Switched on Pop - The Past, Present, and Future of EMO (with Allegra Frank)

Episode Date: November 19, 2019

Nate doesn’t know much about the musical style known as emo. Sadly, he was too busy nerding out on jazz during his youthful years to catch the moment. That’s a shame, because emo is experiencing a revival right now - most surprisingly within the world of hip hop. All of which leaves Nate in the awkward position of not really having any idea what’s going on, so thank goodness for some schooling by Vox culture reporter Allegra Frank, who spent her teenage years the right way: getting emotional to the soundtrack of emo. Her first lesson about this endlessly fascinating subculture? It’s way more than just a sound.  Songs discussed: Sunny Day Real Estate - Seven Jawbreaker - Do You Still Hate Me?! My Chemical Romance - I’m Not Okay (I Promise) Fall Out Boy - Sugar, We’re Goin Down Panic! At the Disco - I Write Sins not Tragedies Jimmy Eat World - Lucky Denver Mint Jimmy Eat World - A Praise Chorus Jimmy Eat World - The Middle American Football - Never Meant Foxing - Lich My Prince  The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die - Heartbeat in the Brain Check out more of Allegra’s work here: https://www.vox.com/authors/allegra-frank And learn more about Tom Mullen and Washed Out Emo here: http://www.washedupemo.com/about Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switch on Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. Hi, Nate. Hi. Who are you? I'm not Charlie Harding. He's still out with his cute baby, but I am somewhere further down the list of the next best thing.

Pretty far down. If you see in the very small print, I am Allegra Frank. I'm from box.com. Yeah, thanks for having me. We've been a fan of your writing for so long. It's really thrilling to have you on the show, Allegra. Thanks for joining us. Thanks.

I'm really excited to talk to you about sad things, which is my favorite thing, is being sad. Yeah. This is the anti-pop episode. Yes. Well, there's definitely some pop influences. We'll see. What are we talking about today? We're talking about emo music.

Yes, finally. Tell me what you know about emo. I mean, this is why I'm so excited to have you on because this is like one of those embarrassing gaps in my musical knowledge. Emo. People talk about it. People make jokes about it. Oh, he's an emo kid. I pretend I know what they're talking about and laugh along.

Yeah, totally. I'm like, I don't really know what Emo really is. I have a vague idea that it involves like converse sneakers and really long song titles and maybe people. in the early 2000s, but it's a black hole for me. Awesome. Well, I will tell you that a lot of your impression of emo isn't totally wrong, so that's good. We're starting on a pretty good foot. That's encouraging.

Yes. Yeah. But actually, its roots are deeper and a little more complex, I think, its journeys from where it started to now. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about why I'm even thinking about email right now and why emo is sort of back in the either right now. Something really awesome happened, Nate. I'm on the edge of my seat.

Three of the biggest bands in the Emo sphere, Green Day, Weezer, and Fallout Boy, all announced on the same day that not only were they releasing new albums soon in 2020, I believe, but they are also going on a huge tour called the Hella Mega Tour. which is an amazing name. But it's also like three huge bands that like could sell out an arena on their own back when they were at their peak are going to triple headline. And it was amazing news for people like me. You know, it means next to nothing to me. And yet your excitement is like I'm getting really pumped up through it.

Oh, thank you for interrupting my passion to say that you don't share it. But that's okay. No, I'm glad that I have affecting you, though, because the reason this is so big for me personally is that I grew up when emo was sort of back. Right. From like 2002 to 2007 or eight, emo music was everything to me. And that went and ranged all the way from mineral, which is considered to be one of the first emo bands. To things like Weezer, which is very much on the sort of,

fringe of that. It's not exactly what a lot of people consider emo. Sunny Day real estate, jawbreaker. Probably names you're not super familiar with. No. That's okay. We're going to get there. But during that time period, it wasn't just that, you know, I personally was invested in these things. It was that they also were hugely popular. It's why this is the era that you think of when you think of emo. It was when Fallout Boy was when Fallout Boy was. at the top of the billboard chart. Wow. In the same year, we had My Chemical Romance, remember them?

Yeah. Their breakthrough album, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, that sold over a million copies. Green Day was sort of thrown into the mix because of their aesthetic and also because they were popular on the charts at the same time, which they had American Idiot come out,

and it went six times platinum. Wow. This sort of emo or punk ink-tinged music was all over the place. So when I was growing up and getting more exposed to media and everything that was good and bad about it, I found some sort of kindred spirit in the emo genre because of how emotive inherently, right, emo is short for emotional, which we'll talk about. But they were so vulnerable and songs were so personal and they didn't really sound anything

else like the traditional rock or pop on the radio. So I was walking around saying, oh, I love Panic of the Disco. I love Weezer. I love Green Day. These are emo bands because they felt more honest lyrically than a lot of the other music that was popular. But then as I got further into the genre, I found out that calling these things emo was controversial. We're going to talk about why, assuming you're still on board with me. Oh, I'm more on board than ever.

I didn't realize there would be this much intrigue in the, you know, Emo story. This is exciting. So much drama, I know. I think the best place to start is what is emo? You kind of gave me your own sense of what it is, which I told you wasn't totally wrong. But we're going to get something that's a little more right. Can I add live journal to my earlier description? I just thought of that.

Oh, that's a good one. Thank you. Yeah. But please continue. By and large, emo is a genre of music. At the same time, it is also an identity. and it's a community and it's a location. And defining its boundaries as a result is sort of a personal endeavor

because it does extend beyond a music genre. Yeah. I have my own sense of it, but I also wanted to get someone else to sort of help me out. So I reached out to a man named Tom Mullen who has a website and hosts a podcast called Washup Emo, both of which are very highly regarded in the emo scene. It's been around for over 10 years.

years now. Wow. But Tom's been a fan for even longer than that. He's been a fan since he was a teen in the 90s. And I talked to him and he told me that he started up this website because he felt like it was really hard to find out anything online about emo, which probably also contributed to some confusion that we all sort of had in the mid-2000s about what it actually was. In 2007, I just got frustrated and I said, no one's talking about the bands that I love. The internet only had the sort of the pop stuff. There wasn't articles about Sunday Day real estate or mineral. So I said, okay, I'll make a website.

And I just made it, and I just started talking about the bands that no one was talking about on the internet. I remember searching Emo into Google and nothing came up at all. And that was the first tagline of the website. At this time, 2007, when Tom Mullen started up this website, it seemed like Emo, the way you were describing it before, of like, long song titles and crying all the time. It seems like that was all over the place, right?

Especially like for teenagers, I was 14 then. So it was all over my school, like emoes. But for Tom, that's not the emo that resonated with him. That's not what he knew of as emo. Think of emo in that way as sort of a wave of indie rock, but one that didn't come from the same scene as indie rock does. Yeah. For a lot of people who really identify with emo,

it's sort of about what you know that matters the most. And Tom, it was cool because not only did he just, you know, talk about the bands he loved and talked to the bands he loved, but he also used his platform to sort of promote the newer bands that I mentioned, the ones that sort of sounded like the older bands that he loved, the ones that weren't quite mainstream, which was another really big push and pull tension of emo at its commercial height. But here's Tom really quickly telling us about, you know, what inspired him to really give the floor to some newer bands. It was just cool to be able to help them because it felt like there was a little tree beginning to come up out of the ground. No one was giving it water yet, but there was people in shows happening, but it wasn't in the mainstream eye.

So what is emo? Let's kind of just get down to it. Is it a variant of punk? Is it indie rock, like I said? It's not quite. It's born of both of those sort of scenes. Tom had a lot of trouble boiling it down for me when I tried to ask him, like, where did it start? But I think it's because, as I said before, emo is really personal. So let's just get to the straight basics because I know you're like chomping at the bit for that and you're like, please stop.

Just tell me what this thing is. I don't know. You keep referencing the things I think it is and you tell me I'm wrong. What is it? So it's short for emotional, but also it was emotional hardcore. So not just emotional in the sense of music that is very emotive, but a particular brand of hardcore punk. So in the mid-80s in particular, this is when emotional hardcore kind of started popping up in the DC punk scene.

So DC was like the place for younger punk bands, if you've ever heard of like minor threat. or Fugazi or Black Flag. So Emo came out of that scene, but it wasn't just a variant of punk, and it wasn't sort of like more indie skewing rock that was more feelings driven than punk, which was very aggressive. But there is some clear difference. Tom, when I asked him for a straight definition, he faced the same challenge that I'm clearly having and that industry folks have and that fans have of defining emo.

The genre itself wasn't playing just emo shows. So they were playing with hardcore bands. They were playing with punk bands. It wasn't as here's a emo tour that was never sort of talked about. So if we're talking about what it is, it's a combination of community, location, sound. and also, I mean, like, heart. And what I mean by heart is not sadness or happiness, but more of like, are you in it?

And I think I can tell the difference. If you're really, like, forcing it or trying to be it, you can do it. But when it comes to the word and the genre and how it connects, there's a level of sort of, I don't know, I can see through, you know, someone or see through it when it doesn't seem honest. And so there's a level of honesty to it where

You are wearing your heart on a sleeve. You are putting it out there. You are putting this music out there and you're not afraid. You're not ashamed. And there are different subsets. There are people that are going to argue with me all day about things. It's more of a cat and mouse joke. But when it comes down to it, that's what I look for.

And it goes back to that euphoria moment. Am I going to feel this? Talk about emotional. I'm getting a little, that got me a little choked up. I see what you mean. This is a musical style, but it's also something more. What I like about this, it's sort of simple what he says. Like he very much boils it down to like it's a combination of four things, right?

It's about the community. It's about the location. It's about the sound. And it's about heart. But then defining those four subsets in there becomes a lot harder. And especially when he says loving emo involves being in it. That's the thing where I was like, okay, but what does that mean, Tom? Like you said you can tell when someone has heart and is in it, but what?

What is it? What is the heart? How do we actually quantify or even qualify that, right? It kind of, to me, all spoke to, like, there's this protectiveness of emo as a culture and a genre because it's based around emotion and vulnerability, right? Like, because emo is inherently personal. It's about people who are, you know, wearing their heart on their sleeve and singing it through their music. And every part of their music bears that out.

which is why it includes community, which is, I think, people sort of bonding or geeking out over favorite lyrics and comparing set lists, going on live journal or forums or at bars, like emo night events where they play old emo songs and mix them with some new ones and just encourage people to mingle. That becomes part of the listening experience for emo. and a lot of that also has to do with location because there are certain pockets where it's a lot easier to find these like-minded people, the DC punk scene, right? That was a place. New Jersey was a huge place for both emo and punk.

A lot of bands came out of that area, probably because it's New Jersey. We're both New Yorkers, Nate, so, you know, I can just say it's New Jersey and you understand why people would be sad there. No comment. Also, the Midwest was a big location for emo bands, probably because, you know, it's in the middle of the country. There's this bi-coastal envy, I think, that people in the Midwest could have.

And so they would channel that through music. So those three locations, and, you know, D.C. one, there was already a budding punk scene, but also you're close to the government, and this was in the late 80s with Reagan. And, oy, yoy, there's a lot of reasons to have feelings down there, too. So location is really crucial. And then for Hart, I tried to think about what heart means to me in Emo. And I guess to me it's this implicit sense of dedication to all of these aspects, dedication to the genre, protecting it, exulting it, championing it. Emo's not just a type of music you're into, right?

It's like a lot more. It's how you learn to express yourself and your emotions. and you find people who validate that. You sort of make sense of why it means so much to you, and that can often drive you to have very particular emotions. And one of those emotions, guess which one of those emotions, Tom was not happy to have associated with emo? Sadness.

Yes, you got it. Sadness. Everyone says that emo is sad. Now, we talk about anything in the media, Spider-Man, He's sad. He looks down. They call it emo or the Star Wars movies, that one character. Ilo Ren.

Yeah. And there's a Twitter account. Everyone thinks that that's, so that permeates that thought away from the music. So the sadness and that thing, all the things I just talked about had nothing to do with sadness. But for some reason, any time someone uses that word, it's a joke. And so if I'm giving the definition, it's not what the mainstream people. keeps pushing out. It's about community. It's about friendship. It's about the labels. It's about making things, not just doing it to say like, I'm sad. I love this. We are blowing up all of my

stereotypes about emo already. I'm going to suggest we take a quick break and gather ourselves and then come back and listen to some of these tracks and see how they, might give us a deeper picture of what emo actually is. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic,

and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no. No. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on

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So Allegra, where do we want to start? I want to start from the top because I want us to figure out how we got from punk, angry emo, which is where it started, to sad, right? Which isn't fair and it's not accurate because emo doesn't have to say. sound sad, and frankly, for the most part, it doesn't sound sad. So I think I want us to start from the top so we can bust up that assumption. Does that sound cool to you? I'm ready to bust some emo myths with you. Yes. So I mentioned before that emo really got its start as emotional hardcore in the 80s, punk scene predominantly in D.C. Around this same time, there were other, there were punk bands, like I mentioned Black Flag, Fugazi, minor threat.

But there also were bands like Nirvana, you may recall, that established a sound for rock music that bled into emo. So let's kind of boil that down to like, it's mostly guys. It's mostly like lower registers, very loud like guitars, guitar solos, pretty aggressive percussion. Yeah, I think that's generally how I would describe punk at that time. So you started to see

those traits pop up but in a slightly different way from punk. Like there were songs that were starting to evolve out of the punk scene that also really sort of were different because of their lyrics. I would say very largely their lyrics

at this time. One of those big bands that kind of seamlessly went from punk to emo was a band called Jawbreaker. It was this band that really a couple of albums in the late 80s, early 90s, that were super beloved. And then they joined a major label. And as can happen with kind of cool indie bands, the major label release wasn't as well

received. Yeah, they broke up after the release of their major label debut, which was called Dear You. They're one of the first bands to really break out from traditional punk to combine more honest, personal, emotional lyrics. So I want you to listen to a little bit of this one song called Do You Still Hate Me? What about this song to you as a music theorist and musicologist? Why is this not just a punk song?

I love that question. I mean, I'm definitely hearing those sonic characteristics of punk you're talking about low register guitars and distortion. and sort of sparse, like, power trio, guitar-based drums kind of set up. And yet maybe the things that separate this from punk for me are the melodic content, which is very sweet and even sort of catchy and kind of get stuck in your head in a way that I think punk would be anathema to a punk sensibility in which something that is catchy or too melodic or frankly like kind of enjoyable to listen to would be contrary to the anti-capitalist

mission of punk perhaps. In the same way, there's calculated sloppiness to punk music. I don't say that in a pejorative way. Like, that's part of the sound of punk. That's part of the aesthetic that being too accomplished or precise is maybe a kind of conformity and is thus to be avoided at all cost. By contrast, this has a certain kind of virtuosity, especially in the drums. You can really hear these sort of lightning fast snare rolls and perfectly executed drum fills that are like really kind of take your breath away. Those jump out

to me as key divergences from a punk sound here. This is so cool to talk to someone who knows what they're talking about about music because that's so awesome. Like everything you said really taps into a lot of what emo was and how it diverged from punk in the late 80s, early 90s. I was sort of looking at it from a lyrical perspective because I think you perfectly nailed down the musical differences. But lyrically speaking, this song, like it's called, do you still hate me? Right. It's sort of pleading, please don't hate me anymore. I'm worried that you hate me. I'm, anxious about you not liking me. And that's honestly a really deeply relatable feeling for a lot of people like

jawbreaker and like me who constantly fear that people don't like them and are worried about judgment. And that song, I think from a lyrics perspective, it really exemplifies the emotional part of emotional hardcore. Totally. And I feel like I can already hear some of the seeds of the hella megatour here, which is really cool. Well, we're about to kind of actually deviate away from the idea of lyrics because it's

interesting because Emo both is about the lyrics but then also about imagery at the same time. So by that I mean the lyrics are either incredibly specific, incredibly personal, incredibly open to a point where you feel as though someone is bleeding their heart out to you and all you can do is take their heart and love them. Or emo is about

creating this sort of fantastical image scape. It's about the feeling that it evokes more so than the words itself, the words themselves and what they're trying to tell you. Which is an

interesting dichotomy to have because they seem completely antithetical to each other. But I think, I hope that this next example will sort of show you why that they work. Like those work and are actually more sympathico than that, you know, this would suggest. In 1994, what I would consider to be arguably the most important emo band, Sunny Day Real Estate's first album, Diary came out. And Diary is well titled because the album is this diaristic. exploration of the memories and feelings and ups and downs of its lead singer, Jeremy, and I've never learned how to pronounce his name.

So we're going to just call him Jeremy. He's a beautiful man. There we go. My boy, beautiful Jeremy. And from me saying that, like, we don't need, we don't, we're on a first name basis. Yeah. I mean, it's his diary. We've read his diary.

We've listened to it. There we go. The thing I love about this song, Seven, that I want you to, listen to which was the big single off of diary is it says so much without making any particular like you know grand overtures about this is how I feel this is my life this is what this memory is specifically it's very abstract it's very fantastical and I think in that way it makes it feel even more personal to the listener themselves so let's listen to seven by Sunny Day real estate It's a good song.

Wow. That really hooked me. Lots of dramatic shifts, these moments where everything drops out except the vocal and then suddenly there's this explosion of noise and all the instruments are back in. And then as soon as they join, it's back to just the vocal again. It's very almost like operatic or something. It's high drama. High drama is such a good way to describe. that. It is very dramatic. It is. And Jeremy, our boy, our beautiful boy, Jeremy, he has this

Jay Train has this really pretty voice. Like his voice is honestly very, it's tuneful and it's sweet. It's kind of delicate in a way. Yeah, it's delicate. And in the chorus, he does, you know, end up shouting the lyrics, but it's never as if he's trying to shout them at you. It's more like This is how he needs to communicate. And there's a reason that Sunday Day real estate is considered the second wave in a sense of emo is one. In terms of location, Sunny Day Real Estate was from Seattle, which was huge for grunge and indie rock. So they were percolating in those spaces. And they were on sub-pop records, which is a very well-known record label that, you know, Nervoir.

Bona's first record was on. But the vocals and this shift away from low register to a higher register and less intimidatingly loud and gruff and low vocalization, I think that was a really big turning point for emo. Emo didn't have to be punky anymore. It didn't have to be people who were going to tear their shirts off and have all these tattoos and start screaming and moshing. It could be a soundscape for feelings,

or it could even be a blunt discussion of feelings. It could be either one, but it could be open to, like, you know, slubby dudes in jeans from Gap, you know? Yeah, I'm feeling like there's an alternate reality in which I don't just kind of go down the jazz route in middle school and high school and could find a lot of the same emotional meaning

and technical musical musicality in this emo scene. It's really interesting. Okay, Sunday Day Real Estate, two thumbs up. That's a maximum number of thumbs, which is awesome. Yeah, and they could have been thumbing a bass and an emo power trio in another reality. Yeah, so from Sunny Day Real Estate in 1994, it really opened up the door for a lot of bands that were influenced by them. Toward the back half of the 90s we start seeing other bands really make it big,

things like the Get Up Kids, Dashboard Confessional. These bands came up right around Sunny Day Real Estate. The one I want us to talk about right now is called Jimmy Eat World. Have you heard of them? It just takes some time. Yeah. Right? Yeah, the middle.

This is the first song that you feel. known. Yeah, you loved it. I clearly don't know any of the lyrics, but I love that song. We all know the song. It was like my favorite song when I was like nine or eight or something. Oh my God, it's so good. Yeah. Yeah. Jimmy U.Rill released their first album. It was an indie album in 1994. Didn't make any huge waves, but people who were sort of in the emo and indie scenes, they knew about it. They liked it. And they were very much inspired by Sunny Day Real Estate, of course, as well as as other bands from around then. So their second album was called Static Prevails,

and it was on Capitol Records, so they had some attention and they had some singles. Their music was a lot slower, and it was a lot more interestingly constructed and orchestrated, and the vocals were softer, not as in your face, more considered. Gotcha. They're sort of moved toward a more emo-type.

of sound and less like punk rock. Didn't really chart, but their new sound resonated with a different and bigger audience. After that, Clarity by Jimmy Eat World was their real big breakthrough in the emo scene. And the first album in the emo scene that really felt like a radio ready kind of album that still fit in with emo. There are choruses, it's melodic, the vocals are a higher register. and probably more appropriate for the radio. Clarity did really well.

They had some clout. They had been on a major label, which ended up dropping them because sales weren't amazing. It was 1999, and, you know, Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys and InSink, they were the big guys. But for the people who cared about that sort of thing, clarity was huge. But then we sort of start to shift away from, you know,

teeny bopper pop being the hotness, by 2001. I think we were all interested in finding something new, a new sound for the new century. And Jimmy World came back up, and they were on DreamWorks now, so they still had major label backing, and they released Bleed American, which had a ton of commercial success. The album is platinum. It's sold over 1.6 million copies now. So I want to have you listen to two. Jimmy World songs right now. Awesome. One from Clarity, which is their more emo breakthrough,

and then we're going to listen to one from Bleed American. And then I want us to sort of talk about the difference and why Bleed American in that song probably stood a better chance for success than the prior song from Clarity. So the first song from Clarity is my favorite song and also a big single. It's called Lucky Denver Mint.

So I want you to listen to that. Let's do it. I really dig it. There's something that really jumps out immediately, which is the contrast between the kind of pulsing drums and guitars, and maybe there's even a synthesizer in there that are chugging away at sort of a 16th note pace. Take it, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick it, tick it, tick it, diga, diga, diga, diga, diga, and then on top of that, the vocals are at this much kind of slower temporal.

register of like half notes, Denver, mint. So it's like these two contrasting rhythmic planes that together produce this really moving kind of tension. It definitely has like strains of a sort of traditional popular rock song, but then also like if we look at the lyrics, going back to what I was saying about Sunny Day real estate of they create these sort of image scapes within their lyrics. Like it's not necessarily like easily interpreted what they're saying or what they're trying to convey

and it's more about what you're getting out of it. Lucky Denver Mint, I mean, the lyrics don't necessarily make a ton of immediate sense. It says this time it's on my own, minutes from somewhere else, somewhere I made a wish with Lucky Devmur Mint, hurry, go on ahead.

It's very internal. And it really is left to the listener to ascertain what the mistakes are that he's trying to wish away and how we can see that in our own lives. Yeah. Really, I think what Jimmy World did super well is they captured that emo sensibility, but also made it a little more palatable

for the average listener. Right, right. That's more apparent in this next song from Bleed American, which was their big breakthrough. And this one's called A Praise Court. And I chose this one instead of the middle for a very particular reason that I will get to after you listen to the first 30 seconds or so of this one. So this is a praise chorus by Jimmy Eat World. That was really cool.

That felt in some ways like looking even further back to the progenitors of this emo movement like jawbreaker that we listen to. It's like a little more elemental in a way perhaps than Lucky Denver Mint. Okay, that's interesting. Elemental. I feel like I hear more of the punk roots of this band in that song. Yeah, than in Lucky Denver. Just sort of like chugging wall of sound guitar and just like straight head like duke, uncha, uncha, drumming.

And yeah, it's, I mean, the melodies are still something else entirely. But I heard like more of that punk DNA in that version. Yeah, I think that's totally right. I think Lucky Denver Mint leaned more toward. not not sunny day real estate but bands that followed after sunny day real estate so like we mentioned dashboard confessional which was very much when they started acoustic and sort of like a college kid with his guitar and his bedroom it wasn't about the whole band situation it wasn't really about trying to create a lot of sound and a lot of noise and lucky denverman feels a bit more like that of course it's it's different it's not acoustic it is a full band but it reminds me more of of like this sort of simple I'm a guy sitting in a room being in my feelings. Yeah. And then a praise chorus, it's more of an active energetic song for sure. It does remind me more of like the sense I get when listening to Jawbreaker, which is sort of to jump up and down, right? That's the sense I get to when I listen to a praise chorus. But I chose, so I think that's great. I think that's awesome that it feels to you more like an original sort of emo song, First Wave here, if we want to call it that. So I'm going to bring us to now the time that you were thinking of for Emo 2004.

There we go. Yeah. So this is when Emo as sad, as wacky, as a look, an aesthetic, as a boy band even sort of fandom. This is when those images and impressions of emo started to show up. Fallout Boy, My Chemical Romance, Panic of the Disco, Cobra Starship, God forbid, a bunch of other bands that were popular at this time in the emo scene or what was being called emo. They really kind of were like boy bands. This is when community meant obsession.

It meant going on your live journal and making personal profile icons of your favorite singer. It meant idolizing the people in these bands because they were getting into the sort of performative aspects. And it wasn't necessarily performative emoting so much as it was like making a real performance out of emo, which shied away from that in favor of giving a sort of honest view and honest performance of the music. Before Jimmy Eat World and Sunny Day Real Estate and Jawbreaker, they were more about you getting something directly from the music. They didn't try and dress up for you. they didn't want you to come to see them and take pictures with them. They wanted you to come and have an experience where they would share themselves with you. When we get to Fall Out Boy, it's not that people don't relate to them.

That's not true at all. They definitely have relatable lyrics and same with My Chemical Romance, which had a song called I'm Not Okay, I Promise, which spoke to a lot of people who were in middle school when I was in middle school. That's another killer. song title right there. To me that is textbook emo. Just something about the pounding guitars and maybe particularly the tonal quality of Gerard Way's voice in that track, which is just like dripping with emotion and it's like laying

it all out on the table. Yeah, that's really fun to listen to. It's cool that you say that. It's funny because my chemical romance, one, I agree. That's like to a lot of people what emo sounds like and looks like, and I'll get into that in a minute. But also, my chemical romance, just to get personal for a second, is my least favorite of the bands that I'm talking about today. That's okay. And I think it's because, to me, I think they're very talented.

I think Gerard Way has a great voice. But what always have bothered me was that their performance leans so heavily. into what I consider to be like a parody of emo. I think it's my chemical romance. Yeah, that is why people think of sad when they think of emo. Both because of this song, right? Like, I'm not okay, I promise.

That tells you, right? What it wants to tell you from the title. But then they would wear black eyeliner and black nail polish and they were very pale and they strained their hair and they wore for the Black Parade album. They all wore black, like, vintage.

army uniforms. It was very much like putting on a show, which isn't bad, but it really took away from the lyrics and the emotion for me and made it something that could be packaged up into an aesthetic. I think Fallout Boy takes that sort of pop sensibility aspect, but doesn't make it quite as a performance. It makes emo sing-alongable, if that's a word, It makes Emo something you can sing along to in public at a club for the first time.

Not just catchy, not just like with a chorus that is super memorable, like the middle. Like everyone knows every single word to Sugar We're Going Down from Fall Out Boy's biggest album. They kind of built upon the framework that Jimmy World created of making Emo a mainstream thing, a mainstream hit. And they took it all the way to the top. Falla Boy was huge. This song was huge. Dance, Dance, another single from this album, was so big. Everyone loved these things because they did have, they were rock songs and they were emo. And if we really want to talk performance, we could spend a whole bunch of time talking about Panic of the Disco. But I think that actually could help us come up to the present day because Panic of the Disco was also part of that whole emo group. Their first album came out in 2005. You remember Panic of the Disco, right? They were the people who always pretended that they were, like, working out a circus. Remember them.

They just had a top, top 40 hit with high hopes. After everything we talked about, is that emo, Nate? No, no, you're right, Allegra. That is pop with a capital P, not emo. It is pop. Panic of the Disco was great, but there were bands that started to come out afterward that really were trying to ape that style of, like, being very poppy in this ostentatious way. without having any substance.

Like Brendan Uri's an amazing singer and that's a big part of why planning of disco is successful and still is. But bands that came after like all-time low, metro station, they're not as critically acclaimed or beloved as the emo bands that came before. And emo's just in general, there's like a huge proliferation of bands

that all were borrowing each other's sounds and copying from each other. And it became too much. It started to oversaturate them. market and emo just started started to peter off by the end of the decade. So by the time you get to 2009, emo just didn't really fit into the musical landscape anymore. But that was just true of the mainstream. We had people like Tom Mullen who had washed up Emo by this time by like 2009, reminding us that Emo had never gone away. Emo wasn't dead. And the emo he was thinking of wasn't panic of the

disco and wasn't fallout boy in my chemical romance. It was bands like a little band called The World is a Beautiful Place and I am no longer afraid to die. Run that by me one more time. The World is a Beautiful Place and I am no longer afraid to die. Okay, great. At first I wasn't sure if the band's name was The World is a Beautiful Place and you were separately just letting me know that you were no longer afraid to die. So that's clarifying. Yeah, I mean. That's a mouthful. That's a thing I would say because of the continued existence of emo.

But yeah, the world is a beautiful place and I am no longer afraid to die. They started in 2009 and slowly worked their way into more of a, well, not so much the small scene in Connecticut, which is where they started. They started to get more mainstream national attention for sounding like classic emo. you know, like chugging guitars, deeply layered chords, and growling vocals that were going into the belly of yourself and pulling out your feelings through some sort of like a wailing. Yeah, well, a beautiful description, yeah. Yeah, thank you.

And I talked to The World is a Beautiful Place because I wanted to hear from them about the so-called emo revival. I ask them, what does emo mean to you? And what is the emo revival in particular? I like it because I feel like it can be like whatever you want to be. Like the whole emo revival thing is the thing that we are associated with. And like I feel like that's just like a label that we have and will continue to have like no matter what kind of weird music we decide to put out. And I think that can be said about any band like in the emo genre.

I don't know. There's like room exploration and like you can do whatever you want. And I think it's really cool. And I also do think it's really cool that, like, people can be genuine. There aren't, like, a whole lot of big egos in Emo. I like that tape from our conversation because it really, it drops this pretense of what Emo has to be, which I think got really muddled by the time we got out of the aughts, by the time we got to 2010.

Because at that point, we thought Emo must be kind of, of melodramatic. It must be sad. It must be people who have never seen the sun and who just want to die. But it doesn't have to be. It can be whatever you want it to be, whatever it needs to be for you. And I think it's really cool that the world's beautiful place is seen as like one of the bands in the forefront for this email revival because they have such a chill and non-possessive understanding of the genre. Like they don't necessarily consider themselves to be emo. Their influences aren't strictly emo bands.

But overall, it's just people who want to feel something together and make friends with people who understand them and understand why this music is so important to them. Yeah. Which is great. It makes me think of that last line from The World is a Beautiful Place. What attracts them to the idea of emo is that it's a place without ego. And maybe that is at its best, at least, the promise that this genre has always offered.

I love that. I hope that now you can understand why I think emo is so exciting and why I was so excited about this hella megator, even though it also sent me into the spiral of reminding me of like, what is emo anyway, though, if we're calling this the big emo comeback? Wow. Allegra Frank. Thank you so much for joining. us on this emo odyssey. You have really enlightened me in a deep way forever more as to what

emo is and isn't and what it sounds like and that its identity is will perennially be somewhere in between a negotiation, but at the center of it will always be that thing that Tom Mellon said, the heart. The heart. It all comes back to the heart. Thank you for joining us. Yay. Thank you so much for having me. Switched on Pop is produced by Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding. Our extraordinary editor and engineers, the great Brandon McFarland, Megan Lubin and Bridget Armstrong, our producers. Liz Nelson and Nashat Kerwa are executive producers,

and as always we're proud members of the Vox Media Network. You can get our podcasts anywhere you get podcasts, Spotify, Apple Podcasts app, all the other ones. And we'll release a new episode every Tuesday, so join the conversation. and reach out to us on Twitter. It's switched on pop and tell us what you are hearing in the wild world of pop. Until then, see you next week, and thanks for listening.