Scenestory: Teen Girl Squad
“We’d see ourselves in a magazine and it was like, ‘Again?’ Everyone must have been so sick of us.”
Previously.
Nike is one of those companies that seems constantly embroiled in scandals. Years before the sportswear-peddler became a player in national politics and international human-rights cases, it sponsored a three-day East Coast tour called “Major Threat” to promote a new line of skateboarding shoes. The promotional material featured a reworked version of the logo and album cover art used by Minor Threat — which you might remember as the precursor to the band first ever labeled “emo.”
Naturally, Minor Threat’s Ian Mackaye got big mad. In a statement, he wrote:
To longtime fans and supporters of Minor Threat and Dischord, this must seem like just another familiar example of mainstream corporations attempting to assimilate underground culture to turn a buck. However, it is more disheartening to us to think that Nike may be successful in using this imagery to fool kids, just beginning to become familiar with skate culture, underground music and D.I.Y. ideals, into thinking that the general ethos of this label, and Minor Threat in particular, can somehow be linked to Nike’s mission.
While Nike scrambled to put together a “sorry, I’m sorry, I’m trying to remove it” response, a much bigger tour also sponsored by a skate-shoe company was making its way across the Midwest.
It was the summer of 2005, and all videos were filmed on a Motorola RAZR, judging by that YouTube embed. Paramore, fronted by 16-year-old Hayley Williams, was playing their first tour. The lead singer of the post-hardcore band From First to Last was hopping onto other bands’ tour buses to play video games using the username Skrillex — the name he’d be performing under six years later, when he won his first three Grammy awards as a solo artist. Meanwhile, the biggest bands on tour, the Dropkick Murphys and My Chemical Romance included, were selling truckloads of merchandise every day.
“The only band that had more items for sale than us was the Murphys. They used Warped as a warehouse sale,” My Chemical Romance merch manager Kate Truscott once joked.
The 2005 Vans Warped Tour saw its biggest crowds ever for the traveling festival’s tenth anniversary, with 700,000 tickets sold. It was the only year the tour ever turned a profit on tickets alone, but the real money was in merchandise sales.
Warped Tour was founded on a compromise: bring punk bands to areas they wouldn’t normally be able to visit, with accessible ticket prices thanks to corporate sponsorships. Commerce became integral to the Warped Tour experience almost immediately.
“When you see bands changing pop culture, you see fans embracing their style,” Matt Watts, guitarist for the pop-punk band The Starting Line, told Billboard magazine in an oral history of the tour.
It was the summer of “a more sensitive, precocious, fashion-focused brand of punk,” according to journalist Chris Payne in the same oral history. And no one else on Warped Tour that year had the stylish impact that Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance did.
Perception is nine-tenths of credibility
Despite Chicago’s rich music history (it’s hometown to artists as diverse as blues great Muddy Waters and alt-rock band Smashing Pumpkins), the hardcore scene located in the greater Chicago area never got the attention that the East- and West-Coast scenes did. At least, it didn’t get that much national attention outside of the long shadow of Fall Out Boy.
The same money that flowed into the Bay Area after Green Day and Nirvana hit it big showed up in Chicago too, but the Chicagoland hardcore scene stayed relatively insular. “People don’t do this to be cool or to start a band that they think is going to get big,” according to the documentary No Delusions. “We have to do this because this is all we have: hot dogs and hardcore.”
Plus, if you tour, it’s harder to get to major cities across the sprawling Midwest than on the East Coast. “Fall Out Boy was damned by convention and geography to swing for the fences,” Drew Millard wrote for Vice in 2013.
Social media (in particular dear, departed Myspace, where the band once had over a million followers) played a huge role in building Fall Out Boy’s audience. The internet made the band’s music accessible to people regardless of geography, and it also let fans feel like they were in a more intimate relationship with the band — a dynamic that would later become a necessity for social media influencers.
At some point after the band’s formation in 2001, Fall Out Boy turned into the Pete Wentz show. And I say “at some point” when what I mean is “literally right away.” “Before he was Pete Wentz, ‘Rock Star,’ people just paid attention to him,” Fall Out Boy singer/guitarist Patrick Stump said in 2009.
After playing Warped Tour 2004 on one of the side stages, Fall Out Boy got booked to play the following year on the tour’s main stage. Although they didn’t pull huge crowds in 2004, the audiences were so engaged that it seemed like a safe bet.
That bet paid off. In April 2005, Fall Out Boy released the first single off From Under The Cork Tree, “Sugar, We’re Goin’ Down,” and the rest is history. “Sugar” didn’t chart immediately, but it would go on to be the band’s most enduring and recognizable hit. (For example, Alternative Press published an article this April, a full 15 years after the song debuted, about how you can play “Sugar” in the newly released video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons.)
“Sugar” is a rejected-love song in the same vein as The Killers’ equally classic “Mr. Brightside,” but other songs on the album, with cumbersome titles like “Sophomore Slump or Comeback of the Year” showcase an anxiety about success and fame that would go on to define the band’s later work.
“Fall Out Boy is the main topic of Fall Out Boy songs,” Sasha Frere-Jones wrote in a New Yorker review of the band’s third album, Infinity on High. Even highly critical reviewers remarked on the fact that the band’s unusual dynamic (Pete Wentz wrote the lyrics and singer Patrick Stump brought them to life) made it work. Frere-Jones again: “Wentz’s lyrics can be cynical and sour…but Stump sings them on bended knee, seemingly incapable of insincerity.”
In 2007, the year Infinity on High came out, Pete Wentz showed up in a hilariously infantilizing feature about the boyfriends of the rich and famous in Vanity Fair — alongside Britney Spears’ ex, Kevin Federline, and a string of Lindsay Lohan beaus. At the time, he was dating Ashlee Simpson, a partnership that author Nancy Jo Sales says benefitted both parties by giving her music-industry credibility and expanding his band’s share of the tween market.
The full article is some of the meanest but also funniest shit I’ve ever read.
“They keep telling me I’m a mogul,” Wentz tells me.
“Are you a mogul?” I ask.
“That’s what they keep telling me,” he says.
His publicist at Island–Def Jam already told me, “He’s a mogul,” concerned that Pete not be equated with other young men who are not moguls.
Celebrity culture was at its gaudy peak, which Fall Out Boy referenced/parodied in the music video for “Thnks fr th Mmrs.” (Also featuring early-career Kim Kardashian, product placement, and chimpanzees.)
Around the same time, Pete Wentz’s fashion line, Clandestine Industries, became a part of the marketing campaign for Infinity on High by collab-ing with the high-end fashion house DKNY and the mall store Aeropostale.
Which is possibly the worst thing you could do as a former hardcore kid.
Historically, fashion in hardcore scenes could be considered a response to punk fashion being co-opted by the mainstream. Instead of bright colors and patterns and spiky hair, hardcore fashion looked more like old-school rock attire, which borrowed from the typical working-class wardrobe: blue jeans, T-shirts, leather jackets. The symbiotic relationship between bands like Fall Out Boy and the commercial fashion industry rankled the people who considered those bands posers to the point that some started referring to the bands as “fashioncore.”
“Let’s just end this, okay? The ‘fashion’ ‘core’ kids look stupid,” an anonymous poster wrote on Punknews.org in 2003. “White studded belts, painted finger nails, girl jeans, and stupid ass haircuts.”
Researchers writing about subculture throughout the ‘90s and 2000s often argued that this vitriol for posers is partially rooted in the idea that consumerism and vanity is inherently feminine. I’m not 100% sold on the “women be shopping” argument, but it would be easier to dismiss it if the most vocal haters were able to criticize the commercial co-opting of punk without zeroing in on things like nail polish and “girl jeans.” Meanwhile, there are far more serious issues at stake that have nothing to do with what someone’s outfit looks like (even though we can confidently say in retrospect that the outfits were, in fact, bad).
The girl jeans are not the issue here; the music industry is, because any choices made within that industry have to be justified by profit, which benefits the industry and not a community.
Some, like Brett Gurewitz of California punk band Bad Religion, saw commercialization as a type of democratization, bringing the movement to people who wouldn’t otherwise have access to it. “The ‘punk rock is sacred’ thing is dangerous,” he said, “because punk rock cannot be about elitism.”
On the other hand, American hardcore punk had always been about building community in a country that had no real opposition or alternative to capitalist industry. From that perspective, what was happening to punk echoes what happened to rock music in the 1970s after the demise of the leftist movements of the 1960s. In the words of author Ryan Moore: “Divorced from movements for social change and insulated within a massively profitable enterprise, there were no checks on rock music’s inflated sense of self-importance, but also no hopes that it could help create a better world.”
It’s not a fashion statement, it’s a concept album
My Chemical Romance was lambed in New Jersey, a part of the chaotic fallout of 9/11, and was helped through the baby steps of becoming a real band by earlier emo breakouts like Thursday and The Used. Even before playing Warped Tour for the first time in 2004, touring netted the band its first fans and a “love it or hate it” reputation, according to a semi-authorized biography of the band by music journalist Tom Bryant. The band’s first booking agent, Matt Galle, said, “The goal was to keep them away from home and on the road because their live show was so good. They were winning everyone over.”
The way that people who were around in those early days talk about My Chemical Romance is remarkably similar to the way that people talked about Rites of Spring.
“This was the band, this was it, and it was going to take off forever and be the greatest thing on earth,” singer and guitarist Guy Picciotto said after Rites of Spring broke up in 1986.
Describing the energy at My Chemical Romance’s first shows, guitarist and non-founding member Frank Iero said, “You just knew something important was happening. The band was just too good for something not to happen.”
Well, one of them was on the right track.
After signing to Reprise Records, a subsidiary of music giant WMG, touring and selling merch became a way for My Chemical Romance to justify and recoup the cost of its spare-no-expense artistic antics, such as the million-dollar WWII-themed music video for “The Ghost of You.” Like everything about My Chemical Romance’s visual and philosophical impact, the video was largely guided by frontman, BFA-in-cartooning-haver, and Jack White look-alike, Gerard Way.
Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, the band’s 2004 major-label debut, became a cultural moment thanks to Warped Tour and to MTV’s music video countdown show Total Request Live. In 2005, Fall Out Boy’s “Sugar, We’re Goin’ Down” video often shared the screen with My Chemical Romance’s “Helena” while the bands were sharing a tour stage.
After winning over a global audience, the My Chemical Romance team rented out a haunted mansion in LA to make a classic but deeply cursed record about death that tried to kill the band during the production and wouldn’t stop for years afterward. And you know who produced it? Friend of the newsletter and Jawbreaker-ruiner Rob Cavallo, who had also just produced Green Day’s American Idiot. It’s all comin’ full circle, baybee.
(To be clear, because apparently people “can’t tell” when I’m “being sarcastic,” Rob Cavallo didn’t ruin Jawbreaker and Dear You has bangers.)
This is the album that gave the world the anthemic and eternally meme-able “Welcome to the Black Parade,” which you might notice sounds, looks, and acts nothing like Rites of Spring or Jawbreaker or American Football or even Fall Out Boy.
Reviews compared the high-concept album to David Bowie, Queen, Pink Floyd, Iron Maiden — even Meatloaf. It’s a big, big, arena-big rock album. A campy, dark, and just super fucking weird rock album, but a rock album nonetheless. It required a lot of money to pull off; a second music video was tacked onto the shoot for “Welcome to the Black Parade” to justify the expense, and the band toured almost nonstop after the album came out, bringing along seven trucks of stage equipment and four buses for the crew.
I’m only barely exaggerating when I say that album tried to murder the band. Not only did MCR almost break up several times during the album’s production, but the music video shoots and the multi-year, confetti- and pyrotechnics-studded tour were plagued by inconvenient illness and near-fatal injury. Maybe the Paramour Estate, where The Black Parade was recorded, really is haunted, but it’s more likely that multiple years of a grueling tour schedule was just too draining and there was also simply nowhere else to go.
In the words of John Mulaney: “We’ve all gone too big too fast and then run out of room. We’ve all made a ‘happy birthday’ sign.”
There was also mainstream backlash by parents and journalists that focused on “black clothing and hair, depressing music, and, in extreme cases, self-mutilation and cutting” the way that the Satanic Panic of the 1980s latched onto benign stuff like Dungeons and Dragons. The UK’s Daily Mail, the worst kind of tabloid, published multiple stories claiming that My Chemical Romance was a suicide cult that endangered children, and an ABC affiliate in Utah put together a broadcast package that claimed, “Happiness is a sin to emo culture.”
“Look out, you emos! The media finally heard about you, and they’re looking at you like you’re the next Columbine killers,” Newsday contributor Rafer Guzmán wrote in response to the panic, a column that I could only find reproduced in full on a busted-ass Blogspot blog. “The whole ‘story’ is an outdated throwback to the early days of punk, when the mass media vilified that subculture as a kind of alien germ infecting America’s youth.”
Punk, of course, was spawned in response to the demise of the optimistic spirit of ‘60s counterculture. Ryan Moore describes the movement as a kind of positive nihilism: “If nothing was true, then everything was possible.” Hand-wringing over punk culture didn’t do anything about record industry excess or bring back the New Left, just like anti-occult fear-mongering in the ‘80s didn’t fix the unease caused by the highly publicized nightmares like the Chicagoland Tylenol murders. The backlash against emo was similarly useless at doing, um, anything, and the attempt to stir up controversy seems especially flaccid compared to previous moral panics.
I have a suspicion that My Chemical Romance (and others, but MCR was the standard-bearer) got labeled emo because of a convergent evolution. Original-recipe emo was so called because it was more melodic and introspective than other hardcore music; new-millennium emo became a thing because these bands had a sound that wasn’t easily categorized as pop-punk or alt-rock. People who had heard the word emo but weren’t aware of the full history applied it to bands like My Chemical Romance because it sounded right, despite them having only the barest relationship to the earlier stuff.
A misinformed appropriation? Yeah, but the instinct is the same. And none of that changes the fact that for a generation of kids who are now adults, emo is synonymous with a G note played on the piano, a la “Welcome to the Black Parade.”
Next time: Damn, this blew up. Check out my Soundcloud.
Offline sources
“American Punk: The Relations between Punk Rock, Hardcore, and American Culture” by Gerfried Ambrosch
The True Lives of My Chemical Romance by Tom Bryant
“Messageboard Confessional: Online Discourse and the Production of the ‘Emo Kid’” by M. Douglas Daschuk
“Identity Crisis: The Dialectics of Rock, Punk, and Grunge” by Perry Grossman
Sells Like Teen Sprit: Music, Youth Culture, and Social Crisis by Ryan Moore
“Hardcore: Subculture American Style” by Susan Willis
Header collage images from Wikimedia Commons: Warped Tour pass, Fall Out Boy 2007 tour logo, Fall Out Boy concert, My Chemical Romance pyrotechnics, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge vinyl.