1 Emo: The Paradox of Contemporary Youth Culture David Buckingham This essay is part of a larger project, Growing Up Modern: Childhood, Youth and Popular Culture Since 1945. More information about the project, and illustrated versions of all the essays can be found at: https://davidbuckingham.net/growing-up-modern/ . Back in the distant days of the early 2000s, my two teenage sons both became ‘emos’. They formed guitar bands with their friends, played gigs in dodgy pubs, and recorded EPs. They wore skinny jeans, black T-shirts with obscure band logos, and skater shoes. Both had long hair carefully draped over one eye, although neither went so far as eyeliner or piercings. They collected CDs by bands like Coheed and Cambria, Say Anything and Taking Back Sunday, and spent hours poring over guitar solos. When Nathan, aged 18, separated from his then girlfriend, he recorded an entire CD of songs filled with despair and bitterness, going under the name of ‘The Futile’. Louis, three years younger, struggled a little to keep up, and was probably always more of a ‘pop punk’. At the time, both would probably have balked a little at the label ‘emo’, although they now look back to it with an air of affectionate nostalgia. Adults of my generation tend to discuss contemporary youth culture in tones of regret: it’s not like it was in my day. When we were young, youth culture was authentic, non-commercial, and rebellious. Today, it’s just superficial and consumerist: it’s not really proper youth culture at all. Whether or not this is true, emo might seem to represent an exception to the general rule. There were undoubtedly several ways of ‘being emo’, but there was nevertheless a defined style, a specific musical genre (or set of genres), and a kind of shared emotional mindset. On the face of it, emo looked like a genuine youth subculture. And yet, like my teenage sons, many ‘emos’ appeared ambivalent about being categorized in this way. The term itself seemed inherently disparaging, although for some it was an identity that seemed to be embraced almost in a spirit of self-parody. So what was emo? To what extent can we pin it down, or draw a line around it? Was it a genuine expression of adolescent angst, or a manufactured pose? Did it ever really exist, or was it a myth – an illusory teenage fad that was doomed to live forever in scare quotes? And what might these paradoxes tell us about the continuing evolution of youth subcultures in the twenty-first century? Defining emo ‘Emo’ is short for ‘emotional’. Many believe the term first arose in the mid-1990s as a way of defining a new musical genre, ‘emotional hardcore’: what was initially termed ‘emo-core’ was eventually shortened further to become ‘emo’. Various waves of emo music can be identified, but the term really took off around the turn of the century, with the release of a series of compilation albums called Emo Diaries on the US label Deep Elm. The heyday of emo was relatively short, for reasons I will try to explain, although elements of it are still continuing. As I write, (arguably) emo