CHIRP: The Chicago Independent Radio Project

Billy Kalb writes

From Russia with eyeliner

Not merely content with suppressing Chechen insurgents, playing hardball with George W. Bush over his proposed European-based missile defense system and, erm, supplying James Bond with four sweet, sweet decades of Cold War-era job security, Russia today turned a hostile eye toward its most insidious adversary yet — emo kids.

Worried about the future of a youth populace growing up on bands like My Chemical Romance, legislators are considering a “Government Strategy in the Sphere of Spiritual and Ethical Education” which, according to London’s The Guardian, would involve “heavy regulation of emo websites and the banning of emo and goth fashion from schools and government buildings.”

The “emos” in question are understandably upset at the news, many of them participating in protest marches in defense of their moody, gloomy post-Soviet existence and the right to have black hair with fringes that “cover half the face.”

Still, it doesn’t look as though this potentially endangered subculture will get much support from its international peers, many of whom are too busy observing, as one angsty poster on GIGWISE.com does, that “MCR IS NOT EMO!!!!!”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/jul/22/russian.emo

http://www.gigwise.com/news/44752/russia-proposes-ban-on-emo-and-goth-fashion-in-schools