The Scenestory so far: Introduction, HarDCore, Boiling frogs.
At the turn of the millennium, emo went mainstream.
The 2009 film Jennifer’s Body captures that period in fiction, using a pop-punk soundtrack to underscore a story about sex, murder, teen-angst bullshit, Myspace, and low-rise jeans. Jennifer, a popular cheerleader possessed by a demon after a disingenuous indie band botches an attempt to sacrifice her to Satan, is even introduced laying on her bed under a collage of Fall Out Boy posters.
Later, mid-sacrifice, the fictional band’s frontman pauses to bemoan the state of the industry at the end of the 2000s:
“Do you know how hard it is to make it as an indie band these days? There are so many of us, and we’re all so cute and it’s like if you don’t get on Letterman or some —— soundtrack, you’re screwed, okay? Satan is our only hope. We’re working with the beast now. And we’ve got to make a really big impression on him.”
The cultural shift between the ‘90s and the ‘00s was intense, in emo music and in the world at large. Not only is the emo music of the 2000s a different beast than what came before, it’s also much better documented — which means a lot more information to sift through. That’s why I’m taking this edition of Scenestory to zoom out for a look at the bigger picture.
In 2000-2001, bands like Jimmy Eat World and Dashboard Confessional broke into the commercial, mainstream music industry. They brought a flurry of media attention to emo music and fashion — a vague, fluid concept that was never meant to be defined.
Outside of being attached to a particular band or scene, the term “emo” had primarily spread as an insult. Norman Brannon, former guitarist in the ‘90s emo band Texas Is The Reason, wrote last year about being hardcore in the ‘80s and compared “emo” to a homophobic slur, a way to police “unacceptable” behavior:
“Being called ‘emo’ was akin to being called ‘soft,’ and that alone was the kind of thing that got you beat down on the Bowery right before somebody stole your Doc Martens. But the derision with which the word was used — the implication of its very tonality — suggested that “emo” had also become an updated shorthand for ‘——.’ You’d often hear people say things like, ‘What are you, fucking emo?’ We all knew what that meant.”
In 2004, the same year that Dashboard Confessional’s song “Vindicated” made it onto the Spider-Man 2 soundtrack, an anonymous user posted on a message board on Punknews.org, “Kids these days are getting blindsided by all this pop-post-hardcore-emo crap that it’s like the explosion of records/pop punk of 5 years ago, but this time it’s on major labels and really starting to ruin anything left of the ‘scene.’”
Now that emo was a part of mainstream parlance, it had to mean something, right? In 2002, veteran music journalist Mara Schwartz Kuge gave us a (tongue-in-cheek) guide to emo for Seventeen magazine as part of a larger package about the genre.
Boy, did the Punknews posters hate that. “What next?” one wrote in a comment archived in the Berkeley Journal of Sociology. “Are they gonna throw Rancid and NOFX on the cover and send their legions of screaming girls to those shows too?”
This wasn’t the first time that Seventeen, the first magazine to cater to teenage girls, publicized a punk-adjacent music genre. In 1993, for example, an article by Nina Malkin about the riot grrrl movement was published under the headline “It’s a Grrrl Thing: Punk rock, explosive politics and no boys allowed.” Although the emo guide recommended clothing brands that no self-respecting punk would have anything to do with, like Calvin Klein, Schwartz Kuge wrote in her article:
Some [emo bands], like Jimmy Eat World and Thursday, have already been snatched up by major labels eager to make emo the next big thing. We kinda hope it's not. If this stuff sells a gazillion copies, we'll have to hide from the copycat bands looking to cash in.
A serious subheading for a serious discussion
Like their predecessors, the emo bands of the 2000s mostly rose to prominence through local independent music scenes that strived to be a more authentic alternative to mainstream music. By the 21st century, authenticity was something you could outwardly perform with the right dress and the right behavior. Calvin Klein might not have been authentically alternative, but cultural goods like a rare band shirt bought at a hardcore show helped define a social group and legitimize its position in a cool-kid hierarchy.
Many of the ‘00s emos were reviled by the indie scenes that they grew out of. Like a Black Flag sticker on a Cadillac, major-label contracts were a sign that the people who nurtured alternative music didn’t have ownership over it anymore. In the ‘80s, according to author Ross Haenfler, “The scene was small enough that it felt like a community; we believed we were part of an incredible underground secret society that most people had no idea existed.” By 2005, however, “instead of making fun of punks, many of the cool kids are becoming punks.”
Faced with conservative austerity in the ‘80s and an influx of exploitative industry money in the ‘90s, it makes sense that the alternative underground would develop an antipathy to posers and outsiders — but that protective tribalism also fostered a frat-like culture that was hostile to women, marginalized men who didn’t fit into acceptable forms of masculinity, and was especially exploitative of teenage girls, who are still frequently treated like a sexual commodity. (That linked article is from July.)
Emo music and the people who created it often fell under that second category, subject to homophobic attacks from both the alternative scene and mainstream media for acting too girly and even just for having a lot of female fans. (Make that make sense.) However, that doesn’t mean that the purveyors of emo created a safe environment for female fans or female artists, or that they were interested in challenging the harmful status quo.
“The punk scene is supposed to be a safe space for those who feel different,” a female music fan told Alternative Press in 2015. “But it seems to only make room for sad white boys.”
Sometimes it feels like the music world is uniquely rife with abuse of power, but that’s not exactly true. Any industry that lionizes its success stories will create the imbalances that make it easy for power to be abused. The same is true of the journalism industry and the movie industry and the book industry and the restaurant industry and probably the underwater basket-weaving industry.
Does loving art necessarily mean supporting the artist? If I’m drawn to art that reflects my immature, dirtbag-y, self-pitying side, do I have a responsibility to not promote that art when I know that, to the artist, behaving immaturely and dirtbag-ly involves harming other people? Am I, personally, propping up the great man theory of history by framing this series around a handful of bands to the exclusion of the many, many other people who shaped the history of music?
I don’t have the answers to any of these questions. I don’t know if there even are definitive answers to any of them, but I’ve been asking myself these questions throughout writing this series. While I’ve chosen not to write about some bands, like Brand New, specifically because members of those bands have been credibly accused of sexual assault or other forms of abuse, there’s others that fall into a maybe-could have-might have gray area. It’s hard to know what to do with that, and it’s also hard to make peace with the fact that I still really fucking love Brand New. Like, a lot. I guess that’s just something I have to deal with forever.
While I’m still writing about things that happened more than a decade ago that sometimes fall into that gray area, I try to find some kind of moral grounding by remembering how much has changed in the last ten years. For the better, mostly, I guess, except for, you know, the pandemic, and all that other stuff.
Which brings me back to Jennifer’s Body. It’s not about processes of control in the music industry, but the plot revolves around the complex give-and-take of power and insecurity. The two main, female characters are wise, savvy, and casually cruel, but the fact that Jennifer can get anything she wants at her high school doesn’t protect her from being victimized by a touring rock band.
At the same time, her victimization doesn’t stop her from continuing to terrorize fellow students when she has demonic powers on her side — innocent kids who still treat each other callously, policing each others’ relationships and lifestyle choices and throwing around slurs like there’s a going-out-of-business sale at the slur store. It’s all born out of insecurity, just people in pain who have been given no emotional safety net reproducing the hostile culture around them with no awareness of the fact that it doesn’t have to be like this.
Man, growing up in the 2000s sucked.
At least the bops were great.
I was going to save this little plug/call-to-action for next time because there’s somehow less than six degrees of separation between what I’ll talk about in the next Scenestory and the USPS’s current troubles, but I don’t know how long it’ll take me to write that and I am very worried about the postal service. Not the emo-adjacent supergroup The Postal Service, but the actual US postal service.
Unfortunately the most any of us lowly non-politicians can do is bug our elected officials to provide stimulus funding to the USPS through the HEROES bill and the Postal Service Emergency Assistance Act. And would you look at that, the American Postal Workers Union even has online form letters you can use.
Next time: I'm not dead, I only dress that way.
Offline sources
“Messageboard Confessional: Online Discourse and the Production of the ‘Emo Kid’” by M. Douglas Daschuk
Straight Edge: Clean-Living Youth, Hardcore Punk, and Social Change by Ross Haenfler
“The powers that be: Processes of control in ‘crew scene hardcore’” by Jeff Purchla
Header collage images from Wikimedia Commons (notebook paper and Seventeen magazine), Poakpong on Flickr, and tables from Straight Edge by Ross Haenfler.