By Jude Jones
Floppy hair, skinny jeans, and XD emoticons. Emo was one of the defining – and one of the most contested – subcultures of the 2000s, creating a new language of melancholic self-expression for a freshly-online generation navigating a senseless world they could increasingly fragment between an isolated IRL and the customisable connectivity of the URL.
Courtesy of Katrina Graef | Museum of Youth Culture
The Museum of Youth Culture’s “I’m Not Okay (an Emo Retrospective)”, running at London’s Barbican Centre until 15 January 2024, is the first museum exploration of the 2000s’ “lost emo subculture”, deep-diving its first generation from 2004 to 2009. Emo – caught with one frayed Converse-wearing foot in cyberspace and another in the mosh pit – was a youth movement about angst, confession, and emotion (hence the name, emo) which, through its transgressive edge, attracted a cult queer demographic across its lifespan. Reflecting on emo’s nu-existentialist impact, GAY45 talked with Jamie Brett, one of the curator’s behind “I’m Not Okay” and a self-described LGBTQIA+ ex-emo, about what attracted so many queer kids to the subculture, growing up online, and what it means to archive Internet history.
Jude Jones (JJ): I wanted to start a bit on a personal note. You said you grew up around the emo scene. Could tell me a bit about your experience within the subculture and how you came across it?
Jamie Brett (JB): I grew up in Bognor Regis in West Sussex and I think I was probably about 13 years old, which would’ve been 2003, when I started listening to more alternative music. Nirvana, Black Sabbath, stuff like that. It was later on that I started to listen to more of the old school American punk stuff and through that I started to feel a little bit more heard as a teenager. It wasn’t that I had like a terrible time growing up, I was just a very anxious teenager, and I felt like a bit of an outsider. I think the music just helped me feel more understood.
Courtesy of Kai Hardcore | Museum of Youth Culture
Courtesy of Kai Hardcore | Museum of Youth Culture
JJ: What was the fashion side of it like, for you? Because that’s a big part of the emo subculture, I guess as it is in any subculture, having that classic emo look.
JB: I don’t think I was brave enough to express myself visually at that time. But, after listening to that sort of music for a while, I met a completely new group of friends who were going to go see this band called Finch play in Portsmouth. It was at a venue called Portsmouth Pyramids, a converted swimming pool with a stage. Going there was the first time I saw the emo look, the guys with the really short-back hair that’s all coming down at the front and the sides, the skinny jeans. I had never been to anything like it. But I loved it. It was like an initiation and now I had all this secret emo knowledge nobody else knew about. So, after that, we would go like as a once-a-week thing.
Back then, it was mostly bands on really small tours from the USA with no money at all. They just had little merch stores with some boxes and T-shirts, and they would fly over with it and try to make enough money to go back across the UK. I remember Fall Out Boy did it when they weren’t that known. Everything felt quite raw and DIY, and me and my friends were discovering it all together.
We never labelled ourselves emo, though. I remember it being a buzzword. It got picked up by the magazines and people started using it as an insult, with these homophobic connotations, I think. And it was only looking back that we started calling ourselves emo, but never at the time. We mainly used emo as an adjective back then, when we wanted to describe something we thought was cool.
Courtesy of Simon Mitchell | Museum of Youth Culture
JJ: Where you a very online teenager? Another big focus of the exhibition is the online dimension of emo, how it was one of the first online youth subcultures. How did you navigate those spaces?
JB: From about 11 onwards, I was building computers and I’d sell them on eBay, so I was really online all the time. We only had dial-up internet so I’d be using up my mum’s phone bills and getting shouted at for it. There were all these things like Habbo Hotel where you could speak to your friends and anonymous chat rooms where you would speak with strangers for hours on end.
I always felt half in it though. Everyone was on MSN Messenger and MySpace and I felt shy about putting myself online like that. Then there were my friends who were MySpace famous and were like, “Oh my god, Jeffree Star follows me and I have 25,000 followers” and blah blah blah.
But emo really was the first subculture between online and in person. It was really important to have that online presence and create a personal brand for yourself. You’d constantly be posting confessional diary stuff, song lyrics. You reflected how you felt inside. People were just writing the most depressive long statuses on MySpace and MSN Messenger and nobody would ever be like “Oh hey what’s up, are you OK?”. It was just normal to be tormented internally and that was fine.
Courtesy of Mai Jones | Museum of Youth Culture
Courtesy of Lina Sapphire | Museum of Youth Culture
JJ: Did that ever become problematic? I think for a lot of people looking back that has been part of the darker side of emo, how it romanticized and glorified depression, trauma, and all these really bleak emotions.
JB: I’ve never thought of it like that, but one of the first big news stories to come out about emo was in the Daily Mail, not front-page or anything, but saying in really big writing: “SUICIDE CULT TAKES OVER OUR TEENAGERS.” That was the main bit of press we ever got, and that’s really normal for the Daily Mail, to attack youth culture. They’ve been at it since the ‘50s. But I think in general it’s interesting because, at the time, it wasn’t really the norm to talk about mental health. Most people would find it really awkward to bring up, especially in your friend group, then would go online and post all this heartbroken stuff and that’s how you would know something had happened. And that produced years and years of regressive poetry people posted online.
But there were definitely a lot of emotions navigating the scene. I think, as time got on, the tone shifted. Bands like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, they definitely found a positivity among the sadness which is so performative and theatrical that it’s almost like you’re not talking about your daily experiences, you’re turning your sadness into something positive. But, especially earlier on, there were some bands making it look like there was no future for us, that we’re a generation at the end of the line. Self-harming was quite a big thing, too, and loads of people in the scene had friends who took their lives and we can’t forget that. But I think over time emo became a lot more positive, actually.
Courtesy of Sian Krawiec | Museum of Youth Culture
JJ: A big part of growing up online, at least in my experience, is finding these digital spaces where you can express yourself completely uninhibitedly, for better or for worse. And that’s especially true for queer kids who don’t feel like they can safely explore their identities offline. Which leads nicely to what I wanted to be my central question of the interview: emo, as a subculture, definitely had a very disproportionately queer demographic. What do you think it was about emo that made so many young queers gravitate towards it?
JB: I think it just made us feel like we didn’t have to define ourselves at the time. And I think that was really important when you go back to the 2000s and even the word ‘gay’ was shocking to most people.
I definitely remember one of the biggest trends in the subculture being ‘emo boys kissing.’ You’d have all these posters and images on MySpace, you know, of girls posting pictures of emo boys kissing. And that alone, you know, I don’t know how helpful it was in the overarching queer narrative of the time, but it at least normalised being queer to me and made me feel better about the struggles I was having inside.
There was also something about the gritty rawness to the gigs we were going to as well, especially when you mix drinking and everything into it, and it all started getting a little messier. It all felt tied in with this idea that we’re all outcasts and outsiders so we don’t have to conform to society and, sort of inadvertently, that helped to normalise things like homosexuality or queerness. Like, if you want to kiss a boy then yeah, kiss a boy, you’re just the same as anybody else.
Courtesy of Lucy Brown | Museum of Youth Culture
Courtesy of Cas MCR | Museum of Youth Culture
JJ: Was it difficult curating an exhibition on a youth culture that, like you said, for the first time was as much online as it was offline?
JB: It was almost easier to curate because we had less to choose from. When we started, we only had three things in the Museum of Youth Culture’s archives on emo so we had to do a public callout on Instagram and crowdsource. So, whereas normally we might have entire rolls of film with 36 images on it or whatever, with this we might have been lucky to get three images from somebody’s profile that got backlogged somewhere. MySpace’s servers went down in 2013, people have Photobucket accounts but have lost their passwords, so it was just a lot from people’s mobile phones and digital cameras. Even if the quality is awful, it kind of taught us that the photo quality doesn’t always matter and it’s really about the content.
Courtesy of Floyd Gibbons | Museum of Youth Culture
Courtesy of Sarah Orr | Museum of Youth Culture
JJ: Do you have a favourite item or photo that was submitted for the exhibition?
JB: There’s this guy called Liam Lacey who sent in a photo of himself and his look is just perfect: he’s got the red hair that goes all down in a fringe, these trousers that are slightly low with the boxers pulled up, you can see his phone in the mirror. He sent it in from Wales, too, which I think was the epicentre for emo in the UK because it tied in with a lot of the bleakness that was happening in America in terms of industry. A lot of Midwestern emo bands were almost physically connected to Wales.
We also managed to get a T-Mobile Sidekick that we bought. It’s basically a flip phone with a full keyboard underneath and all the American bands used to have them, Jeffree Star used them, so we would want them in the UK, but we couldn’t because they had a completely different type of network. But people would still bring them over from the US, if they went on holiday to Florida with there parents or whatever, even if they didn’t work, just to pose with them for photos.
Also, my friend AJ submitted a really amazing video of her walking around her room going “Hi, this is my room, these are my posters.” I don’t know why she did it – it’s almost like it’s for a museum – and it’s just a really good snippet of what our rooms used to look like at the time, with all the band posters and ripped out magazine pages on the walls. But it really captured the heart of emo, I think.
Courtesy of Molly Jackson French | Museum of Youth Culture
The Museum of Youth Culture’s exhibition “I’m Not Okay (an Emo Retrospective) runs for free at London’s Barbican Centre until 15 January 2025. It is a pilot exhibition, awaiting a fuller showing at date TBD.
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