The perfect place to argue about what’s emo and what’s not.Īlternative Press: An L.A.-based publication that turned into a music news powerhouse. While Absolutepunk had over tens of thousands of news articles and more than 2,500 reviews in its archives, its biggest draw was its forums, which boasted over 300,000 users at its peak. My replies when some emo album gets an 8.0 or less Ībsolutepunk: A defunct online community and alternative news source that focused on punk and emo. The cause of at least a few martyr complexes.

Good enough to qualify as high praise, but still a few decimal points shy of qualifying for the site’s coveted Best New Music designation. They still exist today, but as Andy Greenwald wrote in his book Nothing Feels Good, emo may have been the last culture born of vinyl rather than computer bytes.Ĩ.0: The numerical grade often given to great emo albums by indie-leaning and largely un-emo website Pitchfork. Just try not to get emotional about it.ħ-inches: Small, typically 45 rpm records that helped spread the music of First- and Second-Wave emo bands, sometimes through “splits” with other bands. What follows is a comprehensive attempt to do that: From the key figures to the slang to the seemingly infinite social-networking sites where the culture spread, we’re running through all the strange and beautiful things that have gone into the past 40 years of emo. But if we can’t define the word itself, we can certainly define the many things that make up emo culture. Still, no one can agree on what “emo” means. Along the way, it’s made stars: We owe emo for the likes of My Chemical Romance, Paramore, Fall Out Boy, Jimmy Eat World, Dashboard Confessional, and dozens of other aughts rock stars, even if all they shared with Rites of Springs was a propensity to turn a mirror onto themselves and write about what they saw. Today, with the genre firmly entrenched in its Fifth Wave, it thrives on Bandcamp, where sullen kids from across the globe tap into the spirit of Rites of Spring, sometimes trading guitars and drums for Ableton and sample packs. In the 2000s, it spread to Hot Topics in suburban malls and the MTV offices in New York City. In the ’90s, emo spread in basements throughout the urban Northeast and small rock venues in the Great Plains. beginnings, the movement traveled around the country, and then the world. musician and activist Jenny Toomey told Greenwald.īut the word clearly means something to some people-or else, why would The Ringer be holding an entire Emo Week? After its humble D.C. “It didn’t mean anything then and doesn’t to me now,” D.C. (Isn’t all music supposed to be emotional?) So if the supposed forefathers of the genre didn’t come up with the word “emo,” who did? Was it Thrasher magazine, who first committed it to print in 1986? Haters jealous of the cultish success of bands like Rites of Spring and Embrace? Just some guys Mike and Dan, as someone hypothesizes in Andy Greenwald’s 2003 book on emo and pop-punk, Nothing Feels Good? Ultimately, some people there at the beginning felt it didn’t even matter. Neither did Embrace, another pioneering D.C. But Rites of Spring didn’t embrace the term. music scene, where the band Rites of Spring is credited with introducing a new kind of hardcore that focused on the personal instead of the political. Why is the word “emo” so hard to define? At first, “emo” was short for “emo-core,” which itself is short for “emotional hardcore.” The term was born in the D.C. Grab your Telecasters and Manic Panic and join us in the Black Parade. Welcome to Emo Week, where we’ll explore the scene’s roots, its evolution to the modern-day Fifth Wave, and some of the ephemera around the genre. In case you haven’t heard, emo is back, baby! In honor of its return to prominence-plus the 20th anniversary of the first MCR album-The Ringer is following Emo Wendy’s lead and tapping into that nostalgia. My Chemical Romance is touring again, Paramore and Jimmy Eat World are headlining a major festival this fall, and there’s a skinny, tattooed white dude with a guitar dominating the charts.

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