Let’s pretend it’s 2006 again
Tickets went on sale this week for My Chemical Romance’s first show in seven years and I found myself drunk on nostalgia, running back to 2006. Not only was it the year the band’s hit album The Black Parade came out, it saw emo subculture at its peak.
Teenagers worldwide squeezed themselves into skinny jeans two sizes too small, dyed their hair black and got a lip piercing to prove just how much no one understood them.
Pent Wentz, of Fall Out Boy, was king, fringes that were singed from excessive hair straightener use fell over one eye, and eyeliner sales had never been higher. You felt different and unique to the kids at your high school, but, actually, you were identical to millions around the globe.
It was a movement that was short-lived but powerful.
We didn’t communicate through Facebook, but rather spent our time organising our top friends on MySpace and taking high-angle profile photos.
MySpace fuelled the movement. If you felt there was no one to connect with in your town or at your school, you could connect online.
It was the beginning of social media and musicians had their own presence. For the first time bands were within reach and fans could connect with them directly.
They say emo, a style based on ‘emotional hardcore punk rock music’ and the fashion that came with it, was the last true subculture.
Hopefully, that’s not true. Without subcultures there would be no punk, no soul, no disco, no grunge, no goths, no drag, no skaters, no metal heads, no Freaks and Geeks – the cult classic TV show from the 1990s based on high school subcultures.
Without them the world would be an extremely boring place and for some people, like me, a subculture can be where you find your place in the world and find yourself.
It feels like decades no longer carry a definitive style and music like they once did, but perhaps that’s because you don’t notice it until you are no longer living it.
But if you are a member of a subculture, it never fully dies: it will always live inside you.
Sure, my hair isn’t teased to the point of risking it falling out anymore and purple tights with checkered vans are no longer my party attire.
I don’t race home every day to jump on MSN Messenger and update my username with the emo lyrics that relate to life that day, but I do carry a
My hair isn’t teased to the point of risking it falling out anymore and purple tights with checkered vans are no longer my party attire.
little bit of emo at all times.
At 28 I still gravitate towards extremely skinny jeans, probably because as a chubby 15-year-old I couldn’t really wear them, so now I wear them for her.
And I have a nose ring that won’t be taken out anytime soon and still listen to music that stinks of teenage rebellion and being misunderstood.
Vans and Dr Martens still grab my attention and I find anyone with a slightly emo look about them immediately interesting.
Perhaps we cling to subcultures because usually they happen in our teenage years and into our early 20s when we are figuring out who we are.
It’s an incredibly thrilling time in your life where anything and everything is possible and the connection you make with someone over music and fashion is electrifying.
The bands of the emo era created the soundtrack to many millennials’ youth.
My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Taking Back Sunday, Paramore, The Academy Is were all thrashed on ridiculously chunky MP3 and CD players. Yes, that’s right: CD players. This is 2006 we’re talking about remember.
All these CDs that I would once rush home from school to listen to on repeat, now sit collecting dust under my bed. I can’t bear to throw them out but these days I don’t even own any contraptions capable of playing them.
Listening to these bands today takes me straight back to that time in my life where everything was a discovery on the verge of being an adult.
Although that same chubby emo girl lives inside me, I thank my 15-year-old self daily for not going through with that Fall Out Boy tattoo when I thought emo would last forever.
There’s irony in going to a My Chemical Romance, or any emo band show, as an adult.
As teenagers, parents would be roped in to buying the tickets. I had to persuade mine to let me catch the bus to Auckland from Taranaki to go – a seven-hour journey.
Now, as a grown woman, I can buy my own ticket, drive myself there, and don’t have to ask anyone for permission.
But you best believe when My Chemical Romance come to Western Springs on March 25, I’ll be drunk on nostalgia, in my skinniest jeans, hair teased to pieces, screaming at the top of my lungs pretending it’s 2006 all over again.