By Saira Afzal
Illustrated by Francesca Corno
The Barbican Music Library currently has a small yet incredibly nostalgic exhibition dedicated to the emo subculture that brought me back to simpler times. The exhibition prompted me to reflect on my own experience with emo, growing up as a kid ‘raised by the internet’ with My Chemical Romance flooding my headphones from the tender age of eleven. The emo subculture wasn’t solely about music or fashion. It represented an entire lifestyle dedicated to being alternative: rejecting posh, stiff British culture while rebelling against the mainstream and the upper class.
Emo (or emotional hardcore) was founded in Washington D.C. in the mid-1980s, with bands like Rites of Spring or Sunny Day Real Estate dominating the scene. Emo is, at its core, a fusion of soppy, confessional lyricism with the aggression and rage of punk music. Unsurprisingly, the exhibition showcases My Chemical Romance (MCR), Fall Out Boy, Paramore, Evanescence, Green Day, and many other bands who found fame around the 1990s-2000s. More unexpectedly, bands like Nirvana and System Of A Down made their way into the showcase, more specifically a Kerrang! cutout of Nirvana, and System Of A Down’s ‘Toxicity’ on CD – demonstrating the blanket use (some would say bastardisation) of the word ‘emo’, commonly throwing grunge, nu-metal, and punk under the emo umbrella.
The exhibition has a wall plastered with grainy MySpace digital camera shots of emo teens, and contributions to the exhibition by their adult selves. The MCR T-shirts, side fringes, and heavy black eyeliner were in almost every single photo. One of my favourite photos on the wall depicts a group of teens huddled around a train table, circa 2008, all donning spiky haircuts with striking bleached highlights. What’s fascinating is that despite emo fashion having multiple staples, every emo teen depicted on the wall retained their own personal style, whether that’s merging emo fashion with scene-kid fashion (think stud belts, tutus, chequered patterns, and neon pinks and greens), DIY accessorising, or wearing their favourite band’s merch. Emo wasn’t all black and red; it was a burst of colour and style, merging together with goth and punk fashion to create its own unique voice in the post-hardcore, early 2000s social environment.
Much of the exhibition focuses on old tech. The mid-2000s were revolutionary for mobile phones, with devices such as the T-Mobile Sidekick and Motorola RAZR allowing teenagers to creatively engage with phones. The combination of new technologies for listening to music, browsing the internet, and chatting with friends coincided perfectly with the rise of the emo subculture. Tech wasn’t merely a medium of emo subculture but became a symbol of the subculture itself. Staying up to date with what your friends were listening to was even easier with the creation of cyberspaces like LiveJournal, MySpace, and Bebo. We may consider them digital fossils now, but they were the height of technology back then.
Most impressive were the signed setlist sheets and albums from Panic! At The Disco and MCR. It was surreal to see the signatures of bands that fundamentally shaped my youth. However, I would be lying if I said emo was dead. Just last month, Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance performed at the ‘When We Were Young’ Festival, with MCR performing the entirety of The Black Parade and Fall Out Boy playing across their entire discography. And next year, Panic! At The Disco will perform their debut album A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out at the same festival. Others at the festival next year include Avril Lavigne, Blink-182, and Weezer. Emo isn’t dead in my heart either – I was in the top 0.05% of Fall Out Boy listeners in 2023 according to Spotify.
