In May, I vowed that this summer would be my Hot Internship Summer: no concerts, no staying out past midnight, just the Washington, D.C. grind set. It was a lot of fun, but throughout the summer I had an itchy feeling in my joints that came from pretending to care about Sabrina Carpenter and Disney just to hold conversations outside of work. It just wasn’t what I really cared about.
By August, I had been seeing ads on Instagram for an Emo Karaoke Night. The premise of the set is that a live band would play the instrumentals and sing the backing vocals, and you took the lead. Cautiously optimistic, I bought tickets and bussed through a thunderstorm to Union Stage hoping it would be worth my while. Spoiler alert: It was, and so much more.
There are a lot of differing sources on the origin of emo. Generally, it’s agreed that sometime in the late ’80s to early ’90s, some hardcore bands started singing about personal loss and emotion. A popular narrative places the birth of the emo genre in Washington, D.C. with the band Rites of Spring, starting the trend of singing about your sadness spreading across the D.C. hardcore scene and the “emo” moniker being used as an insult by hardcore and punk fans to mock perceived “softness.” It wasn’t until the late ’90s with the “second-wave emo” genre that “emo” transformed from simply a term of disparagement to more of an independent genre; by the early 2000s, it was clear that emo was a cultural force of its own.
I made my first foray into emo around 2014, toward the end of its time in the public purview. Because I didn’t have a phone, most of my time was spent on YouTube watching music videos, and I remember seeing Fall Out Boy’s “My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light Em Up)” video and being intrigued. This intrigue quickly turned into fascination and then delight. Something about the heavier drums and bass and their strong use of rhythm resonated with me then — it still does to this day — and I was even more floored by the fact that the Save Rock and Roll music videos had an ongoing storyline. I’d never seen any band or artist do something like that before. In the weeks after, all I did was listen to their songs and then to the bands recommended by the algorithm once I got bored. When I eventually did get a phone and Spotify along with it, the Fall Out Boy discography was one of the first things in my “Liked” playlist.
Despite never being allowed to go to concerts due to my parents thinking electric guitar was going to turn me into a drug addict, I found community among the other weird art kids on the internet. I was never involved with the fandom culture of any bands, but even then, seeing a familiar lyric or logo on a profile meant an automatic connection. To that end, I think emo’s historical lack of definition actually served it well. At the end of the day, the only true thing bonding the community together was a shared love for specific bands, and everything else was moot. Sure, there were fashion trends and a general unwillingness to see the sun, but in a community without officially set rules or axioms, people were willing to befriend anyone with a tangentially similar taste in music and were open to new experiences.
As a result, the diversity of the emo fanbase is immense and vastly understated. As a softer, less focused offspring of hardcore punk, emo serves as a great gateway into alternative subcultures for those who may be seen as a bit weird or off-putting. Although the popular bands and wider perception of emo tended to be waifish and pale, I’ve always known the community itself to make space for its members of Color, especially if you’re not chronically online. Anyone who was ever the only non-white kid on a school sports team could relate to lyrics about never fitting in on a fundamental level, even if the singer was singing about a girl who didn’t like him back.
Additionally, the emo subculture is and always has been very Queer. Often, gender and sexuality aren’t things you always know from birth. For teens figuring out why exactly they’ve always felt ostracized from their peers, emo culture, with its emphasis on nontraditional masculinity and expressions of frustration or angst, was like a contained laboratory to figure things out. There are also many models of masculine Queerness in emo, with band leads like Billie Joe Armstrong and Gerard Way openly talking about and demonstrating bisexuality and gender nonconformity, respectively, throughout the 2000s. There’s a reason so many transgender men were emo; those spaces in the 2010s often felt safer for us than a lot of more mainstream “trans-friendly” or Queer masculine spaces do today.
During Emo Karaoke Night, I stood next to a woman in her 40s or 50s with her 12-year-old daughter. As the only other person in the room with a Sharpie “X” on my hand denoting an under-21 status, I was curious. Of course, I assumed that the daughter had asked her mom to bring her to the concert. It turned out that the mom was also a fan of these bands — she commented that “Nine in the Afternoon,” my song choice, was one of her favorites. A guy who looked like someone’s Midwest dad went up and did some incredible screamo vocals. A different guy with a spiked vest in his late 20s said my slam dancing was awesome. It’s easy to forget that, at this point, emo culture is multigenerational. At rock events generally, it’s common to see people well into their 50s and 60s who’ve been in the subculture their whole lives.
Subcultures, much like regular global cultures, rely on the generational passing down of information from those who’ve had similar experiences to us. In the punk community, there are “elder punks” able to impart skills and traditions, like bringing earplugs to every concert lest the younger generation also get tinnitus at age 30. Emo culture is getting old enough to have our own elders, and, for those of us who may have not grown up with older role models with shared experiences or hobbies, it’s bittersweet to see, erring on sweet (we’re getting older, for people who promised to stay young forever). Among all these different people that I never would’ve known under other circumstances, I felt safer and more comfortable than I had the entire summer.
Nowadays, I’m more into metal and punk bands like Sabaton and Dog Park Dissidents, but the emo subculture has a special place in my heart. It was, as the song goes, where I found a place among “the broken, the beaten and the damned.” It was somewhere I could figure myself out in all the embarrassing and cringy ways while being reassured that yes, all teenagers had big embarrassing and cringy feelings. It was also where I learned how to do grunge eyeliner, which is apparently back in a big way, so thanks for that too, I guess. My point is, that regardless of where or when I am, there are people like me to be found. As they say, emo never dies.
Rock on, friends.
For those of you who want to experience the electricity in the room live, Emo Karaoke Night is playing in Detroit on Nov. 8, 2024.
Daily Arts Writer Lin Yang can be reached at yanglinj@umich.edu.
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