Return to your emo, 90s self.
By Jon Reiss
Yom Kippur is about denying yourself pleasure for a day in order to be properly submerged into the despair you’ve cast out into the word with your bad deeds. You wake up, go to shul, stand, sit, stand, sit, stand, sit and then go home and wait for shul again. If your mom is anything like mine, you mustn’t watch TV, play hide-and-seek, or do anything pleasurable as you wait to return to services.
However, if you’re going to watch TV, maybe watch something appropriate, something with that Yom Kippur malaise, like Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark. As far as music’s concerned, it shouldn’t be too hard to find appropriate tunes to help you ruminate over your bad behavior. Certain genres of music are especially heavy on repentance/atonement-centric songs, while others are almost entirely devoid of them. One is not likely to find many Yom Kippur-appropriate songs in the discography of Brittney Spears. But jump back 20 years and the most popular music of the time was full of atonement. Alternative rock is a treasure trove of sad, sappy music for hungry, weary Jews on Yom Kippur. Emo—old emo—specifically, is also pretty packed with sad, repentant lyrics. (Though modern emo is much too self-obsessed and glammy to dwell on any wrongdoing.) Here are five Yom Kippur-appropriate songs to listen to in between services.
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