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N MoTHER’S DAY, 2005, I was trapped in an East St. Louis club called Popp’s. I say “trapped” because I had a stamp on my wrist that glowed under ultraviolet light, and the doorkeeper told me and my husband that if we went outside for any reason we would not be allowed back in. My eighteen-year-old daughter was somewhere in a crowd of people her age, mingling around a stage in the bare, high-ceilinged room. One or two other parents were there, but my husband and I were easily the oldest people in the place. We were there for a battle of the bands, in which my daughter’s boyfriend and his group would be competing. The bar served alcohol and soft drinks, but no food at all. It was after five o’clock, and I was hungry. I had a large gin and tonic. We learned at some point that Daniel and his band had won the honor of playing last, so they might not take the stage until nine o’clock. My feelings about this came close to desperation. At about six o’clock, the first musical group assembled on the stage. The crowd got very quiet, as a young man came up to the microphone and said something like, “Happy Mother’s Day, you motherf------.” Well, something like that. Then the music began. It was “emo,” which means loud, raw, emotional, angry, plugged-in, screaming rock (I guess). At first I understood nothing but a few screeched expletives. The crowd of young people surging around the stage bobbed their heads and moved their hands in a rhythmic, hypnotic kind of synchronized motion. After a while, I began to respond to the music, and I looked at the faces of the musicians. They were all young and all male, and they were all expressing the most terrible, wrenching, throat-ripping rage. When his turn finally came, Daniel amazed me. His band had cleaned up from their previous dreadlocked image. They had cut their hair, and they were dressed in white shirts, dark pants, and suit jackets. They had carefully choreographed all their moves, and they knew how to play their instruments while moving their bodies in agile, impossible, expressive Epilogue O 131 132 THE DEAD END KIDS oF ST. LoUIS ways. Daniel sang and shouted, moved all around the stage, even got up on a chair and did a kind of backflip off of it and never missed a beat. But his lyrics, what I could understand of them, were hard and anguished and full of painful shock at the ways of the world. Harvard professor William Pollack has concluded after years of studying adolescent boys that anger is the emotion through which they express their vulnerability. Parents, friends, teachers—virtually everyone involved in the process of raising male children discourages them from showing other feelings, such as fear and sadness, but encourages them to vent their anger. Because they are denied expression of the full range of human feelings, some boys become depressed or hopeless. Others become hard, aggressive, rambunctious, alienated, or even violent.1 Pollack points out that most of the violence in American society involves boys and young men as perpetrators and victims. He notes that, statistically , males are four times more likely to be murdered than females. With more and more frequency, in the 1980s and 1990s male teenagers died from the use of firearms. Most boys, of course, did not become involved in violent crimes, but they had to grow up in this culture of violence.2 The emo bands in that East St. Louis club found a healthful outlet for their emotions in music. Even anger can find expression in creative, and not destructive, ways. As Jane Addams observed, the passion of youth can make our cities exciting and bright, or, twisted and crushed, it can make them dangerous. ...

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