Why is Sunny Day Real Estate considered the band that pioneered Midwest Emo when Cap'n Jazz was around before them?
Sunny Day Real Estate was formed in 1992, they released their first EP the same year when they were still known as Empty Set. They released Diary in 1994.
While Cap'n Jazz didn't release their first EP till 1993, they did form in 1989. The anthology album How the Midwest Was Won was released in 1993 also. Cap'n Jazz was on it. Cap'n Jazz is the reason it's known as Midwest Emo, being from around Chicago.
Ergo, they should be known as the first Midwest Emo band.
And come on, lets be honest, Diary sounds closer to post-grunge then to other Midwest Emo. There's a reason two of their members ended up joining Foo Fighters.
I think they probably are, though. For one thing, Cap'n Jazz is from the Midwest, from Chicago. SDRE isn't, they're from Seattle.
Cap'n Jazz and the bands that came from them (Joan of Arc, The Promise Ring, American Football, etc.) are all beloved cult indie bands. SDRE were on a higher level of popularity than that, they got on MTV. I think the biggest thing is that Cap'n Jazz were the major inspiration for lots of very underground midwest emo bands, like Algernon Cadwallader and Glocca Morra. SDRE, on the other hand, were the biggest influence on the emo-pop bands that got huge in the mid 00s, like Fall Out Boy, Jimmy Eat World, and Paramore. I think that's a big part of it.
I love Cap'n Jazz, they had a beautiful and explosive sound. But it's all very lo-fi and intentionally weird. SDRE I think set out to be a big band, and wrote these very professional-sounding songs that melded sort of the Seattle grunge/indie sound with the emotionally vulnerable Dischord post-hardcore of bands like Shudder to Think. I think it's very telling that the biggest band to spring out of Cap'n Jazz was probably either The Promise Ring or American Football, while the biggest band to spring out of SDRE was the Foo Fighters.
I honestly like both bands a lot, but I'd probably take Cap'n Jazz over SDRE.
Samuel Ward
Cap'n Jazz's sound can still be heard in Midwest Emo bands to this day. SDRE not really.
Josiah Clark
cap n jazz = moss icon > all other emo
David Bell
Jimmy Eat World were contemporaries of SDRE, both of their debuts came out the same year.
Anthony Lewis
>Why is Sunny Day Real Estate considered the band that pioneered Midwest Emo They're not. What are you talking about? They're considered the band that brought 'emo' into the mainstream, that's it
Kayden Diaz
Yeah, it feels weird that the “first” Midwest Emo was on MTV during their prime.
Feels like the first Emo band should be like the lot of them in the 90’s. Only around for 5 years, release only one LP that’s influential and then break up.
Benjamin Powell
>Midwest emo emerged as a style of Emo in the mid-1990s. Its advent is usually credited to Sunny Day Real Estate, who combined elements of their native Seattle, WA's Indie Rock scene with the Post-Hardcore music propagated by Washington, D.C.-based Dischord Records. The music tends toward alternating loud and soft dynamics; off-key, strained or "whiny" vocals with little screaming; and "twinkly" arpeggiated guitar parts. Other prominent artists in this genre include Mineral, The Promise Ring and Texas Is the Reason. Artists such as The Get Up Kids and Jimmy Eat World, whose earlier output can be described as Midwest emo, helped to lay the foundation for what would become Emo-Pop.
>The genre's name stems from its high prevalence in cities such as Chicago, Madison, Kansas City and Cleveland, but the style is in no way limited to the Midwest, as exemplified by Sunny Day Real Estate and Texas is the Reason.
>Sunny Day Real Estate is an American emo band from Seattle, Washington. They were one of the early rock bands in the Midwest emo scene[1] and helped establish the genre, despite not actually being from the Midwest themselves.
I'd say Sunny Day Real Estate is just plain 'Emo' while Cap'n Jazz were doing something new with the sound hence 'Midwest Emo', I think there's a distinction there that some may think is nitpicking or whatever, but Rites of Spring sounds nothing like American Football (yet they are both emo to alot of people) so there needs to be a better way to separate the two under the same broad umbrella
Connor Perez
oh, okay, i see. i thought you were implying that JEW couldn't have been inspired by SDRE just because they were technically contemporaries
Carson Hall
>Rites of Spring sounds nothing like American Football I guess but you can clearly hear the influence Rites of Spring had on Cap'n Jazz, which influenced American Football.
Caleb Martin
I can see these bands having an influence, but they sound like pretty generic Indie Rock bands and not the true Midwest Emo style.
1993 the starting point for Midwest Emo in my opinion. Both SDRE and Cap'n Jazz released their first true records:
