
By Leroy Tran
It’s kind of taboo; it’s kind of derogatory. For most of its history, the word emo has been associated with a clique of bang-bearing, black-clad and grunge-adjacent individuals who appeal to introversion and retrospection. It’s a subculture undoubtedly rooted in an ethos of solitude and a sense of ostracization.
But it’s unjust to call it just that. Emo is based on strong community ties and shared emotional consciousness, and in no other place is this more apparent than in the emo music scene. It’s a unique, emotionally charged genre that continues to change throughout its nearly 40-year history. However, in its wealth of history, it’s hard to pinpoint what emo really is. So, what exactly is emo?
Wake Up, It’s Revolution Summer
Four distinct waves of emo music emerged between the 1980s to the 2010s, the first of which emerged in the summer of 1985 in Washington D.C., home to a hardcore punk scene in violent decline. Dissatisfied by the scene, Fire Party lead Amy Pickering coined a new term for punks to be inspired by: Revolution Summer.
Revolution Summer would be a rebirth of hardcore punk and an opportunity for bands to expand the genre. It would be the pedestal for many of the formative bands that would create the roots of emo: Rites of Spring, Embrace and Beefeater … these genre-defying punks distanced themselves from other hardcore bands and created a new style of hardcore with an interest in cathartic lyricism amid Revolution Summer. There was still the noise and disorder of hardcore; these bands were not the angsty emo bands that the subculture would be associated with later.
It’s Not Hardcore, It’s Emocore
The fresh emocore bands of Revolution Summer would be fleeting. Still, their ideas took root elsewhere in the U.S. New bands abandoned emo’s hardcore origins and emphasized its distinct qualities, for evidently, the mainstay of emo was its emotional expression. Thus, a second wave emerged. Instead of the noise and aggression of hardcore, the emo of the 90s expressed the songcraft and experimentation of pop punk and indie rock, seen in bands like Sunny Day Real Estate, Jawbreaker and Jimmy Eat World.
The second-wave bands of the 90s were accompanied by a distinct enclave that found a niche in the melodic emotion of emo music: Midwest emo. Midwest emo bands shared many of the elements that made emo distinct but incorporated its signature arpeggiation, melody, and complexity, which was primarily taken from math rock. The bands American Football, Cap’n Jazz, and the Promise Ring would be hallmarks of 90s Midwest emo.
In a similar fashion to Midwest emo’s divergent approach to emo, the scene in San Diego began making screamo, a dissonant, heavy genre that was more similar to emo’s hardcore origins than other subgenres of the time. As the name implies, the vocals of screamo were often screamed, although screamo maintained many of emo’s lyrical characteristics. Screamo rose in popularity and influence outside of San Diego, with bands such as Thursday and Hawthorne Heights coming from the East Coast.
A New Emo
Emo and its subgenres would remain underground for most of their early existence; however, in the 2000s, emo was propelled into the mainstream, attributed to Jimmy Eat World’s platinum album Bleed American, and the most popular acts associated with the genre would spring up and thrive in emo’s success. This was in large part due to another reinvention of emo, in the prevalence of third-wave emo pop, the home for legendary bands like Panic! at the Disco, Paramore, Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance. This era of emo music encapsulates what most people associate with the emo subculture as a whole: a genre of angst, black clothes, bangs and confessional lyricism.
But, despite the success of emo-pop, many of its acts looked to venture into other genres or reject the idea of emo as a whole, believing the genre to be unsustainable. Influential bands like My Chemical Romance and Thursday broke up by the 2010s, and emo slipped back into its underground roots.
It’s Not a Phase
Yet, emo would not die despite its decline, as evident in the emo revival that emerged later in the 2010s. An emo revival came to fruition in the popularity of bands like Modern Baseball and Title Fight, who drew on the sound and sensibilities of 90s emo and its hardcore origins. Emo music would never be as mainstream as in the 2000s, but the acts of the emo revival created a renewed interest in emo that has lasted until today. The advent of social media has further assisted emo in reviving its popularity—on platforms such as TikTok, old and new emo bands, especially Midwest emo acts, have garnered new fanbases through social media content.
So, with all these waves of emo music, what is real emo music? Nobody knows. It’s impossible to objectively say that one era of emo music is more emo than another. Emo is a tapestry of an evolution of people’s desire to express themselves—to confess things that they otherwise can’t. Whether that be in the rage of early D.C. emocore, or the delicate angst of Midwest emo, it’s all emo if the music reflects emotion. Emo’s too diverse to be held as one thing and one thing only; it’s all real.