When Emo Conquered the Mainstream
Sometime in the eighties, the story goes—and every musical genre is ultimately a story—a few bands in America’s hypermasculine hardcore-punk scene started making music with poetic, emotionally vulnerable lyrics, and people called this music “emo,” as in “emocore,” as in “emotional hardcore.” In the nineties, indie bands with more interest in melody continued exploring similar lyrical territory, and people called their music emo, too, even though it didn’t really sound the same. In the early two-thousands, bands from cultural hinterlands—Boca Raton, Las Vegas, the suburbs of New Jersey and Illinois, Long Island—took their predecessors’ interest in private emotion and the legacy of punk and added a new ingredient: pop ambition. There was fast, percussive guitar strumming; earworm riffs; frenetic drumming; and melodies full of stadium-ready sing-along moments, delivered in a nasal style that flirted with whining and sometimes crossed over into yelling. People called this music emo, too, and for a brief moment it conquered mainstream culture, with acts like My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, and Panic! At the Disco playing sold-out shows across the world, and becoming mainstays on Billboard charts and MTV.
It’s this period in emo history, often referred to as its “third wave,” that the music journalist Chris Payne takes up in “Where Are Your Boys Tonight?: The Oral History of Emo’s Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008.” He starts with an amusing methodological caveat: “It’s worth noting that approximately zero of the bands covered in this book—or the ones that came before them—owned up to the ‘emo’ tag” during the years when they were most popular. From the start, the word was often deployed as a slur, a way of mocking bands for dealing in “soft” subjects, like heartbreak. To this day, multiple waves and revivals later, the term is still shorthand for immature, melodramatic angst. “We were at odds with the term ‘emo,’ ” said Mikey Way, the bassist of My Chemical Romance, a band commonly held up as the genre’s biggest mainstream success story. “We did everything we could, kicking and screaming, to get away from it.”
I can relate. I was in high school and college during the years Payne and his interviewees cover. The main thing I knew about emo was that, whatever it was, I didn’t like it. Or, more accurately, and more pressingly to my teen-age self, I didn’t want to be seen liking it. This was only partially because of my awareness that the genre was dominated by young men whose anguished lyrics often channelled a sense of having been wronged by women—fickle, untrustworthy women, now angels, now demons—on the battlefield of romance. My real problem was that emo songs’ emotional machinery felt overblown in a way I was embarrassed to be associated with. The emotions sat right on the surface, big and loud. The emotions were the surface. There was no distance, no perspective, no mystery. No cool. That wasn’t how I wanted to see myself or to be seen by others, so I didn’t listen to emo—or I did now and then, but in private, telling myself that this particular song or album or band wasn’t so emo, or wasn’t emo like that. By my college years, when the third wave was cresting, I was hardly listening to the stuff at all, in private or otherwise. I took this as a sign that I was growing up.
Today, it is indisputable that emo has lost its once mighty perch in mainstream culture. The victorious moments evoked in Payne’s interviews—My Chemical Romance playing on the top of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Dashboard Confessional being picked to resurrect “MTV Unplugged”—feel like dispatches from another era. Many of the bands whose members he interviews don’t exist anymore or live largely in the crystallized amber of the lucrative millennial nostalgia circuit. There’s been a fourth wave of emo and even a fifth (you see, now and then, critics talking about seven waves), but it’s returned to more niche appeal; the emo being made today harks back to the nineties more than to the early two-thousands.
At the same time, emo DNA is everywhere in the mainstream. There’s a whole subgenre of hip-hop that pairs samples of emo songs with moody lyrics about depression, suicide, relationship woe, and substance abuse. You can hear the genre’s influence in the intimate, diaristic lyrics of Phoebe Bridgers and in Olivia Rodrigo’s scorched-earth odes to post-breakup emotional extremities. Taylor Swift’s newly rerecorded version of her 2010 album, “Speak Now,” features collaborations with Fall Out Boy and Hayley Williams, of Paramore; in a tweet, Swift identified the emo titans as “the artists who I feel influenced me most powerfully” as a teen-age lyricist. Swift’s love of melodrama and wordplay are pretty emo, as is the sense she cultivates that, in listening to her music, you’re following the story of her life, building a bridge between her psychic peaks and valleys, and your own.
Payne never identifies himself as an emo fan, let alone a partisan of any particular wave, but much of what his book offers is standard fan service. There are firsthand accounts about how X singer met Y guitarist; about the epic group house in Jersey where everyone hung out; about early shows in crowded residential basements or veterans’ halls; and about magical nights animated by a sense of excitement (extra detectable in retrospect, of course), coursing between the band and audience, that something was happening. At times, the book has the feel of nothing so much as an emo song, one that celebrates the possibility of a maligned, angsty outsider eventually triumphing over the skeptics, haters, and cool kids. It helped me identify, in emo music, a force I’ve always sensed but never been able to name: the drive of young people to take their thing and, through the raw application of effort, make it as big as possible. Even if emo became, in its most popular manifestations, a lucrative, punk-flavored commodity—music of the mainstream, soundtrack of the mall—the songs are still marked by the intensity of this drive, which aligns with the intensity of the emotions in play. The music is cheering for itself, and it’s hard not to cheer along.
More than once, though, the book’s implicit commitment to a triumphalist narrative produces a blind spot. The most obvious one has to do with emo and women. There is, by now, a whole genre of essays, inaugurated by the critic Jessica Hopper’s oft-cited “Emo: Where the Girls Aren’t,” about the plight of the female emo fan. Multiple generations of women have written about their experience of being drawn in by the music, the vibe, and the punk promise of community among outsiders—only to end up being treated, at shows, like unserious interlopers or sex objects, and realizing, sooner or later, how many of the lyrics they were singing along to cast them as either Madonnas or whores, and sometimes in violent terms. In Saves the Day’s “Rocks Tonic Juice Magic,” from their 1999 album “Through Being Cool,” Chris Conley sings, of an ex-lover:
The overwhelming maleness of emo, and especially the third wave, is mentioned, but only glancingly. For a book that makes a great deal out of emo lyrics’ special relationship to emotionality, there’s curiously little discussion of lyrics at all, and none of the flattening, aggrieved scorn they so often spat in women’s direction. We hear a lot about the photo shoot for the “Through Being Cool” cover—the band members sitting, isolated and awkward, on a couch during a houseparty—but next to nothing about the album’s lyrics.
This absence has its most absurd manifestation in the book’s treatment of Brand New, another band that consistently shunned the emo label. Jesse Lacey, the group’s front man, criticized the genre for its excessive focus on one particular story: in his words,“I was hurt by someone else.” In 2017, Lacey was accused of serial sexual predation by multiple young women, at least one of whom he’d interacted with when she was a minor. Lacey issued a vague apology, and the band cancelled an upcoming tour; they haven’t been heard from since. Payne mentions these facts in his own narration, but if he asked any of his musician interviewees about them or about the broader context they reflect—numerous other emo artists have faced harassment allegations—he doesn’t say so or include their answers. Nor does he mention the Brand New song “Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis,” in which Lacey sings unambiguously from the perspective of a date rapist.
When Payne’s interviewees do bring up women, it’s often as a data point in the third wave’s dramatic rise: more girls are showing up to concerts, more girls are buying T-shirts, more girls are buying the albums. It sometimes feels like an oblique defense of the genre: “Hey, girls liked it, too!” By not digging deeper or pushing any of his interview subjects to do the same, Payne forecloses the possibility of a more interesting book, one that would see emo’s biggest players giving their perspective on how a musical moment notionally built on male emotional vulnerability, and with a devoted female fan base, could also be a home for sexist exclusion and violence.
Inevitably, the people Payne talked to get around to speculating about why emo’s third wave took off so explosively. It is suggested that the third wave filled a void left after the cultural exhaustion with grunge. The possibility is raised that emo was a perfect fit with the early file-sharing era, in which the output of local scenes could travel quickly across the country to people newly comfortable with listening to music alone at their computers, where perhaps it was possible to entertain new modes of feeling. That all seems plausible.
Finally, there’s the recurring suggestion that emo spoke to a post-9/11 mood of confusion and doom, especially among young people with formative memories of the attacks. “It was kind of inappropriate to have party music as the background to two wars and probably the deadliest terrorist attack in American history,” Buddy Nielsen, the singer of Senses Fail, said. “The response was music that captured the energy of the youth, which was this fucked-upon world we’re living in. . . . In 2008, there’s a generation of kids that may not remember 9/11 in the same way, and it switches to a different style of music that reflects the zeitgeist.”
It’s not outlandish to suggest a connection between post-9/11 American life and emo. But 9/11, the wars that followed, and politics appeared in emo songs only rarely. (One exception was the early My Chemical Romance song “Skylines and Turnstiles,” with its references to “broken city sky like butane on my skin” and “steel corpses” that “stretch out towards an ending sun, scorched and black.”) If the genre reflected some specifically post-9/11 mood, it also embodied a national inability to speak with any specificity about where that mood came from, especially in any cultural enterprise where a significant amount of money was on the table. But dissecting these dynamics feels at odds with the overwhelmingly celebratory approach of “Where Are Your Boys Tonight?” Payne’s interview subjects are mostly boosters of the genre they participated in; they’re invested in a story where emo succeeded because it was a vessel for the direct delivery of raw truth. They’re not looking to tell a more complicated story, and that makes “Where Are Your Boys Tonight?” less than satisfying as cultural analysis.
“Kids grow up, they do,” Payne writes in his afterword, and that’s an explanation as credible as any other about why the emo bubble burst. It was, for a while, the teen-agers’ music; then the teens got older, and the next teens down the line wanted their own thing, the way teens always do. Meanwhile, the ex-teens found new identities and new music to match. Payne addresses a theoretical young person aging out of emo: “You might start denying you ever liked My Chemical Romance and telling people at college parties your favorite band has always, always been Joy Division.”
