Emo

Emo (/ˈiːmoʊ/ EE-moh) is a genre of rock music that combines musical characteristics of hardcore punk with emotional, often confessional lyrics. It emerged as a style of hardcore punk and post-hardcore from the mid-1980s Washington, D.C., hardcore scene, where it was known as emotional hardcore or emocore. The bands Rites of Spring and Embrace, among others, pioneered the genre. In the early-to-mid 1990s, emo was adopted and reinvented by alternative rock, indie rock, punk rock, and pop-punk bands, including Sunny Day Real Estate, Jawbreaker, Cap'n Jazz, Mineral, and Jimmy Eat World. By the mid-1990s, Braid, the Promise Ring, American Football, and the Get Up Kids emerged from Midwest emo, and several independent record labels began to specialize in the genre. Meanwhile, screamo, a more aggressive style of emo using screamed vocals, also emerged, pioneered by the San Diego bands Heroin and Antioch Arrow. Screamo achieved mainstream success in the 2000s with bands like Hawthorne Heights, Silverstein, Story of the Year, Thursday, the Used, and Underoath.

The emo subculture signifies a specific relationship between fans and artists and certain aspects of fashion, culture, and behavior. Emo fashion includes skinny jeans, black eyeliner, tight t-shirts with band names, studded belts, and flat, straight, jet-black hair with long bangs. Since the early-to-mid 2000s, fans of emo music who dress like this are referred to as "emo kids" or "emos". The emo subculture was stereotypically associated with social alienation, sensitivity, misanthropy, introversion, and angst. Purported links to depression, self-harm, and suicide, combined with its rise in popularity in the early 2000s, inspired a backlash against emo, with some bands, including My Chemical Romance and Panic! at the Disco, rejecting the emo label because of the social stigma and controversy surrounding it. There has long been controversy over which bands are labeled "emo", especially for bands that started outside traditional emo scenes; a viral website, Is This Band Emo?, was created to address one fan's opinion on this question. Emo and its subgenre emo pop entered mainstream culture in the early 2000s with the success of Jimmy Eat World and Dashboard Confessional, and many artists signed contracts with major record labels. Bands such as My Chemical Romance, AFI, Fall Out Boy, and The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus continued the genre's popularity during the rest of the decade.

In the late 2000s, an emo revival emerged, when groups including Tigers Jaw, Algernon Cadwallader and TTNG drew on the sound and aesthetic of 1990s emo, rejecting the perceived commercial turn the genre had taken. This movement gained prominence in 2010s, with the success of Modern Baseball, Joyce Manor and the Hotelier, and expanded outside of simply 1990s revivalism with the various sounds of Title Fight, Basement, Citizen, Touché Amoré and La Dispute. At this same time, a fusion genre called emo rap became mainstream; its most famous artists included Lil Peep, XXXTentacion, and Juice Wrld. The emo revival movement ended in the late 2010s, giving way to the more experimental "post-emo" sounds of Origami Angel, Awakebutstillinbed and Home Is Where.

Emo originated in hardcore punk and is considered a form of post-hardcore. Early emo bands used melody and emotional or introspective lyrics and that were less structured than regular hardcore punk, differentiating them from the aggression, anger, and verse-chorus-verse structures of traditional hardcore punk. According to Ryan De Freitas of Kerrang: "Emo in the '90s was about scrappy, emotionally fuelled imperfection."

According to Chris Payne, author of Where Are Your Boys Tonight?: The Oral History of Emo's Mainstream Explosion, emo is "often more melodic, more vulnerable [than traditional hardcore] — and often really over the top. [There are also] really performative aspects in emo." Sandra Song of CNN describes emo as a "softer approach to hardcore punk, with warbly vocals and evocative lyrics that have other bands derisively calling it the sound of 'teen angst.'" Em Casalena of American Songwriter stated that the genre is characterized by an "angsty yet kind of miserable vibe".

Despite being rooted in hardcore punk, emo has also been associated with other related genres, such as alternative rock, indie rock, punk rock, and pop punk. Andrew Sacher of Brooklyn Vegan has expressed his belief that the year 2001 was a "crossroads" of sorts for the genre, stating that "emo came in a lot of different varieties" during that year. He said: "There were bands who were still playing the style of second wave emo that was prominent in the 1990s, as well as bands beginning to define the sound of the third wave. Some bands leaned more towards post-hardcore, others more towards pop punk, others towards indie rock, and others towards softer, acoustic guitar and piano-based music." The New York Times described emo as "emotional punk or post-hardcore or pop-punk. That is, punk that wears its heart on its sleeve and tries a little tenderness to leaven its sonic attack. If it helps, imagine Ricky Nelson singing in the Sex Pistols." Author Matt Diehl called emo a "more sensitive interpolation of punk's mission".

Lyrics, a focus in emo music, are typically personal and confessional, or according to Merriam-Webster, "introspective and emotionally fraught". Themes usually deal with topics such as failed romance, self-loathing, pain, insecurity, suicidal thoughts, love, and relationships. AllMusic described emo lyrics as "usually either free-associative poetry or intimate confessionals". According to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians: "In its most basic sense, the term 'emo' is short for emotional, an indication that the music had left behind punk's heavily politicized public protest for more private and reflective concerns. Musically, this new emotional sense was best captured in the nostalgic and poetic lyrics of the Rites of Spring singer Guy Picciotto and his cracked, almost distraught, intense vocal style."

Emo guitar dynamics use both the softness and loudness of punk rock music. According to AllMusic, most 1990s emo bands "borrowed from some combination of Fugazi, Sunny Day Real Estate, and Weezer". Some emo leans toward the characteristics of progressive music with the genre's use of complex guitar work, unorthodox song structures, and extreme dynamic shifts.