Dictionary

There's no consensus definition for "emo," but there are plenty of things related to the culture we can break down. From Rites of Spring to the Fifth Wave ...

While a lot of the music fell into the “indie rock” bucket, emo bands like Pinback, Bright Eyes, and Jimmy Eat World snuck into the mix. “The Middle”: In 2002, as most of the music press was spilling untold gallons of ink about the Strokes and the White Stripes, a group of emo survivors shot up the charts and improbably landed as one of Billboard’s Songs of the Summer. Jimmy Eat World had toiled away as an afterthought on Capitol for a few years, failing to break through in any meaningful way. Third-wave emo is when “emo” became something kids embraced en masse—and for many that found it during the 2000s, it was just a phase. They christened the project with a name inspired by the means of collaboration, and their resulting album has one of the most emo titles possible: Give Up. Their biggest hit (“Such Great Heights”) is an electronic emo song through and through, and in true classic emo fashion, they broke up after one great album and have only teased at new music since then. SuicideGirls: The “alt” lewd and nude website/magazine that employed models with a “punk” aesthetic. Myspace: The platonic ideal of a social-networking site, one that allowed bands to connect directly with fans like never before and users to let their emo flags fly in the form of GIFs, elaborate wallpapers, and MCR lyrics in the About Me section. Nowcore! (The Punk Rock Evolution): A shockingly excellent late-’90s compilation of indie and emo produced by K-Tel, the company known for hawking ice-cream makers and country LPs in late-night infomercials. But the name stuck, and in a way, the pioneering punk became a trailblazer in another way: He kicked off a long tradition of emo musicians rejecting the label outright. Long song titles: There’s a cottage industry of clickbait dedicated to the long emo song title, but consider the beauty of one in particular: Fall Out Boy’s “‘I’ve Got a Dark Alley and a Bad Idea That Says You Should Shut Your Mouth (Summer Song).’” It’s the “(Summer Song)” that sells this—did FOB add the parenthetical because they felt the song title needed more words? Predictably, there have been disputes over who owns the rights to the idea, with a trademark battle over the name “Emo Night.” And the profits aren’t just confined to cover charges: The L.A. iteration has sold hundreds if not thousands of their “Sad As Fuck” T-shirt, while the Brooklyn crew recorded an original song in 2018. (“It’s warmer where you’re waiting / It feels more like July / There’s pillows in their cases / And one of those is mine.”) It feels like his diary—or maybe yours—come to life. (The short, vague answer is to evoke Potter Stewart’s definition of obscenity: You know emo when you see it.) If nothing else, “Defend Pop Punk” makes for a great T-shirt.