#not a vauge to any particular person btw

[wienners]

its funny that the entire tag of habit/vinny is like "this is an abusive basically proship why do people like it :/" when 1. theyre both unrelated adults and 2. their dynamics just this

(art by @punkitt-is-here )

[queerofcups]

what bands are True Emo? bc when i think of emo i think of lo-fi but i'm pretty sure that's bc i'm 18 so i wasnt around for the Real Emo Tunes :(

i’mma answer this publicly because i needed the excuse to be entirely self indulgent, k? 

wait. hold on.

*puts on grad school hat*

so my answer/view on what counts as “emo” is really heavily influenced by this book, Nothing Feels Good, its been years now since i’ve read it, but it includes (may be wholly?) a history of the development of emo as a genre, as well as profiles on some really well known bands. what’s super cool about it is that it was very of the moment. it was published in 2003, which is when emo was gaining mainstream notoriety amongst rock circles, but was nowhere near the cultural zeitgeist it became.

so if you ask me, i’d argue, as andy greenwald identifies in Nothing Feels Good that “true emo” bands would include the likes of Rites of Spring, Sunny Day Real Estate, Jets to Brazil, Mineral, American Football etc*. There’s a really interesting idea that Dan kept kind of bumping up against but didn’t really articulate–that late 00′s emo and the indie music that was fucking exploding around that same time (so, your Death Cab for Cuties, Minus the Bear, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, etc) actually have a common ancestor in the early 00s emo that was coming out of places like DC and further Northeast (as far North East as…New Jersey, eh? eh?). But Dan says some bullshit about the indie guys not liking the emo guys, not exactly? Like sometimes indie guy and the emo guy were the same dude.

And that dude was a dude who was into the hardcore scene/punk, but who wanted to sing about his feelings and heartbreak, and mental health issues, things that were seen as more feminine and less aligned with the more masculine, more politically charged punk/hardcore scene.

And so you have bunch of dudes doing this, with differing levels of alignment with the hardcore scene. On one end of the spectrum you’ve got your Thrices, your Alkaline Trios and on the other end you’ve got your Sunny Day Real Estates, or even further, your Dashboard Confessionals where he’s not even using an electric guitar. 

This, btw, is part of why you’ve got both Death Cab for Cutie and AFI on the same list of bands that are “emo” on wikipedia. The whole emo genre was actually super fucking prolific and because the genre qualifications were so vauge (its “emotional” “rock” music. that’s a lot of musical space to play in) a lot of different sounds were able out of early 00s emo. 

Mix emo with hardcore? You get Thrice. 

Mix emo with goth? AFI and Hawthorne Heights

Mix is with metal? You get Coheed and Cambria, I guess??

Mix it with rap? Dear god you get Brokencyde, undo undo. 

And if you mix it with pop? Well shit, you just built a Fall Out Boy. 

So, Dann, you say, I didn’t need any of this. 

I mean that’s fair, but I’m sure you’re also wondering where the fuck My Chem, P!atD and FOB come in. 

Wikipedia makes the really helpful delineation of emo and emo pop, which is like…sociologically accurate, even if I feel like its not generically accurate. Like, MCR and Panic! at the Disco are two very different genres of band.

Those three bands, along with a glut of other bands in the mid-00s somehow managed to ride the wave of popularity that started with these early 00s emo bands. I don’t want to make it sound like these bands aren’t significant, like these are people who were and are at the top of their craft (and pete wentz). but they were also pretty lucky. they came up in a time when not only indie bands but indie labels were experiencing pretty unprecedented public attention, MTV was still showing music videos, but maybe more importantly Fuse was still showing music videos. There was a whole TV station dedicated to “alt” music (how do people even find music these days? Spotify?). 

Now why were those three bands the ones that made the catapult from Fuse to MTV (so from very very popular alt/indie to straight up popular)?

Teenage girls.

See, emo came out of punk spaces in the mid-to-late 90s, and these spaces (at least the spaces that these particular guys were in) were, more often than not, pretty white/male spaces. Emo might have been about girls, so many girls—girls who agreed to date you, girls who agreed to fuck you, girls that dared to stop fucking you, girls that broke your heart—but it wasn’t really for girls. People who talk about rap music being the most misogynistic genre haven’t sat down to listen to emo. My god were some of those dudes upset about getting dumped.

But pop music. 

Pop music has been the bread and butter of girls, young girls since what, the 1950s aka its inception? Teenage girls created pop music.

And teenage girls decided they liked this emo stuff. And they decided they liked those emo boys. Really they decided they liked MCR and FOB and then Pete Wentz bore panic and lo, the teenage girls decided, it was good. 

(Brendon Urie and Harry Styles ought to sit down and have a talk sometime about how they owe their whole career to teenage girls finding them appealingly non-threatening)

You know why MCR and FOB were so dedicated to “equality” and their pits being “safe” (back when they had pits) and also challenging gender norms in a way that happened to be acceptable (and lbr titillating) to teenage girls?** 

Because teenage girls chose them and Made. Them. Rich. 

You don’t get rich of teenage girls aren’t coming to your shows/in your pit because they might get hurt. You don’t get rich when homophobic assholes, that are also sexist assholes, are coming to your show.

Don’t get me wrong. There were boys there. Obviously. Sensitive boys that didn’t fit in with the jocks, bullied for acknowledging their feelings etc. But teenage girls created the Scene.Christ, what was your question?Ok, yeah. You’re pretty spot on thinking of emo as being a low-fi, diy thing, if you’re thinking of it from the same direction I am. But the cultural moment Dan is talking about is defined way more by emo pop/scene than what I personally would call emo.* I mentioned an emo revival in an ask earlier today/yesterday. A lot of those bands are “reviving” the sound of early 00s emo. Which is interesting.**there’s a whole fucking book in the concept of stage gay alone. also the trend of “emo boys kissing” videos. these things are connected, obviously but I can’t quite say how.***this is a tumblr ask answer, so I can’t get into things like the effect of the internet, the breaking down of the fourth wall for fandom, why you can thank/blame Jimmy Eat World for all this, why DIY punk these days sounds the same as emo if you ask me, etc.****yeah I wrote that whole teenage girls made the scene diatribe and didn’t mention Paramore once. Paramore changed the fucking game and there’s a reason every emo band with a girl got compared to them.