Previously.
This is the last Scenestory, and we’ve almost caught up to the present day. Let’s jump right in, because we’ve already been here far too long.
I have a personal essay for you.
Stream used to mean water but words don’t mean those things anymore
I could have caught the last gasps of emo culture in the late 2000s, but I was too skittish and neurotic for music that heart-bearing. I listened to Top 40, and I listened to Top 40 from my parents’ time, and then I hit high school and realized that there was music out there that really, really resonated with me. I just had to find it.
Like most people who were teens at some point in the last 20 years, I found out about new music through social media — mostly Tumblr and 8tracks, the vampiric playlist-making website that has died and been resurrected so many times that I’ve lost count.
Like Napster before it, 8tracks trafficked in pirated music. In my personal experience, that meant downloading mp3s from low-quality YouTube lyric videos using a sketchy website that changed domains every few months and then uploading them to 8tracks, but you could also find rare demos, remixes, and live covers scattered around. It was kind of the last gasp of the pre-Spotify digital music wild west.
The amount of effort required to make a playlist on 8tracks made it the perfect place to discover emo the way people had been discovering emo since the ‘80s. The playlists were short and highly curated, and the human touch was obvious: They often grouped together related artists who were on the same niche label or artists with their direct influences. Basically, 8tracks could fulfill the role of a cool older sibling who can introduce you to The Clash if you didn’t have a cool older sibling who could introduce you to The Clash. The site also dropped me into the dark world of emo music like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff and not realizing he’s falling until he’s falling.
8tracks (as well as other music streaming platforms like Pandora) obviously lost the bulk of the market to Spotify, because it’s impossible to monetize a giant library of unlicensed music post-Metallica v. Napster, Inc. The Spotify behemoth, which I cheerfully participate in, has almost 300 million users worldwide, and the company made its bones by automating the process that goes into discovering new music.
Part of Spotify’s success is based on the fact that, using data provided by all those millions of users, the company has figured out when and why people listen to music. Playlists are organized into “Genres & Moods” under the desktop app’s “Browse” tab, with hip hop and pop sitting next to “focus” and “party.”
This is like the natural evolution of the way emo was understood once it escaped the confines of local hardcore scenes and went rampaging across the country — as a big mishmash of styles that evokes and reflects a particular mindset. Even beyond that, it’s also an example of the conflict that’s plagued emo since it started getting attention in the ‘90s, the struggle between art, commodification, and selling out.
I mean selling out in a very literal sense. The user behavior data analysis that lets Spotify offer listeners tone-appropriate playlists for any moment also serves a second purpose as a commodity that can be sold to advertisers, so any music made available on Spotify is a data point used to map the spectrum of human emotion for profit.
In the words of music journalist Liz Pelly:
In 1990, the Journal of Marketing published an article dubbed “Music, Mood and Marketing” that surveyed some of this history while bemoaning how “despite being a prominent promotional tool, music is not well understood or controlled by marketers.” The text outlines how “marketers are precariously dependent on musicians for their insight into the selection or composition of the ‘right’ music for particular situations.” This view of music as a burdensome means to a marketer’s end is absurd, but it’s also the logic that rules the current era of algorithmic music platforms. Unsurprisingly, this 1990 article aimed to overcome challenges for marketers by figuring out new ways to extract value from music that would be beyond the control of musicians themselves: studying the “behavioral effects” of music with a “special emphasis on music’s emotional expressionism and role as mood influencer” in order to create new forms of power and control.
Today, marketers want mood-related data more than ever, at least in part to fuel automated, personalized ad targeting.
That might be chilling to read, or you might not care.
Until very recently, the idea of working with corporate interests to maximize the profit you made from your art was grossly uncool, which is why bands like Jawbreaker were roasted by fans for signing to a major label and changing their sound. And it’s part of why the big emo bands of the 2000s were ostracized from the “real” punk community.
That’s not really the case anymore. “I don’t spend a moment worrying that my peers will feel deeply compromised by the prospect of landing a plum copywriting gig or Urban Outfitters approaching them,” Catherine Baab-Muguira wrote for Quartz in 2016. “They’re not naïve. They’re practical. My sense is that they don’t trust their employers anyway, which mitigates the danger of losing your soul to a corporation.”
For the most part, music fans recognize the economic realities that influence artists to join a major label or accept a brand sponsorship or otherwise bend to the whims of the market.
According to research conducted by Spotify itself, young consumers are less wedded to the idea of genre than their parents. They’re also less likely to participate in other traditional structures, like getting a job, getting married, buying a home, having 2.5 kids, and experiencing suburban malaise. Spotify’s research report frames this as consumer preference, but look around — people in the 18-34 demographic aren’t buying houses because they’re crushed by student loan debt, and the jobs they went to school for are concentrated in high-cost coastal cities.
Meanwhile, the available dollars in the music industry are being funneled to a few chart-topping acts (Spotify and Apple Music use a model that pays artists based on how many streams they get compared to the the most popular tracks, privileging the top artists). In other words, the material conditions that inspired emo-core in the ‘80s have only gotten worse.
Succession plan
America is still living in the shadow of the 2000s. The xenophobia and wealth-hoarding that characterized the Bush-era political years haven’t gone anywhere, reality TV set the template for scores of influencers to get ahead in pop culture without really trying, and Sony and Marvel Comics will not stop rebooting Spider-Man.
The emo music of the 2000s is also still with us, just in a slightly different form.
Some of the biggest overall artists in the US, like Juice WRLD, fall into the new emo-rap fusion genre. It’s a new kind of DIY music, music that requires nothing more than a laptop and a USB mic and that eliminates the need to have enough friends to fill out a band lineup. Upload your first track to Soundcloud or Bandcamp and you’re ready to go.
A lot of critics treat emo rap dismissively: It’s just “joylessly auto-tuned rap songs about numbing pain with drugs” that “fuses elements from classic hip-hop, like 808-heavy beats and objectifying women, with aspects of classic emo music, like dark narratives and blaming women for heartbreak.” In an interesting moment of reflexivity, those critics end up fusing the history of bad-faith criticism of hip-hop with the same stuff people have been saying about emo since the beginning: that, unlike more serious spinoffs of punk, emo bands were “wallowing in a shallow pool of sentimentality.”
At this particular moment, there’s some curiosity about what the future holds for emo rap, given that some of most prominent emo rappers have died, including Juice WRLD and Lil Peep, or have gone to prison for being, just, like, cartoonishly shitty people. That doesn’t mean that emo rap is going to disappear from the music landscape, though — for the time being, the old guard is still releasing music posthumously, and indie/punk labels like Epitaph Records continue to sign new emo rap acts.
This is just one example of the ways that emo bled into mainstream music. There’s artists like Phoebe Bridgers, the emo-folk singer and guitarist who Andrew Sachar calls a “heartbreaker who gets thousands of people singing every word as if they were their own,” and there’s Halsey, electro-pop star and unreformed emo fangirl, and there’s also the fact that there are 2000s emo bands like Paramore who have been consistently producing music this whole time and ‘90s emo bands like American Football who have reunited to produce new music.
I’ve tried to avoid turning this series into a list of names and dates like a lot of music histories tend to do it (and so Minor Threat begat Fugazi and so forth), but that’s kind of inevitable here, talking about the 2010s. The stories are still being written, and we don’t yet know what the most interesting ones will be.
Remember what your heart is for
If emo was ever its own cohesive subculture, it’s not anymore. It’s been folded into the greater pop culture landscape — welcomed, even. For better or worse, the confessional, self-conscious, brutally honest mode of expression that emo championed is a part of the broader culture now in books and music and TV and personal essays and Instagram captions and more.
“A subculture, by definition, doesn’t have to be small, just underexposed,” Natasha Stagg wrote for Spike magazine last month. “But what counts as exposure, now? Network television and magazine covers seem quaint as benchmarks. And although we always read about ‘dark annals of the internet’, most of culture is not so sub- anymore.”
I would “Yes, and…” that definition: A subculture doesn’t have to be small or underexposed if it has an antagonistic relationship to the mainstream.
For emo, that was the emotional part of emo-core: not just expressing emotions, but expressing the wrong emotions. Wrong for whatever your context is. It’s not a coincidence that emo bands usually popped up in the same time and place as massive social conflict. Personal problems are shaped by public issues, and emo music is the result of someone looking up and saying hey. Something isn’t right here, and no one else is talking about how it feels.
In the words of Jim DeRogatis, writing about emo in 1999: “After years of post-modern irony, camp, and nobody in rock ’n’ roll meaning anything they said, these groups are not only daring to share what they feel are truths, they’re striving to share them with poetic flair.”
In 2017, Sam Hockley-Smith tried to explain the popularity of emo rapper Lil Peep for Vulture in similar terms:
What I appreciated emo for as a teen, and what I appreciate it for again as a 22-year-old feeling unmoored in one of the worst national crises of all time, is the genre’s ability to marry banal angst with existential dread and sometimes political ferocity. Because on the inside, those things really do all feel the same.
And that’s the story.
Header collage images from Wikimedia Commons (8 track player, Phoebe Bridgers setlist, Juice WRLD, Spotify badge).