Evanescence just released a remaster of their 2003 album. Evanescence hit a few years after Linkin Park and I always thought that Linkin Park paved the way for the kind of conflict-focused lyrical themes that briefly dominated the rock genre. Linkin Park was about depression and families that are held together not by love but by hate. Evanescence was about depression, disillusionment with life, and suicide fixation. Listening to it today, the lyrics feel a bit raw and personal. Like, the view today would be that the singer just needs medication. Today we have no stomach for raw emotion of a negative kind, unless it's "tongue-in-cheek" humor, I.E. unserious, said ironically for laughs. The millennial humor style. Like if we don't take life seriously it can't hurt us. But I digress...
The lyrics are also a bit cringe, on top of it all. This music came out at a time when relationships were forced into two boxes: monogamous "white picket fence" suburban blandness or friends with benefits sex-positive pop star life. There was no room for anything in-between. "It's complicated" wasn't taken seriously by society. So people were looking for something romantic that transcended these two unapologetically crass buckets, and Evanescence mixed depression and romanticism in a way that doesn't really work today. We hold people to a high standard for emotional maturity now, and people generally aren't pining away for their crush at such a high intensity. At least, that's the sense I get from the world. I'm 35 and the peak for that kind of pining away happens, what, ages 15-19? Music these days tells a different story. Of course, music is tied to cultures, and the white bread rural Pennsylvanian culture may very well still be deep in Evanescence mania, but I kind of doubt it. It seems like hip hop and mumble rap speaks for the current generation, and while there are aspects of Evanescence in that music too, it's very much a different thing. Hip hop / rap is about hustle, relaxing, partying, being baller, basically experiencing life from the lense of being rich & famous. Maybe music says what society is afraid to say, and rap is what we need right now, to say things like "dating sucks" and "it's okay to expect respect from people".
Anyway, the kids will love it. I'm happy that people will rediscover this music. It's really something unique and special. You know that feeling when you learn about a band from 20 years ago that had a cool thing going for them, and were mildly successful, but somehow you never heard of them until now? And you try to put yourself in the world 20 years ago to understand what the music was like new? Yeah that happened to me with Oingo-Boingo. And hopefully people get a kick out of Evanescence, even though the cultural moment that made it make sense is long gone.
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