Where Are Your Boys Tonight?: The Oral History of Emo's Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008

by Chris Payne

The music this book is about, whatever you want to call it—[early] 2000s emo, emo-pop, third-wave emo, mall emo, MTVmo, Steven’s Untitled Rock Show–core, fake punk bullshit for posers—can be traced back, somehow, someway, to hardcore punk, and thus, an outsider mentality.

American hardcore—bands like Bad Brains, Black Flag, Minor Threat, and Dead Kennedys—started in the late seventies as a loosely connected community of scenes with no link to the mainstream music business. It thrived off-the-grid in LA and DC, but also in places like Austin, Texas, and Reno, Nevada.

So about eight years into the hardcore movement, when a few DC bands got tired of stage diving and built their identities around yearning, poetic lyrics, and performed like they were about to burst into flames, they stood out. People even thought of a word for it. The term “emocore” (short for “emotive hardcore” or “emotional hardcore”) had been bouncing around the album review sections of publications like Thrasher, and with bands like Rites of Spring and Embrace, the term stuck.

Rites of Spring, commonly cited as the “first” emo band, played only a handful of shows outside DC and broke up after about two years. Embrace’s run was even briefer; they split in 1986, and vocalist Ian MacKaye formed the post-hardcore band Fugazi a year later.

Some major labels and prominent indies tried to ride the post-Nirvana rush and break emo bands in the mainstream, but the moment wasn’t right. Over the decades, records like Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary, the Promise Ring’s Nothing Feels Good, Jawbox’s For Your Own Special Sweetheart, and Jawbreaker’s Dear You have grown into underground classics, but upon release, they certainly weren’t making anyone rich.

We start at the turn of the millennium, when a handful of overlooked scenes fostered a slew of promising groups who hardly dreamed of any sort of success, outside of filling basements and Elks Lodges (often with the help of five other bands). For Thursday, Midtown, and Saves the Day in New Jersey; Brand New and Taking Back Sunday on Long Island; Dashboard Confessional in Florida; and the hardcore kids who’d soon form Fall Out Boy in the Chicago burbs, local heroes were exactly that: local.

Part two picks up in 2001, with Dashboard Confessional and Jimmy Eat World, a survivor of that post-Nirvana alt-rock bust, on the verge of taking emo to the masses. In 2002, the moment arrived.

Part three follows the mass media feeding frenzy that ensued in 2003, but even more importantly, the social media revolution that began that year with the launch of MySpace. When the platform took off in 2004, soon-to-be stars like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance flourished on its pixelated pages. The age of influencers had dawned, and emo was its choice aesthetic.

then there’s 2005, the only year to get its own section. This year was a unicorn, a collision of old media and new, of punk rock and pop stardom, that we’re unlikely to see again.

The same way rock historians talk about 1977 and 1991, 2005 was the lynchpin of emo, the big bang of the 2000s.

did these bands do with all that power? Over section five, we’ll ride the celebrity roller coaster through the triumphs of Paramore’s Riot! and My Chemical Romance becoming the Black Parade, but also the commercial misfires and band breakdowns that led to the end of mainstream emo.

“Emo” was often used as an insult with homophobic undertones, mocking the vulnerability of the lyrics and performances.

Brand New was arguably the most innovative and critically acclaimed band of their scene. Their appeal was so cultish and specific, it’s hard to put into words.

While the emo boom is inextricable from the internet, it’s tied to physical space and a time I don’t think could ever exist again. A time when the earliest recordings from bands like Thursday and Saves the Day felt like they could change the world, but you’d never heard anything like them on TV or radio before; when the internet was accessible enough to spread word of new demos and DIY shows, but pre-MySpace platforms like message boards and LiveJournal were still too analog and isolated to make anyone famous.

This is the era in which the book begins, and within that era, no scene was more vital than New Jersey’s. Before My Chemical Romance brought it to the Top of the Rock, emo’s explosion began across the Hudson River, in the suburbs just out of view . . .

MIKEY WAY: In New Jersey, everyone’s trying to get out of New Jersey,

Nobody has time to worry about your fucking artistic dreams in New Jersey.

you could see the New York City skyline, where everybody’s dreams supposedly came true. And then here we are. All these people with working-class dads, a lot of people with drinking problems in their family, a lot of people who feel like they couldn’t be further away from the idea of living your dream.

Springsteen was not what us young kids were listening to. Springsteen was our dads’ music.

There was nothing socially conscious about New York hardcore. . . . All dudes. Many, many fights.

My first time at CB’s I was baffled by how bloody it was.

grew up in Mount Vernon, in Westchester County, New York. So my experience of punk rock at a young age was very suburban. My parents wouldn’t let me go to the city, but once I turned eighteen, I was like a little bitch: “You can’t tell me, I’m eighteen!” So I started going to the city, shows at Brownies, Coney Island High, CBGB’s, Wetlands. All these places that are now defunct.

Giuliani was on a mission to shut down nightlife in New York. So Giuliani shut down all the places punk bands wanted to play in New York: Tramps, Wetlands, Coney Island High. So all the bands started hitting New Jersey harder.

From squatter kids and punk kids, it shifted to this cleaned up, emo-y post-hardcore music during that time. Similar ideals and aesthetics, but a kinder, gentler, more suburban version.

If you had friends at high school who were like, “I’m going to a concert,” they’re not in the scene. If you’re in the scene, you go to shows.

I have never seen such a clear explanation of this shibboleth before

“Oh, there’s a noose, it’s okay.” We’re like, what do you mean? “There’s a noose, it’s a gang killing, it doesn’t have to do with you guys.” Really not reassuring.

I remember staying up all night on my fucking Compaq on AOL punk chat rooms, bro. It was all about AOL chat rooms. It was a brand-new thing: I like punk rock, you like punk rock, I don’t know anyone else who likes punk rock, let’s talk about it on the internet.

It was the place to be. And Manville’s never been the place to be.

The only things you ever heard about Manville, New Jersey—if you weren’t from Manville, New Jersey—was that there would be shows put on there and more legendarily, there was a strip club called Frank’s Chicken House. It was known to have a pretty skeevatz reputation, as we would say in New Jersey with our Italian hybrid slag.

“Man, girls like him and he’s not a real punk and he’s bringing in all these outsiders,” and “I’m going yeah, well guess what, you sold four more seven-inches tonight because of those girls.”

I still despise tools like this

“I’m starting a band and we’re playing our first show soon.” I was like, “What’s the band called?” He said Thursday, but I thought he meant that’s the day they were playing. “No, the band is called Thursday.” I remember saying, “I think you should come up with a different name.”

This is not a band name that woul have floated a few yers later in the age of SEO

People really didn’t have cell phones when we were doing shows, but if you did, the band was gonna smack your shirt like, “Pay attention, you’re not gonna stand here and look down if you’re here.” It was very confrontational.

If you liked Lagwagon and had the most recent NOFX CD, you didn’t like Saves the Day. I was like, “I fucking love Can’t Slow Down, this guy listens to the same music I listen to!”

Kind of this punk rock guilt that slowed the process. And Gabe’s just a hustler, man. From the get with that band he was just like, “Yo, I’m trying to make this band big.”

People were poking fun at Through Being Cool because it was more polished, but those people also memorized all the words, you know what I mean?

We used to joke it would make more sense to book a show in Boston than Long Island. And usually that wasn’t an exaggeration.

There’s this sibling rivalry between New Jersey and Long Island, that they kind of seem to hate each other, but are kind of exactly the same. Like Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly in Step Brothers.

Long Island was very much more a New York scene than Jersey.

Five minutes from where I grew up in Lindenhurst was Amityville, which had tons of the most popular rappers in America at the time: De La Soul, one of the guys from Leaders of the New School. North of me is Wyandanch, that’s where Rakim is from. Public Enemy’s more like Nassau County, over where Beck from Glassjaw is from.

Its proximity to hip-hop culture made the scene unique. All the good Long Island bands had a hint of a bounce to their sound. It’s that vibe. It’s that air. It’s that lifestyle.

Dancing in our scene wasn’t just punching, kicking, moshing, fighting. There was rhythm and moves. From being on tour, I can say it was like nowhere else.

What made those other scenes really work was there was that local promoter. Jersey had Ricky Saporta. On Long Island, Christian McKnight was the guy.

It was kind of a nod to that. It was like the precursor to the Vice world: you’re hypercritical of social shit, you’re fucking vegetarian, but you’re eating fucking cocaine, like you’re a total fucking shithead hypocrite, get the fuck out of my face.

People could get a good sense of the North Shore and where I grew up in Wilmette by watching the John Hughes movies: Home Alone, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller were all filmed around the North Shore. My elementary school is where they shot Uncle Buck.

I learned more about politics going to one Racetraitor show than I did in all of my high school history classes.

Man, public schools are teeeeeerrrrrible.

They had this whole politic that your political behavior and the way you interact with people around you is your core activist element. And our message was the opposite: The way you engage with the system is the core.

That’s one of the things that drew me to hardcore and punk rock. A lot of people who didn’t fit in for whatever reason could not fit in together.

We were all straight edge. We didn’t drink. Never. Instead of drinking, we would cause trouble all the time. A lot of vandalism. Or you know, just skateboarding. Always out causing trouble.

What an odd tradeoff

The hardcore community says it’s inclusive and all about brotherhood and acceptance, and then you get a guy onstage that’s a part of the hardcore community, and they’re like, “No, this is not cool.” We would always notice the people that would not really approve of his live show—their girlfriends would watch him, and then the girlfriends would go buy merch. Like, the dude you’re here holding hands with just threw pennies at my friend but you just spent twenty bucks!

Without Napster, you had to have some kind of professional foothold, like your label has distribution to get stores to stock your record. Napster was the great equalizer. Anybody had a chance for distribution. Kids taking it upon themselves to make sure people downloaded it, or sent them burned CDs. This genuine peer-to-peer sharing. That gave me a fighting chance. I’d love to know who put it up there first.