Emo ( ) is a genre of rock music that combines musical characteristics of hardcore punk with emotional, often confessional lyrics. It emerged as a style of hardcore punk and from the Washington, D.C., hardcore scene, where it was known as emotional hardcore or emocore. The bands Rites of Spring and Embrace, among others, pioneered the genre. In the late 1980s, Maryland bands Moss Icon and the Hated adopted and reinvented this sound, putting less influence on its punk roots. In the early-to-mid 1990s, their influence led emo to be adopted by alternative rock, indie rock, and pop-punk bands, including Sunny Day Real Estate, Jawbreaker, Cap'n Jazz, Mineral, and Jimmy Eat World. By the Braid, the Promise Ring, American Football, and the Get Up Kids emerged from Midwest emo, and several independent record labels began to specialize in the genre. Meanwhile, screamo, a more aggressive style of emo using screamed vocals, also emerged, pioneered by the San Diego bands Heroin and Antioch Arrow. Its derivative form pop screamo achieved mainstream success in the 2000s with bands like Hawthorne Heights, Silverstein, Story of the Year, Thursday, the Used, and Underoath.
The emo subculture signifies a specific relationship between fans and artists and certain aspects of fashion, culture, and behavior. Emo fashion includes skinny jeans, black eyeliner, tight s with band names, studded belts, and flat, straight, jet-black hair with long bangs. Since the early-to-mid 2000s, fans of emo music who dress like this are referred to as "emo kids" or "emos". The emo subculture was stereotypically associated with social alienation, sensitivity, misanthropy, introversion, and angst. Purported links to depression, , and suicide, combined with its rise in popularity in the early 2000s, inspired a backlash against emo, with some bands, including My Chemical Romance and Panic! at the Disco, rejecting the emo label because of the social stigma and controversy surrounding it. There has long been controversy over which bands are labeled "emo", especially for bands that started outside traditional emo scenes; a viral website, Is This Band Emo?, was created to address one fan's opinion on this question.
Emo and its subgenre emo pop entered mainstream culture in the early 2000s with the success of Jimmy Eat World and Dashboard Confessional, and many artists signed contracts with major record labels. Bands such as My Chemical Romance, AFI, Fall Out Boy, and The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus continued the genre's popularity during the rest of the decade. By the early 2010s, emo's popularity had declined, with some emo bands changing their sound and others disbanding. Meanwhile, however, a mainly underground emo revival emerged, with some bands, such as the World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die and Modern Baseball, drawing on the sound and aesthetic of 1990s emo. During the late 2010s, a fusion genre called emo rap became mainstream; its most famous artists included Lil Peep, XXXTentacion, and Juice Wrld. The emo revival movement ended in the late 2010s, giving way to the more experimental "post-emo" sounds of Origami Angel, Awakebutstillinbed and Home Is Where.
Characteristics
Emo originated in hardcore punk and is considered a form of Early emo bands used melody and emotional or introspective lyrics and that were less structured than regular hardcore punk, differentiating them from the aggression, anger, and structures of traditional hardcore punk.
According to Chris Payne, author of Where Are Your Boys Tonight?: The Oral History of Emo's Mainstream Explosion, emo is "often more melodic, more vulnerable [than traditional hardcore] — and often really over the top. [There are also] really performative aspects in emo." Sandra Song of CNN describes emo as a "softer approach to hardcore punk, with warbly vocals and evocative lyrics that have other bands derisively calling it the sound of 'teen angst.'" Em Casalena of American Songwriter stated that the genre is characterized by an "angsty yet kind of miserable vibe".
Despite being rooted in hardcore punk, emo has also been associated with other related genres, such as alternative rock, indie rock, punk rock, and pop punk. During the 2000s, it became common for bands to fuse emo with harder styles such as heavy metal and metalcore to varying degrees by incorporating metallic riffs, guitar solos and breakdowns into their songwriting. Bands who have released songs in this style include From First To Last, Bullet for My Valentine, Escape the Fate, Underoath and My Chemical Romance.
Andrew Sacher of Brooklyn Vegan has expressed his belief that the year 2001 was a "crossroads" of sorts for the genre, stating that "emo came in a lot of different varieties" during that year. He said: "There were bands who were still playing the style of second wave emo that was prominent in the 1990s, as well as bands beginning to define the sound of the third wave. Some bands leaned more towards post-hardcore, others more towards pop punk, others towards indie rock, and others towards softer, acoustic guitar and piano-based music." The New York Times described emo as "emotional punk or or That is, punk that wears its heart on its sleeve and tries a little tenderness to leaven its sonic attack. If it helps, imagine Ricky Nelson singing in the Sex Pistols." Author Matt Diehl called emo a "more sensitive interpolation of punk's mission".
Lyrics, a focus in emo music, are typically personal and confessional, Themes usually deal with topics such as failed romance, self-loathing, pain, insecurity, suicidal thoughts, love, and relationships.
Emo guitar dynamics use both the softness and loudness of punk rock music. According to AllMusic, most 1990s emo bands "borrowed from some combination of Fugazi, Sunny Day Real Estate, and Weezer". Other accounts attribute the word to an audience member at an Embrace show, who shouted as an insult that the band was "emocore". Others have said that MacKaye coined the word when he used it self-mockingly in a magazine, or that it originated with Rites of Spring. with the term at times being used to describe any music that expresses emotion. "The mainstream success of emo and its related subculture caused the term to be conflated with other genres. Additionally, fans of traditional emo music have expressed distaste for the genre's expanding definition, and what they perceive as "commercialization" of the genre.
Chris Payne, author of Where Are Your Boys Tonight?: The Oral History of Emo's Mainstream Explosion, assessed: "Emo has a lot of different definitions for different people. For me, it can be like the old DIY stuff, like Cap'n Jazz [and] American Football, and then also the more popular stuff like … My Chemical Romance, Paramore and even the emo-rap stuff like Lil Peep." Ian MacKaye, after an article in Thrasher magazine referring to Embrace and other Washington, D.C., bands as "emo-core", he called it "the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard in my entire life" during a live performance. Sunny Day Real Estate's members said they consider themselves simply a rock band, and said that back in the early days, the word "emocore" was an insult: "While I don't disrespect anyone for using the term emo-core, or rock, or anything, but back in the day, emo-core was just about the worst dis that you could throw on a band."
In Chris Payne's book Where Are Your Boys Tonight? (2023), Bayside vocalist Anthony Raneri stated that he believed emo became "a dirty word" around the time of its mainstream success in the 2000s. He explains this derogatory use of the word derived from hipsters adopting the term to demean rock artists they saw as being "not as cool as" the popular indie rock groups of the time, namely the Strokes. My Chemical Romance singer Gerard Way said in 2007 that emo is "a pile of shit [...] I think there are bands that we get lumped in with that are considered emo and, by default, that starts to make us emo. All I can say is that anyone actually listening to the records, putting the records next to each other and listening to them, [would know there are] actually no similarities." Additionally, Quinn Villarreal of SiriusXM stated that "having 'feelings' in the 2000s and 2010s wasn’t 'cool.' So, the term 'emo' became a pejorative, which is why it’s oftentimes rejected by bands and fans."
Brendon Urie of Panic! at the Disco said : "It's ignorant! The stereotype is guys that are weak and have failing relationships write about how sad they are. If you listen to our songs, not one of them has that tone." Adam Lazzara of Taking Back Sunday said he always considered his band rock and roll instead of emo. Guitarist of the Get Up Kids, Jim Suptic, noted the differences between the 2000s mainstream acts when compared to the emo bands of the 1990s, saying, “The punk scene we came out of and the punk scene now are completely different. It's like glam rock now. We played the Bamboozle fests this year and we felt really out of place... If this is the world we helped create, then I apologise.” Vocalist of AFI, Davey Havok, described emo as "such a strange and meaningless word". Early emo musicians also have rejected the label. Guy Picciotto, the vocalist of Rites of Spring, said he considers the emo label "retarded" and always considered Rites of Spring a punk rock band: "The reason I think it's so stupid is that - what, like the Bad Brains weren't emotional? What - they were robots or something? It just doesn't make any sense to me."
The term “mall emo” has been used to separate mainstream bands like Paramore, Hawthorne Heights, My Chemical Romance, Panic! at the Disco, and Fall Out Boy from the less commercially viable bands that proceeded and succeeded them. The term "mall emo" dates back to around 2002, when many emo fans did not like the change emo was going through at the time when the genre became mainstream. He later created the website Is This Band Emo? in 2014, which explains whether various bands are classified under the genre alongside humorous responses.
History
thumb|170px|Hardcore punk band Minor Threat in 1981
Predecessors
According to music writer Luke Britton, "it's generally accepted that the genre's pioneers" came in the late 1980s. During the decade, many hardcore punk and post-hardcore bands formed in Washington, D.C. Post-hardcore, an experimental offshoot of hardcore punk, was inspired by . Hardcore punk bands and post-hardcore bands who influenced early emo bands include Minor Threat, Black Flag and Hüsker Dü.
1984–1991: Origins
Emo, which began as a post-hardcore subgenre, Rites of Spring formed in 1983, using the musical style of hardcore punk and combining the musical style with melodic guitars, varied rhythms, and personal, emotional lyrics. Many of the band's themes, including nostalgia, romantic bitterness and poetic desperation, became familiar tropes of later emo music. Its performances were public, emotional purges where audience members sometimes wept. Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat became a Rites of Spring fan (recording their only album and being their roadie) and formed the emo band Embrace, which explored similar themes of self-searching and emotional release. Similar bands followed in connection with the "Revolution Summer” of 1985, an attempt by members of the Washington scene to break from the usual characteristics of hardcore punk to a hardcore punk style with different characteristics. Bands such as Gray Matter, Beefeater, Fire Party, Dag Nasty, and Soulside were associated with the movement.
The Washington, D.C., emo scene lasted only a few years, and by 1986, most of emo's major bands (including Rites of Spring, Embrace, Gray Matter and Beefeater) had broken up. However, its ideas and aesthetics spread quickly across the country through a network of homemade zines, vinyl records and hearsay. According to Greenwald, the Washington, D.C., scene laid the groundwork for emo's subsequent incarnations:
Maryland bands Moss Icon and the Hated formed at the tail end of Revolution Summer. Unlike previous emo bands, Moss Icon's music often disregarded the conventional rhythms and drive of punk. This is the point at which some music historians draw the distinction between "emo-core" and simply "emo", with Journalist D.I. Kravchek calling Moss Icon and the Hated the pioneers of emo, as opposed to emocore. Subsequently, the sound of emo spread through a number of separate scenes that although being disparate, were also intertwined.
1991–1994: Reinvention
As the Washington, D.C., emo movement spread across the United States, local bands began to emulate its style. Emo combined the fatalism, theatricality and isolation of the Smiths with hardcore punk's uncompromising, dramatic worldview. Despite the number of bands and the variety of locales, emocore's late-1980s aesthetics remained more-or-less the same: "over-the-top lyrics about feelings wedded to dramatic but decidedly punk music." During the early–mid 1990s, several new bands reinvented emo, making emo expand by becoming a subgenre of genres like indie rock and pop punk. Singer-guitarist Blake Schwarzenbach focused his lyrics on personal, immediate topics often taken from his journal. Often obscure and cloaked in metaphors, their relationship to Schwarzenbach's concerns gave his words a bitterness and frustration which made them universal and attractive to audiences. Schwarzenbach became emo's first idol, as listeners related to the singer even more than to his songs. Jawbreaker's 1994 album, 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, was popular with fans and is a touchstone of mid-1990s emo. Although Jawbreaker signed with Geffen Records and toured with mainstream bands Nirvana and Green Day, Jawbreaker's 1995 album Dear You did not achieve mainstream success. Jawbreaker broke up soon afterwards, with Schwarzenbach forming emo band Jets to Brazil.
Sunny Day Real Estate formed in Seattle at the height of the early 1990s grunge boom, which was also primarily associated with that city. The music video for "Seven", lead track of the band's debut album Diary (1994), was played on MTV, giving the band more attention.
1994–1997: Underground popularity
The American punk and indie rock movements, which had been largely underground since the early 1980s, became part of mainstream culture during the mid-1990s. With Nirvana's success, major record labels capitalized on the popularity of alternative rock and other underground music by signing and promoting independent bands.
In 1994, the same year that Jawbreaker's 24 Hour Revenge Therapy and Sunny Day Real Estate's Diary were released, punk rock bands Green Day and the Offspring broke into the mainstream with diamond album Dookie and multi-platinum album Smash, respectively. After underground music went mainstream, emo retreated and reformed as a national subculture over the next few years. A number of emo bands emerged in the underground around this time, the most famous of which was the Arizona band Jimmy Eat World, which issued its debut album in 1994 and was influenced by bands such as the Mr. T Experience and Horace Pinker. Jimmy Eat World released its self-titled debut album in 1994. As they rose to fame, Jimmy Eat World toured with a number of peer bands, including Mineral, another key group during this era with a more melodic sound. California's Weezer is another band sometimes considered to be emo which rose to fame during this period, though Weezer's membership in the emo genre is debated.
Inspired by Jawbreaker, Drive Like Jehu and Fugazi, 1990s emo abandoned the elements of hardcore punk and used elements of indie rock, with punk rock's do-it-yourself work ethic but smoother songs and emotional vocals. According to Theo Cateforis of Grove Music Dictionary: "These groups portrayed a sense of emotional volatility in their music by using extended song forms that oscillated between straight and double time and clean guitar timbres and bursts of distortion. Vocalists deliberately avoided punk’s shouted style and sang melodic lines in a breathy head voice, often straining at the top of their range, which contributed to the music's sense of emotional urgency."
thumb|left|200px|alt=Cap'n Jazz onstage|Cap'n Jazz live in 2010
Many 1990s emo bands, such as Cap'n Jazz, Braid, Christie Front Drive, Mineral, Jimmy Eat World, the Get Up Kids and the Promise Ring, originated in the central U.S. Many of the bands had a distinct vocal style and guitar melodies, which was later called Midwest emo. According to Andy Greenwald, "this was the period when emo earned many, if not all, of the stereotypes that have lasted to this day: boy-driven, glasses-wearing, overly sensitive, overly brainy, chiming-guitar-driven college music." Emo band Texas Is the Reason bridged the gap between indie rock and emo in their three-year lifespan on the East Coast, melding Sunny Day Real Estate's melodies and punk musicianship and singing directly to the listener. In New Jersey, the band Lifetime played shows in fans' basements. Lifetime's 1995 album, Hello Bastards on Jade Tree Records, fused hardcore punk with emo and eschewed cynicism and irony in favor of love songs. The album sold tens of thousands of copies, and Lifetime paved the way for New Jersey and Long Island emo bands Brand New, Midtown, the Movielife, My Chemical Romance, After the mainstream success of Weezer's self-titled debut album, Pinkerton showed a more dark and abrasive style. Frontman Rivers Cuomo's songs focused on messy, manipulative sex and his insecurity about dealing with celebrity. A critical and commercial failure, Rolling Stone called it the third-worst album of the year. Cuomo retreated from the public eye, later referring to the album as "hideous" and "a hugely painful mistake". However, Pinkerton found enduring appeal with young people who were discovering alternative rock and identified with its confessional lyrics and theme of rejection. Sales grew steadily due to word of mouth, online message boards and Napster. "Although no one was paying attention", writes Greenwald, "perhaps because no one was paying attention—Pinkerton became the most important emo album of the decade." In 2004, James Montgomery of MTV described Weezer as "the most important band of the last 10 years". Pinkerton success grew very gradually, being certified gold by the RIAA in July 2001 and eventually being certified platinum by the RIAA in September 2016.
Mid-1990s emo was embodied by Mineral, whose The Power of Failing (1997) and EndSerenading (1998) encapsulated emo tropes: somber music, accompanied by a shy narrator singing seriously about mundane problems. Greenwald calls "If I Could" "the ultimate expression" of 1990s emo, writing that "the song's short synopsis—she is beautiful, I am weak, dumb, and shy; I am alone but am surprisingly poetic when left alone — sums up everything that emo's adherents admired and its detractors detested." Another significant band was Braid, whose 1998 album Frame and Canvas and B-side song "Forever Got Shorter" blurred the line between band and listener; the group mirrored their audience in passion and sentiment, and sang in their fans' voice.
Although mid-1990s emo had thousands of young fans, it did not enter the national consciousness. A few bands were offered contracts with major record labels, but most broke up before they could capitalize on the opportunity. Jimmy Eat World signed to Capitol Records in 1995 and developed a following with their album, Static Prevails, but did not break into the mainstream yet. The Promise Ring were the most commercially successful emo band of the time, with sales of their 1997 album Nothing Feels Good reaching the mid-five figures. Greenwald calls the album "the pinnacle of its generation of emo: a convergence of pop and punk, of resignation and celebration, of the lure of girlfriends and the pull of friends, bandmates, and the road"; mid-1990s emo was "the last subculture made of vinyl and paper instead of plastic and megabytes".
1997–2002: Independent success
Emo's popularity grew during the late 1990s, laying the foundation for mainstream success. Deep Elm Records released a series of eleven compilation albums, The Emo Diaries, from 1997 to 2007. Emphasizing unreleased music from many bands, the series included Jimmy Eat World, Further Seems Forever, Samiam and the Movielife. Nevertheless, the album had steady word-of-mouth popularity and eventually sold over 70,000 copies. Jimmy Eat World self-financed their next album, Bleed American (2001), before signing with DreamWorks Records. The album sold 30,000 copies in its first week, went gold shortly afterwards and went platinum in 2002, making emo become mainstream. Drive-Thru Records developed a roster of primarily pop punk bands with emo characteristics, including Midtown, the Starting Line, the Movielife and Something Corporate. Drive-Thru's partnership with MCA Records enabled its brand of emo-inflected pop to reach a wider audience. Drive-Thru's unabashedly populist, capitalist approach to music allowed its bands' albums and merchandise to sell in stores such as Hot Topic.
thumb|right|220px|Saves the Day was one of the more successful emo bands during the late 1990s and early 2000s, when emo was still primarily underground.
Independent label Vagrant Records signed several successful late-1990s and early-2000s emo bands. The Get Up Kids had sold over 15,000 copies of their debut album, Four Minute Mile (1997), before signing with Vagrant. The label promoted them aggressively, sending them on tours opening for Green Day and Weezer. Their 1999 album, Something to Write Home About, reaching number 31 on Billboard Top Heatseekers chart. Vagrant signed and recorded a number of other emo-related bands over the next two years, including the Anniversary, Reggie and the Full Effect, the New Amsterdams, Alkaline Trio, Saves the Day, Dashboard Confessional, Hey Mercedes and Hot Rod Circuit. Saves the Day had developed a substantial East Coast following and sold almost 50,000 copies of their second album, Through Being Cool (1999), before signing with Vagrant and releasing Stay What You Are (2001). Stay What You Are sold 15,000 copies in its first week, reached number 100 on the Billboard 200 and sold at least 120,000 copies in the United States. Vagrant organized a national tour with every band on its label, sponsored by corporations including Microsoft and Coca-Cola, during the summer of 2001. Its populist approach and use of the internet as a marketing tool made it one of the country's most-successful independent labels and helped popularize the word "emo". According to Greenwald, "More than any other event, it was Vagrant America that defined emo to masses—mainly because it had the gumption to hit the road and bring it to them."