EMO IS NOW RETRO
Millennials (and those younger) flock to club nights devoted to the music that touched them as teens
Every Friday night, things get very emotional at Sneaky Dee’s.
The people heading to the legendary dive bar comb their hair over their eyes, put on heavy eyeliner and squeeze into their old skinny jeans and sing along to the melodic choruses of bands like Taking Back Sunday, then break out their most guttural screams for the verses.
It’s Homesick, a loving tribute night to all things “emo”: the hypersensitive subspecies of punk that briefly saw massive commercial success with acts like My Chemical Romance (the event’s name is a reference to an album by A Day to Remember, one of the most commercially popular bands to emerge from that scene).
In recent years, emo nights have popped up in Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver, Halifax, Montreal and elsewhere in Canada, as well as most major American cities. It’s simply time for this music to have its nostalgic moment, according to Mike de Sevigne, the promoter and co-founder of the monthly Emo Night Montreal. (Homesick’s organizers did not respond to requests for comment.)
“Back in the Myspace days is really when emo music peaked,” he said. “All these kids created a movement back in the day and then just grew up. But they haven’t really grown up because you get all these who are between 25 and 33, they love the nostalgia factor behind it.”
The paradox of emo nights is that while the music can be gloomily introspective, the atmosphere can be breezy, with crowds dancing to the self-lacerating and fairly depressing words of Dashboard Confessional. Rivky Eklove grew up listening to emo night staples like Blink 182 and said she’s drawn to the Montreal event because “it’s celebrated ironically.”
“It’s super fun. I went to another emo night recently and everyone there was actually emo so nobody was dancing or smiling or anything like that and it was
really bizarre,” Eklove said. “At this emo night, everyone’s having a lot of fun and able to celebrate like people.”
While the genre has its roots in 1980s hardcore punk, emo truly broke through just after the new millennium broke, as bands such as Thursday and Alexisonfire enjoyed mainstream success. It didn’t take over popular culture and its moment passed, but the music left a mark on some of the angstier millennials who went through adolescence listening to the likes of Brand New.
But while the old vanguard of bands like Thrice or Fall Out Boy have gone through the breakup-reunion cycle, a whole new generation of bands are also finding exposure simply by getting onto an emo night DJ’s playlist. De Sevigne noted that there are younger parts of the crowd who might appreciate an “oldies” band such as Green Day, but are really coming to party with their friends while enjoying tunes by newer-wave hardcore bands like Beartooth.
“Emo night is a really useful marketing tool for both young and old artists,” said Paul Koehler, drummer and manager for long-running Ontario band Silverstein. “If you can get spun at one of those events in between two really big songs and people are into it, it’s kinda like being on the radio. The younger de- mographic isn’t paying attention to a format like that, but they can easily be influenced at events like this, so it’s a good way to reach new people.”
While reaching wider audiences could be a benefit for upand-comers, nostalgia is still the primary force behind emo nights; de Sevigne estimated that 70 per cent of his crowd is in that late 20s, early 30s demographic. While older generations might look back fondly on their days listening to party bands like Van Halen for obvious reasons, it’s less obvious why somebody would miss teenage years defined by such serious, melancholy lyrics as “I feel diseased/is there no sympathy
EMO from E1
from the sun.”
“People just want to relive their youth, I guess,” de Sevigne said. “For me, the songs are awesome. That was the best era of music for that age group. To really tear it apart and figure out why we’re doing this and why kids are into it? There’s so many singalongs in that genre. It was just a really big movement.”