Ryan Phillips (Story Of The Year): “Not to be derogatory, but it’s not hard to imagine a super jock guy to be like, ‘Man, this guy sounds like a pussy.’ But then you’ve got another guy or girl that’s more sensitive that’s like, ‘I’ve had my heart broken, and I feel like screaming to the world,’ or, ‘If my girlfriend cheated on me or broke my heart, I wish I could scream this right to her face.’ And to some people that really struck a chord. It’s okay to wear your heart on your sleeve. It’s okay to be emotional. That doesn’t make you weak. It doesn’t make you less than.”
Chris Simpson: “It didn’t feel like weakness to us—it felt like our strength. Across the board in punk rock and indie music at the time, there was probably some feeling that that was kind of a weak thing to do. I think that’s maybe why emo got such an easy and immediate backlash. But a lot of that had to do, I think, with the term. Critics and people on the outside put this little cutesy term on it that, to me, felt belittling to the content and the music. I listen to the power of some of the music, and there’s something very masculine about the music but also something very soft and feminine. It can kind of hold both of those things. You could write about anything. I think that should always be the case with any sort of art or expression. I think there are times throughout history where it kind of becomes something that you don’t do, that isn’t done.”
David McLaughlin (Associate Editor, Kerrang! UK): “It’s become a lot more commonplace to do so in recent times, but when I first got into emo, there weren’t a lot of artists around who articulated their personal pain and embraced their own faults and failings like this genre seemed to. So I think starting that conversation in the alternative music sphere was emo’s key purpose. You hear it said a lot now that ‘it’s okay to not be okay,’ but the first time I felt like that was true was through emo bands. When you consider how much more open the world is [now] about its issues with toxic masculinity, there’s an amazing trickle-down effect from artists who dared to be emotionally vulnerable back then. Especially when compared to the braindead, Neanderthal attitudes celebrated across the mainstream metal world (which was then equally dominant in the pop charts).”
Plenty of men and young boys who didn’t feel it was possible to talk about their feelings never got the help they needed because of such toxic masculinity. There was (and still is, albeit less so) a sweeping sense of shame and guilt to admitting to emotional suffering.
Jamie Tworkowski (To Write Love On Her Arms): “For us as a [mental health] organization thirteen years in, I know it’s true that we hear from more females than males. When I show up to speak at a college, there’s always more young women in the room than guys. I think what we see, and it’s sort of stating the obvious, but it’s sort of easier for women to talk about their feelings and to talk about their struggles. We get excited, and it’s always felt important to make it known that the work we do is intended to be inclusive. The work we do is for men and women.”
What emo music did that mainstream thought didn’t approve of was throw traditional macho behavior out the window. The bands who started to develop this sound and this scene were tired of the straightforward aggression and masculine posturing of other rock, metal, and punk genres. Emo and screamo bands didn’t want to fake a socially contrived sense of masculinity; they wanted to convey true emotions exactly as they were. At first, creating an inclusive community with their music was mostly just a byproduct of their creativity, but as the scene gained a greater following, there developed a distinct intent to preach inclusivity.
Ethan Fixell: “As much as we all love Black Flag or Bad Brains, I think hardcore punk fans were desperately yearning for music that was less politically charged and generally raucous, and more personal, reflective, and viscerally painful.”
Shane Told: “Punk music from before was like, ‘Yeah well, you don’t like me? Then fuck you.’ Emo was like, ‘You don’t like me and I’m really sad about it and I’m just gonna listen to The Cure and think about this and what’s gonna happen the next time I see you and how I’m gonna feel.’ That’s real. That’s different.”
Ryan Phillips: “The lyrics were a lot more vulnerable and a lot more sensitive and, I think, in the zeitgeist, it kind of caught on because people were craving that after listening to Limp Bizkit and Korn. Maybe I’m wrong on that, but that’s how I felt. I was so into the nü metal stuff, but then [I heard] Jimmy Eat World and Finch and Glassjaw. I remember the first time I heard Glassjaw, and that was like the death of nü metal for me. It was a relief from the macho-ness.”
Chris Conley: “After punk and grunge, everyone was still aggravated and alienated. Thank god emo came around because all of a sudden you were allowed to have your feelings. You were allowed to be who you are.”
Aaron Gillespie (Underoath): “We wanted to feel angst like punk rock did but inject a little melody into it… We all went to the garage and were angry or hurt or happy or sad and we made these songs and people resonated with them. Our influences were Glassjaw and Thursday and bands that were doing something really, really vital and really fresh.”
Emo music culture was brave enough to challenge the established idea of what it meant to be a man. It was brave enough and daring enough to admit that life wasn’t all nice and peachy and to convey what that frustration, sadness, or insecurity felt like without pulling any punches. In Everybody Hurts: An Essential Guide To Emo Culture, Leslie Simon and Trevor Kelley write, “In the end, being emo is all about having the kind of unwavering conviction that allows one to face the challenges of a new day.”
As time passes, far more people embrace the term “emo” and adopt it as their own, wearing their black eye like a badge of honor. (Ten points to you if you got the “There’s No ‘I’ In Team” reference.) As we grow more distant in time from its inception, “emo” increasingly becomes a legitimate descriptor for a crucial moment in rock history, rather than a slight to those who dare to interact with their feelings.
“I think one thing that’s been really true for our scene several times over,” says Chris Carrabba of Dashboard Confessional, “was that there was a lot of overlapping of different genres that were unified by the nakedness of the emotionality that the singer was willing to display. I listened to this music because it was so emotional. They’re singing songs about what it is to feel. It’s not love songs. It’s not heartbreak songs. It’s just about what it is to feel.”
To me, that’s what it means to be emo: being willing to feel the painful emotions as profoundly as the pleasant ones. It makes me proud to be emo, because, to me, the word symbolizes emotional strength. But, in the end, I really don’t get as hung up on the word as many of the bands that are described that way seem to. People could have used it as an insult, and they did, but those people’s definition of emo wasn’t the right one. To me, “emo” was the name that was used to describe the bands and the music I loved: the songs that saved my life. And that’s all it is—a name. I don’t care what it’s called. It could be any name in the world, and I would still look at it the same way. (And if I recall correctly, Shakespeare said something similar in a little play you may have heard of, Romeo & Juliet.) So enough of mincing words. Let’s talk about the goddamn music.
Chapter 3
The Anthem of Your Underground:
A Look at ‘90s Emo
One of the most significant events in all of human history took place in 1991 when the World Wide Web became public. In 1992, the LA riots tore the California city apart. “The Macarena” craze sparked in 1993, Kurt Cobain