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I just got Johnny Cash's album The Man Comes Around. "Hurt" is really the most emo song ever written. (Yes, I know it's Trent Reznor.) From now on, if someone asks me what emo is, I will play this song. I love it so.

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I was never a fan of "Hurt," the original version. It's, as you say, the very epitome of emo, and not nearly as fun as other NIN songs that are equally (if not more) emo. What Johnny Cash's version brings to it is the weight of age and pain in his singing. Trent Reznor singing it is a young dude whining about one problem on his otherwise still very open-ended, probably-going-to-get-better life. Johnny Cash singing it is filled with the remorse of a long life lived unhappily, full of remorse and pain.

Okay, so it's still emo, but it has some weight to it. I love it.

It's super emo, but keep in mind the album it's from is a concept album--obviously based on personal experience but also exaggerated for maximum narrative effect.

Well, when has anything he's done not been super emo? My brother described Pretty Hate Machine as "my eighth grade girlfriend just dumped me." (I kid because I love.)

Ha! Okay, so that's true, but it was also the '80s and his competition was The Cure and The Smiths.

Not to kill it with over analysis, but what strikes me is how lyrics which, in their original context, are clearly about drug abuse become about dying of a terminal disease. Suddenly talking about how everyone goes away in the end is not about how you drive everyone away but how we all face our own mortality alone. For Reznor, I think it's about wishing that you could fix yourself mentally so that you don't drive your last friend away. For Cash, the wish to start again is much more literal.

I mean, I have to give a hand to both Reznor and Cash, because it takes serious talent to dilute the despair self-hatred into its purest form.

I love that album cause it sounds like a moment where it is still within the tropes of eighties pop music (the backing beats could be straight from anything on the radio--the beginning of one song always makes me think of "King of Wishful Thinking"), but it is also clearly transforming into something new.

I love transitional albums like that, like Genesis's eponymous album, or Supertramp's Crisis? What Crisis?

Oh, and to answer your question, I wouldn't consider either The Fragile or Broken to be emo (and they're my favorites).

The Fragile not emo? I do not think we are listening to the same song (or album)...

I don't think so, but I admit bias. I think emo requires a certain level of self-absorption, the my-pain-is-the-most-important-thing, whereas the song "The Fragile" is more outward. The rest of the album is a good mix of angry and introspection, though. I don't think self-reflection as a whole should be lumped into the emo category. I mean, that's basically music.

I see that song as self-absorbed wish-fulfillment, though. He's playing out a savior fantasy--that he's the only one who sees her in pain, that he can save her. Which to me still is emo.

Fair enough. I just don't see it as any more emo than any other song out there that isn't the product of a drum machine.

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