We All Sing the Songs of Separation
The politics of emo
[This is an essay I wrote for a zine about my experience of emo culture, which you can view here.]
For a subculture historically connected to punk, emo was never an explicitly political scene. To this day there exists a wide gap between emo genre purists and those who, in their words, followed emo as a fashion trend. Even the term emo has been a site of controversy since its conception. For the post-hardcore bands labeled with the term, it was seen as derogatory and insulting. Genre purists decried the increasing commercialisation of emo as an aesthetic trend rather than a specific music genre, a genre that many of the bands that would achieve mainstream success under the emo label didn’t even fit into. For them, emotional hardcore is a specifically delineated musical genre that has little if anything to do with what emo came to mean in the popular imagination.
And so the age-old subcultural politics of authenticity vs commercial success played out in the post-hardcore scenes that birthed emo. Post-hardcore was an expansion of and reaction to the crass hypermasculinity of hardcore punk, incorporating more introspective emotional elements and experimenting with other genres. This is arguably what enabled it to break into the mainstream, however with increasing commercial success the original punk ethos of anti-commercialism and DIY became mostly, if not entirely, lost.
Commercialisation was essential to the popular spread of emo as an aesthetic. Mass media like MTV and music magazines were integral to bringing bands like My Chemical Romance to the masses, and with it the fashion trends that would define a generation of rebellious teenagers. Once emo became a global cultural phenomenon, it had departed so far from punk’s radical political roots that their only connection remained in the safety pins people would stick through their jackets.
There is nothing surprising about the commodification of subculture. And while capitalism is an expert at emptying movements of their social critiques by selling rebellion as an aesthetic, this doesn’t mean that emo as a subculture is devoid of value. If anything, emo can tell us a lot about the society it thrived in, and the society it opposed.
Emo still had its political moments. Bands like Thursday and Green Day explicitly expressed dissent with post 9/11 American politics and the Iraq war in their music. And even in the most apolitical expressions of disaffection and despair, one could read the imprints of what the alienation of late capitalism was doing to people. The disaffected despair of emo music fit perfectly into the growing social malaise resulting from decades of neoliberalism and the related increase in mental health conditions. Indeed, emo’s relationship to mental health was an almost perfect microcosm of what happened when rampant individualism met crushing alienation in a depoliticised culture.
It’s fairly obvious that emo attracted a lot of young people with mental health issues. There is certainly a part of the culture that glorified that stuff to an extent that was, admittedly, unhelpful. But at its best the scene provided a space for disenfranchised and marginalised youth to feel less isolated in their suffering. The music was known for its theatrical and exaggerated display of emotions, and emo culture probably played a substantial role in normalising the open discussion of mental health.
The use of the internet and early social networks was integral to this. People often aired their grievances online hoping to connect with others, when in real life they felt untethered and isolated from others, unable to talk about what was important to them. Back then, if you spent most of your time on the internet you were still seen as kind of weird. Today, that desire to connect to like-minded people online and to escape from the real world into a world where one could belong has become normalised.
Ultimately, subculture is fulfilling a desire for belonging and being accepted for one's authentic self that the dominant culture, for whatever reason, can’t fulfil. Emo, with its aestheticization of strong emotions, fulfilled a desire to have one’s ‘shameful’ negative feelings acknowledged, to be seen as a person capable of suffering without denying that suffering. It met the fundamental human desire to be seen for who one really was.
We didn’t have words for the alienation we were feeling, didn’t even know what alienation was or that it was a word that existed. Who could’ve told us? But the music we listened to, that was what it felt like, whatever that feeling was. And the way we dressed and expressed ourselves was an attempt to establish meaning in a world that appeared inexplicably grey and inhuman, but we didn’t have words for that at the time. It was just that nagging feeling that something was not right. That the life that was sold to us was no way to live.
Emo was perhaps a natural reaction to a culture that not only increasingly demanded happiness as a default state of mind, but also made individuals responsible for their own wellbeing, and that therefore you could fail to achieve it. In a neoliberal society that at once fetishises happiness and makes it unreachable, is it any wonder that people embraced a culture that made an art of putting every negative emotion on full display? In a culture that demands your cheerful participation in norms that actively hurt you, is it not a welcome respite to drop the performance and show how you really feel?
Of course, the apolitical individualist nature of emo culture meant that many of the grievances we had with the dominant culture remained just that: personal emotions. I guess you’re just sensitive, or depressed, or a tortured artist. It’s just a phase! It didn’t occur to us at the time that a huge part of what hurt us had to do with forms of marginalisation and oppression, and that we were seeking refuge in a subculture that allowed our authenticity, at least to an extent. I really do think that emo culture was a precursor to modern mental health discourse, because it existed in the same depoliticised individualised digital spaces that we’re familiar with today.
The fact that emo was rarely explicitly political is a predictable result of a culture under the influence of decades of neoliberalism and rampant individualism. But even within those constraints, emo did create a space for alternative social forms to be explored: there was room for deviant gender expression and queerness, and there was room to talk about the emotions that everyone else was denying. And what else could we have done? We did our best with the tools that were available to us. And what we created went down in history as an iconic period of culture.