EMO IN THE '00s
Photo courtesy of RavenBlakh Photography
Coming of Age on MySpace
by Sam L. Barker
(December 2024)
The original wave of Emo, forged by Rites of Spring during the Revolution Summer of 1985, grew out of the hardcore scene of Washington DC. Frustrated with the genre's increasingly macho attitude, these bands sought to inject something more prosaic and thoughtful into their music. Writing songs that wilted and wandered rather than bashed into each other. Songs that were more nakedly, emotional. This trend would morph into the crisper sounds of '90's Emo, defined by bands such as Sunny Day Real Estate and Braid. Filtered through Grunge and taking cues from Indie and Alternative Rock, giving the genre a washed out, twinkly, at times ambient feeling. The success of these underground bands would lead to another evolution, third-wave Emo, '00's-Emo or most derisively "Hot Topic Emo." Starting roughly from Thursday's 2001 album Full Collapse, this mixture took the basis of the '90's and dunked an entire bottle of classic pop songwriting into the mix. It was comfortable with major labels and mainstream ambition. Inspiration was drawn from genres as diverse as Pop Punk, Metal, New Wave and Chamber Pop. All maverickly mixed and matched with the original Emo blueprint. This led to immense popular success and enduring popularity, with bands like My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco becoming household names.
Despite its success, '00's Emo still struggles to be seen as a respectable music genre, especially in the more serious corners of the music press. Contemporaneously, it was dismissed as image-focused, pretty boy nonsense, cynically acted for hormonal teenage girls. Set apart from respectable rock music- and without a hint of respectability or musical cred. Even now, as history and the era's enduring popularity has beaten this mindset into somewhat of a retreat, the default response is often to assign a "guilty pleasure" participation trophy, and move back into the critical comfort of indie obscurity.
But the '00's Emo scene was the scene I grew up in. Just as vital to me as the basement shows of the Midwest were to a generation of "real Emo" fans. My genre was wide and had a profound impact on music culture, on youth culture in general. You're all living in the world it helped build. The kids who grew up on MySpace, Livejournal, chunky computers and wonky hair straighteners have a story to tell too.
Online Songs
'00's Emo was defined by the internet. Napster and broadband. The world-wide-web. CDs and magazines still existed, but by the start of the Millennium, the real music discovery was happening online. With faster, more consistent internet, regular streaming and downloading became a genuine prospect. Bands could release tracks for free, fans could download and share with wild abandon, legally and illegally. Totally blowing the doors off the traditional music industry.
MySpace launched in 2003, the year before My Chemical Romance's breakthrough Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, as the first social media platform that really took off. The simple set-up, giving each user a profile and letting them customise it with HTML while adding other users as friends, created limitless possibilities for self-expression and made it a pillar of youth culture. And Emo kids, eager to express their love of the music, and build community around it, were some of its most enthusiastic users. This generation could now create and police their own communities in a dynamic, multiplying way. Zines and mailing lists were able to sustain thin lines of communication, forums and IRC allowed opinion sharing. But with MySpace, PureVolume and Livejournal, fans could be immersed in entirely fan-created worlds. Reacting to new songs, videos, photos, rumours, but from within a high-context network of peers who all knew the discography and backstory. A network that was free to join by anyone at any time. Learn the ropes and jump in. They became parallel universes, sucking in new members and warping the genre in real time.
In 2006, the year of My Chemical Romance's era-defining The Black Parade, Myspace became the most-visited website in the United States, surpassing even Google. Other genres moved online when the avenue became available, third-wave Emo grew online.
Testosterone Boys and Harlequin Girls
The online nature of the genre lent itself to a cavalier, expressive nature- both for artists and fans. The fashion, skinny jeans, band-shirts, bracelets and floppy fringes, is well documented and rightly regarded as one of the iconic "looks" of the decade. But let's go deeper. Musically, there was a strand of queerness in '00's Emo which has a clear string back to the sort of "is he, isn't he?" ambiguity of '80's Indie and the bisexual pop star.
Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance, a comic-book artist by trade, sang in character studies, crossing all types of motivations, genders and sexualities and ending up with an ambivalence open to feverish interpretation. Being both the strident, black-hearted killer and a sissy prison victim within the same set. "You should have raised a baby girl, I should have been a better son." Not to be outdone, Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz bashfully declared, "Oh, don't mind me, I'm watching / You two from the closet / Wishing to be the friction in your jeans" (fanlore whispers say in the demo it's HIS jeans, enough to make even Morrissey blush). Doubling down, on Thnks fr th Mmrs, Wentz declares a certain guy, "tastes like you, only sweeter". Meanwhile, Panic At The Disco! offered a soft, theatrical form of Moulin Rouge sexuality. Getting sensitive with the listener asking, "Is it still me that makes the sweat, am I the one you think about in bed?" It wasn't just that this music was queerly ambiguous, but that it was ambiguous while selling millions upon millions of copies. Reaching deep into suburbia, to people who didn't before know that music could help their questioning selves.
This kind of transgression would also spill into the real world, with Gerard Way and guitarist Frank Iero performing illicit kissing routines on stage, with the initial aim of pissing off lumpen Hardcore fans in the audience, morphing into a kind of clunky but well-meaning gay-solidarity. This performed its task admirably, perhaps too well that it lit a fire under the fanbase.
"Shipping," romantically and/or sexually pairing band members together in works of fan-fiction or fan-art, was a mainstay of the seedier sides of the online Emo fandom. Chastised as both artless exploitation of real people, and lauded as an example of women safely exploring their sexuality in a misogynistic world. In a certain light, the fangirls of the Emo fandom got their revenge on the macho world of rock. Pushing the wandering eye of sexuality onto the skinny Emo boys, performing for female titillation and freeing themselves, for a brief moment, from the strictures of society.
In retrospect, I understand the criticisms of the culture, but remain sympathetic. This was the Bush II years and online discourse was crude and basic. We lacked the sophistication of the modern web, with its therapy speak and academia-borrowed discourse. So people tried to express and explore in basic, blunt, sometimes shocking ways. Many Emo fans first discovered their own LGBTQ+ nature in the deep dark trenches of the Emo shipping wars. Or saw parts of themselves and their desires in the stories and artwork of two people they'd never met, but deeply adored. It might be ugly yes, but pioneering self-expression usually is.
7 Minutes in Heaven (Atavan Halen)
This spirit of openness and brazen self-expression also allowed Emo to talk openly and directly about the struggles of mental health. Perhaps like no other mainstream genre before it. Bands like Say Anything named anxiety, depression and social isolation directly. My Chemical Romance's early years were a blur of alcohol, self loathing and fantasy escape. Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz wrote of his own self-harm and prescription drug abuse. Directly confronting these issues became a stereotype of the genre, something mocked and laughed at by supposedly more sophisticated music listeners. More sincere critics might point out that the lyrics could border on sensational or even glamourising. But ultimately, Emo's crudity armed its fans with the words they needed to make sense of their own lives- to name, for themselves, the problems they were facing and in doing so make them concrete, solid and senseful. Ultimately, the message was often, "yes if you are depressed, you're ill, but you're not broken, reach out for help." Gerard Way would scream as such nightly from the stage like a therapist preacher.
This also led to the emergence of scene-focused charity To Write Love on Her Arms, educating and connecting with fans of the genre and wider society suffering from mental illness, addiction and self-harm. Mainstream culture has now caught up with Emo's earnest mental-health awareness, with Fortune 500 corporations hiring HR departments fluent in therapy-speak. But Emo first armed a generation of teenagers with the words to speak for themselves, and those kids took that forward with them into the adult world which we now live in.
Existentialism on Prom Night
The position of women in Emo is worthy of further interrogation. In her empathetic 2003 essay, writer Jessica Hopper labelled the scene "Where the girls aren't." Lamenting the one-way traffic of young female fans enamoured with all-male bands. "So now I watch these girls at emo shows more than I ever do the band. I watch them sing along, to see what parts they freak out over. I wonder if this does it for them, if seeing these bands, these dudes on stage, resonates and inspires them to want to pick up a guitar or drum sticks." Even if those bands were sometimes clever, progressive even, they were still all dudes.
Paramore's breakthrough in 2005 was an answer to this. Charismatic frontwoman Hayley Williams pushing the band through to mainstream success in a way no other female-fronted Emo band had before. Paramore didn't reinvent the wheel on their initial releases, but they did reverse its direction. Williams spat venom at love rivals, spilled her worried heart and jeered for her own successes like the best of the bros. "Woah, I never meant to brag / But I got him where I want him now." She projected a sense of thrill and sincerity that, while still problematic by Hayley's own admission, at least gave the boys a taste of their own medicine and the girls someone to cheer for.
Your Sword vs My Dagger
Paramore have gone on to out-last many of their Emo peers. But Williams has mixed feelings about the era. She seems conscious of her impact, and the legions of fans who look up to her. But is also frank that it wasn't always a great time to be a women in rock music. That the promises of Emo as an accepting, open scene were sometimes not kept.
And this is another important truth to admit and understand. The scene was not perfect. It had corners of deep progressivism, but still suffered from the structural issues of all rock scenes. While the best bands of the genre attempted to explore prosaic and progressive angles, too many mediocre bands swaggered around with unexamined attitudes to women and fans. Lyrics often focused on blunt boy-girl dynamics. With a broken hearted boy at the mercy of a tyrannical girl. The scene could be queer at times, but it had yet to shake off heteronormativity entirely. Most of this was no worse than the default or generic rock band, but no better either.
Some, like Senses Fail, would take this axis to hysterical, even murderous heights on 2004's Let It Enfold You. With tales of bloody revenge against cheating and mean women. Senses Fail would mature away from this, as many of the bands in the scene did as they aged. But they weren't unique in their ugly rage and it doesn't make pretty listening decades on. Hurt people hurt people and sometimes they just make really petty music.
Even darker is the world of accusations of abuse and mistreatment of fans which have risen against certain band and scene members. With the most notable being Jesse Lacey of Brand New. Accusations surfaced in 2017 of him sexually exploiting underage fans in the 2000's. Pierce the Veil, Simple Plan, New Found Glory and numerous other smaller acts have also had band members accused of mistreatment. Warped Tour had a laissez faire attitude to safeguarding. A sort of "let the kids do what they want" misguidedly imported from its punk rock roots. But this extended to inexcusably letting bands like the execrable Blood on the Dance Floor continue to play despite numerous allegations against them. The problems of the scene were clearly systemic, assuredly with plenty of blind eyes turned and cases ignored, until the victims finally broke through to some form of justice years later.
Thank You For The Venom
Yet undeniably a generation still feels at home in these spaces. They made us, good and bad. We've grown up now, and we know the downsides and fuck-ups of the genre. The heights of the greatest albums and pioneering fan-spaces the lows of unexamined privilege and exploitation. I, like Hayley Williams, dislike the often uncritical, deeply rose-tinted nature of a lot of the Emo revival movement- the endless copy/paste memes and cruise-ship mentality of the festivals. But underneath that is something deeply real. As real as your Woodstock or your Seattle Sound or your London '77. I don't care if you think the boys look stupid or the girls are annoying. It was like a furnace, it forged something beautiful, but it was also hot, spitting- occasionally dangerous. We can accept both halves and move forward, but let's take it seriously. In all my writing on this genre, that's all I've ever asked. If this is what you want then, fire at will.
