ‘Presents’ LP. Revolver. Retrieved from: https://www.revolvermag.com/music/screamo-pioneers-jeromes-dream-revisit-intense-early-days-polarizing-presents-lp
In Loving Memory. (2000). Tonight I Scream. [Lyrics]. Retrieved from: https://genius.com/In-loving-memory-band-tonight-i-scream-lyrics
McLuhan, M. (2001). Understanding media: the extensions of man. Routledge.
Smith, J. (1998). Everyday at 3:06. [Recorded by Jeromes Dream] [Lyrics]. Retrieved from: https://jeromesdream.bandcamp.com/track/everyday-at-3-06