When a Label Means So Much That It's Meaningless
Or: unpacking what it actually means when a band is called "emo"
When I was in high school, if you had asked me what kind of music I listened to I’d have told you I listened to “rock.” At the time, I didn’t really have any other language to describe my taste; I learned about bands from the local rock station (that played 90s grunge and alternative, early 2000s pop-punk and nu-metal, and literally everything in-between) and from friends at school burning me random CDs. I didn’t have internet access to learn about their histories, I wasn’t able to go to shows and see how their scenes intertwined, I didn’t have anyone to teach me. To me, it was all just “rock.”
Now, that’s not inaccurate, but it’s not especially helpful either. Rock is an incredibly broad term that can be used to describe dozens and dozens of subgenres, all with drastically different sounds, linked only by a common ancestor. This dives to the heart of one of my greatest issues with genres, and labels in general: either they’re narrow and restrictive, or they’re so broad that they’re functionally useless.
One of the most blatant and fascinating examples is “emo” music. What exactly is emo? Hell if I know, and I say that as someone who full well knows that every band he listens to is either straight-up emo or only a degree or two away. That’s part of the problem; emo is more of a scene or an aesthetic than a genre, defined more by lyrical content, the people making and listening to it, and sometimes even the clothes (depending on which era you’re listening to) than anything intrinsic to the style of the instrumentation itself.
This leads to an incredibly muddled, polarized genre. One the one hand, there’s gatekeepers insisting that “true” emo can only come out of DC in the late 80s or the midwest in the mid-90s and that everything that’s come since is fake, an imposter, a sellout. On the other, modern fans are so accepting and open that pretty much anything they like gets absorbed into the genre like a musical katamari; just like my “rock” phase back in the first paragraph of this piece, we like emo, so therefore all music we like must be emo1. The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” has become an honorary emo song because so many bands in the scene have covered it. These days Andrew McMahon’s music gets played at the mall or on Grey’s Anatomy, yet he retains legions of emo fans from his days in Something Corporate. Pretty much every friend I have who would say that they primarily listen to emo (with an equal mix of shame and pride) are also avid fans of Carly Rae Jepsen or Kasey Musgraves. Is Phoebe Bridgers emo? Machine Gun Kelly? Soundcloud rap? No. But also, kinda, maybe? They certainly share similar orbits, and emo-adjacent might as well be emo most of the time. There’s literally a website called “Is This Band Emo?” meant to answer this question with (tongue-in-cheek, or at least I hope) certainty; there’s clearly an audience for it.
A big part of the problem is that the word “emo” is meaningless. It’s short for “emotional,” but in the context of music, what does that even mean? All music is emotional! Music is literally designed to invoke emotions! So how in the world did this particular genre come to claim a trademark on the concept?
Well, it didn’t do so of its own volition. Emo was a label foisted upon the music in its infancy by detractors, rather than fans; it was derogatory, a pejorative2. The common complaint about emo is that it’s just a bunch of young white men whining about their problems (this isn’t entirely inaccurate, but it’s also a low blow, solely focusing on the genre’s lowest common denominator of bands), and that’s what its haters focused on when they started calling it emo. Emo was born out of hardcore, a genre defined by anger and aggression. Hardcore was born out of punk, defined by anarchy and irony; punk was born out of rock, a genre that was stereotypically “manly,” sometimes downright horny. Those are all emotions too, but they’re emotions that are acceptable for men in the eyes of society, so they don’t count. The genre that would become emo was picked on because men openly sharing their sadness and regret, earnestly bearing their failures and shortcomings, and often doing so while wearing tight jeans or even, gasp, make-up, was something that was obviously bad, something that needed to be mocked. Emo is a moniker born out of misogyny and homophobia; unlike any other genre I can think of, emo is named after what is considered by those outside it to be its greatest weakness, rather than anything having to do with the actual content of the music. It’s no wonder it’s been such a contentious, nebulous term.
As rock evolved it splintered into more and more subgenres, but emo never did that. Instead emo evolved in “waves,” with each wave sounding quite different from the last. Emo from 1995 sounds nothing like emo from 2008, yet they’re both classified under the same name; in fact, bands from previous waves often continue to release music, putting out new songs in older styles of emo at the same time as newer bands in newer styles. It’s enough to make your head spin if you’re not used to it, and has lead to quite an identity crisis even among the scene itself. I want to take a second, then, to put together a brief history/timeline of emo, not to get pedantic (this is going to be very loose and no doubt more than a bit subjective), but simply to show how much the sound of the genre has changed over the years, and how meaningless this has made the term “emo.”
Emo was born in the mid-to-late-80s in Washington DC as “emotional hardcore,” an offshoot of DC’s hardcore scene. Emotional hardcore — or emocore, as it was quickly shortened to — tempered the aggression of hardcore with a bit of softness and more experimental song structures, but its biggest change was to the lyrics, which took more introspective, confessional tones. Emocore was a short-lived movement — its best-known band, Rites of Spring3, only lasted two years, released one album, and played around 15 shows — but it made quite a reputation for itself in that time; rumors circulated that fans would (supposedly) openly weep and sob and shake during performances.
This eventually gave way to the second wave4, the first to be consistently referred to as “emo.” This era of the genre was largely born out of the midwest, led by bands like Braid, Mineral, Sunny Day Real Estate, and whatever project the Kinsella brothers happened to be up to at the moment. This wave kept the underlying harshness of what came before (as well as the plaintive, introspective lyrics), leaned further into melody, and muted things a bit (to me, second wave emo always sounds like it’s fighting through a layer of static, like it’s playing from a speaker in a different room). It also embraced intricate, delicate, downright mathy guitar parts, a technique many have described as “twinkly,” and became one of the signature sounds of emo moving forward. These musicians had understated looks, almost hipsters, favoring sweater-vests, glasses, and skinny jeans.
The third wave was when emo started to receive some mainstream recognition5. Pop-punk — a snottier, more melodic and relationship-driven offshoot of punk that had been undergoing its own parallel evolution — intersected with emo, creating music that retained emo’s sincerity and earnestness but picked up the speed with more upbeat guitar and better production (that classic emo staple of “depressing lyrics paired with peppy melodies” found its genesis here). Bands like Saves the Day, Taking Back Sunday, Jimmy Eat World, and Brand New became the face of emo despite all taking influence from very different kinds of bands6; similarly, the likes of Thursday and Hawthorn Heights channeled the sensibilities of emotional hardcore and combined it with the commercial viability of the third wave to create “Screamo” (another silly label that one of those bands transcended rather quickly; a hint, it’s wasn’t the one with a song about Ohio). That classic shaggy, swoopy hairstyle so closely associated with emo started to make itself known around this time as well.
For any of you not familiar with this kind of music the way I am, the word “emo” probably brings to mind images of kids with stringy black hair, faces covered in make-up, dressed in vests and crying to My Chemical Romance songs in the Hot Topic at your local food court. This is the fourth wave of emo, one born as the third wave’s popularity hit peak marketability and went fully mainstream. There are some legitimately interesting bands to be found in this era — MCR, AFI7, and even the likes of Panic! at the Disco and early-ish Fall Out Boy used the theatricality of the movement to do some really fun stuff — but overall it lost the soul of what came before, that sense of everyman honesty and earnestness. I don’t believe that selling out is a thing — bands need to make money to survive — but with the entire industry seeing dollar signs, hundreds of new bands popped onto the scene with no sort of ethos other than wanting to get rich quick, and it led to a glut of disposable, creatively bankrupt acts flooding the market. Inevitably, it crashed.
From the ashes was born the fifth wave, widely (and contentiously) referred to as the “Emo Revival.” Unlike previous waves, the bands of this era didn’t have one united sound, but instead took what came before the crash and evolved them in multiple new directions. Bands like Algernon Cadwallader and Tiny Moving Parts harked back to the harsh-but-muted, twinkly guitar-laden sound of second wave emo. The Wonder Years played pop-punk music, but with lyrics so emotionally raw, confessional, and resonant that they couldn’t be anything but emo; likewise, the Menzingers’ ability to spin nostalgic tales that made you ache for a life you never lived, but swear to god you did, is one that could only flourish in the world of emo. Acts like Modern Baseball and Joyce Manor leaned heavily on emo’s DIY roots, and eventually charted unconventional trajectories for their careers that could only fly in the untamed Wild West of fifth wave emo. Bands and fans alike have embraced denim jackets. History has yet to formally recognize a sixth wave of emo, but I can feel a change in the air, and believe we’re living in a transition period as we speak. I can already see the next wave of emo (finally) leaning into more women, more queer bands, more black performers8. I can’t wait to see how it all plays out.
I’m an optimist, and a big fan of all this music, so I hope some of you had your interest sparked by something in these last few paragraphs. My point, though, is less about whether all this music is good or bad, and more that it’s all wildly, wildly different. Again, I think it’s cool that emo has grown and evolved so much over the years, but despite that label sticking around beyond the point of all believability, there’s no way all these songs are the same genre. If emo was a better name to begin with I think we’d have seen these various waves classified as their own sub-genres instead, but as it is, I don’t know how you would even begin to change the names of these various waves without losing the connection they all have to each other; it’s quite the conundrum. So as it stands, telling someone I like emo is about as useless as telling them I like rock. Okay, can you narrow it down a bit? It simply means something different to everyone.
Despite everything I just said, though, I think I have come up with an answer to that question I posed way back at the beginning of this piece. What is emo? Well, it’s not a musical style, or an aesthetic, or even a scene. Those all come and go, change and splinter. What emo is is an ethos. It’s about expressing emotions, even negative, ugly ones we would otherwise bury and hide until they turn us ugly too. It’s about catharsis. It’s about empathy, about seeing ourselves in others, discovering everything we have in common and learning about and respecting everything that makes us different. It’s about building communities through shared suffering. No matter what the music sounds like, this will always be its core. Anything can be emo if it makes you feel like you’re not alone.
God, no wonder I fell in love with this music.
THE QUINTESSENTIAL EMO SONG
Yes, I know I just got done explaining how emo is such a broad term that it simply can’t be narrowed down into a singular musical sound, yet, yet, “Central Standard Time” by The Get Up Kids may just pull it off. The mellow vibe paired with slightly urgent guitar lines, the tender, emotionally raw vocals, the aching and longing of the lyrics; even the ideas of distance, location, and VFW Halls are recurring themes throughout emo. Not only does this song absolutely rule, but it manages to sum up exactly what this genre is, what it can do, in one tidy three minute package.
ABOUT
“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin about his relationship with the stories he loves. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!
Logo by Lewis Franco, with respects to Saves the Day.
And I’m as, if not more, guilty of this than anyone.
In fact, most bands in the first decade of the genre’s existence hated the term “emo” and refused to be referred to as it. I don’t want to say that they’ve since “reclaimed” it, because emo was never a slur, but most of those older bands and pretty much all modern ones in the scene seem to have come to terms with the name these days, if they haven’t outright embraced it.
Rites of Spring is widely known these days as the first emo band, a label they both rejected and hated in all its iterations; thus is the duality of emo. Several members of Rites of Spring went on to join up with Minor Threat’s Ian MacKaye to form Fugazi, a band that flitted around that early emo scene but never became defined by it, because Ian MacKaye can do whatever he damn well pleases.
I’m not as familiar with these first two waves as I am the rest, but as far as I know/can tell, the second wave was born with the short-lived, cacophonous band known as Cap’n Jazz. Two of Cap’n Jazz’s members, Tim and Mike Kinsella (the latter of whom was only 12 when the band began), would go on to helm, either individually or collectively, close to a dozen musical projects over the next decade or so, honing the second wave sound long after the genre had moved on.
The first spark of this third wave can be found, not in new bands, but in the evolution of pre-existing ones. The Get Up Kids’ first album, 1997’s Four Minute Mile, is a quintessential example of second wave emo; their second, 1999’s Something To Write Home About, would come to define the sound of the third wave. Likewise, Jimmy Eat World’s 1999 release Clarity sold poorly but went on to become a second wave cult classic; their 2001 follow-up, Bleed American, had a single that was playing thirty times a day on every radio station in the country. In both cases, a clear line between the second and third waves can be drawn between those two albums, despite their different release dates.
Is Saves the Day’s Through Being Cool a pop-punk album? Sure. Is it an emo album? Absolutely! It can be two things at once! That’s part of its brilliance!
Yes, I know AFI was a band long before this and that they have lasted long after this, but Decemberunderground is a definitive fourth wave album, and the drastic shift in styles between Sing the Sorrow and it always seemed like a purposeful attempt to play into this new trend.
I don’t know if any of these bands would actually refer to themselves as emo, but if anything, that only proves my point.