Chris Payne’s Oral History of Emo’s Mainstream finds itself in the company of my various Fall Out Boy records.
Where Are Your Boys Tonight: An Oral History of Emo’s Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008 by Chris Payne
Having never spent a summer at the Vans Warped Tour or spent time ironing my hair to be a MySpace queen, I still find myself entranced by the eruption of emo subculture during the early 2000s. It seems like I’m not the only one stuck in time. Festivals like When We Were Young and My Chemical Romance’s reunion tour selling out arenas worldwide. The third wave of Emo is still profitable and on your mind.
Not many genres are defined through waves, but emo was born from the tides of the DC hardcore scene in the 1980s with bands like Rites of Spring. Full of punk rock influences and confessional lyrics, the ripples of emo began to be felt in the Midwest during the 90s with quintessential acts like American Football and Cap’n Jazz. Nowadays, it’s full of twinkly math rock riffs and maybe too many lines about weed. But for a select few years in the 2000s, emo was in the limelight.
It was about time a book like “Where Are Your Boys Tonight” was published. We are already like three more waves of emo in by now. Chris Payne became the writer to pick up the gauntlet.
Payne is a music journalist from Brooklyn that has written for major publications like Stereogum and Alternative Press and currently hosts an indie music podcast. For Payne’s first book, it amassed quite a bit of attention on social media before its release, from both people excited to relive their Hot Topic glory days and those like me who were still learning their multiplication tables.
One might be inclined to compare this firsthand account to Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me in the Bathroom, which is similarly a very direct Q&A oral history style observation of a time period in music. There was an undeniable overlap in these scenes during the 2000s, I’m even typing this listening to Kimya Dawson’s The Moldy Peaches, one of the bands featured in Meet Me in the Bathroom. “Where Are Your Boys Tonight?” doesn’t shy away from this comparison and even modeled the back cover exactly after its predecessor. One more companion piece of literature braiding together the oral history of a scene long gone.
Payne’s cast of characters is broad—almost to the edge of failure—and includes guitarists, journalists, and promoters. From Hanif Abdurraqib to Pete Wentz from Fall Out Boy, it seems Payne touched every part of the scene, at least in New Jersey and New York. With over 150 characters throughout, the picture he paints can become clouded by incessant flipping back to recall who’s who.
This book caters mostly to those whose arms sported dozens of rubber wristbands and eyes rubbed thoroughly with eyeliner. At the very least, it’s definitely helpful to be familiar with the bands and names of artists involved as be conversant with information about general pop culture from back then. Don’t expect Payne to hold your hand through your first foray into these bands or even your second.
The book seeks to answer how and why third wave emo became mainstream during the mid-2000s, how the bands erupted from smaller local scenes and how the popularity of the genre eventually went back to being the favorite of only a few guys at a basement show. He succeeds in engaging with the reader thanks to his breadth and depth of interviews and its chronological order works to his advantage. Even as someone well versed in the history of these artists, most of the stories featured are brand new to me and provide much needed context for the growth of the scene.
We are finally far enough away from studded belts and striped arm warmers confront the third wave demons, mostly comprised of sexual predators and sexist pigs. Payne does some part in pointing them out where he can, paying most of his attention to Brand New’s Jesse Lacey. But how long must we wait for a book to be written about emo’s current missteps? It seems for now, the scene has become faster at recognizing its moldy spots and cuts them out at a faster pace such as with McCafferty and JANK.
Emo has continued to grow as a space for queer people, women, and people of color. Female fronted acts, which were mostly missing from Payne’s retelling, like Pool Kids, Home is Where, and Sincere Engineer fill the scene with salient lyrics and revitalizing energy. Emo has also become broader in its influences, with newer bands like Glass Beach drawing in synths and Broadway-esque qualities. My hopes are that if someone in the future like Payne chooses to write about the current state of emo, I’ll feel like the story has included people beyond some guy with high top converse.
