Why is Emo popular again? (this is why it died)

oh my God they're playing My Chemical Romance Nicole you know I'm scared of emos what's up everybody I'm Finn mckenty this is the punk rock NBA and in case you haven't heard my friend's emo is officially back and actually it has been for a while now as just a few examples of what I'm talking about my chemical romances most recent tour was one of the biggest of the Year Paramore is back in action with their most recent album This is why hitting number two on Billboard over Taylor Swift Drake and Bad Bunny and as you may remember the When We Were Young Festival last year was a huge success giving all the Elder Emos a chance to feel like it is 2005 again only this time they can drive themselves and they don't even have to get up early for school the next day but what's really interesting to me is that this is not just 32 year olds reliving their high school days gen Z is embracing 2000's emo in a way that honestly I never thought I would see thank you and in general they seem to just really appreciate older music so my question is what's going on here why is emo more popular now than it has been in probably 15 years and why are there so many younger people now who are into these bands that were in their Prime when they were still in diapers I'm not 100 sure that I know all the answers but I think I have a pretty good idea so I'm gonna do my best to answer those questions in this video but first did you know that I have a second channel it's a little bit more fun less edited content I think of it basically like hanging out at Denny's with your friends after a show be asking about music so if that sounds fun to you there's a link to that in the description of this video sleep is really really important to me it gets me rested and recharged to take on the day so thank you to Helix sleep for sponsoring this video I've had my Helix mattress now for about six months and honestly I absolutely love this thing the first time I laid down on it I was like oh my God why didn't 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helixsleep.com punk rock to get 20 off your Helix mattress plus two free pillows so the way that I See It My Chemical Romance are really the flag bearers of this whole emo Revival thing and if you don't believe me just look at Tick Tock and you will see thousands and thousands of examples many of which are Elder Emos having what seems to be kind of a semi-religious experience [Music] which honestly makes sense to me My Chemical Romance had amazing classic Timeless songs they had the definitive 2000s emo look and very importantly they also broke up when they were at or very close to the top of their game versus say Panic at the Disco who honestly probably stuck around a lot longer than they should have and so for any of the people who didn't get to see them back in the day these MCR reunion tours are really a chance to feel like you're 16 again and I think the same is true of the one we were young Festival if you missed it it happened last October and the lineup was basically the who's who of mid-2000s hot topic emo MCR Paramore the used AFI Jimmy world and just dozens and dozens more this lineup was absolutely stacked attention Elder Emos this is not a drill Live Nation just announced this fast when we were young and it has like every single emo band that you could ever imagine and I am freaking in fact it was such an insane lineup that a lot of people actually thought it was a scam because it seemed like it was just too good to be true but it was indeed very real it sold out almost immediately and although they did have to cancel the first day of the festival because of weather other than that it went off basically without a hitch everybody seemed to have a blast in the 2023 lineup is maybe even better kind of going in a little bit more of a pop punk Direction with Green Day blank Good Charlotte The Offspring Sum 41 and again just dozens more legendary great bands and we all know that Nostalgia is great marketing and these Elder Emos are now in their 30s and they can afford to go to these big destination festivals so all of that makes total sense to me but this is not just an elder emo nostalgic cash grab this quote is what really stood out to me from a 44 year old dad at one of the My Chemical Romance shows I noticed that the crowd was people my age that grew up with the band and maybe a little older and then there were people that were my kids age in junior high in high school and call College it was multiple generations of people that had all waited to see them and if you look on Tick Tock you'll see the same thing tons of MCR fans who were literally not even born when welcomed of the Black Parade came out but it's not just MCR the same thing has happened with bands like all time low Deftones and most recently Pierce the Veil getting popular with kids who again were maybe at Best in diapers when these songs came out [Music] and as even more evidence emo night is still going strong and there's even younger people bringing back the 2008 scene kit aesthetic which is something that honestly I never ever thought I would see come back we've also got some pastel pink you know I think you pull off a pastel golf look oh and by the way 55 of you are not subscribed so if you like this video please hit that subscribe button and also turn on notifications and of course if you have been to a mall in the last few years you've seen tons of kids wearing Nirvana Sublime and Guns and Roses merch so my question is why is this happening why are so many younger people getting into emo and just really older rock music in general and just to be clear none of this is a bad thing at all I think it's awesome that young people are into these bands and by no means is this me being the gatekeeper and telling them to stop being into it I just find this really interesting because typically younger people would reject anything that came from their parents generation what are you doing I can actually play a lot of these songs on a real guitar you want me to teach you boys how uh that's gay Mr Marsh so why are so many younger people who are too young to have experienced these bands in their Prime getting into them now and why aren't they latching on to newer rock bands in the same way I'm going to talk about a few possible explanations and see which of them might explain it the first argument that I'm sure a lot of people will say is just that new music sucks and that young people are latching onto these older bands because well they were simply better and while I definitely agree that bands like My Chemical Romance Paramore Green Day Slipknot Deftones and all the other older artists I'm talking about here are most certainly great bands that deserve their reputation as Legends I think there's a ton of great new rock artists as well as just a few examples suaco 100 gecks Spiro box monoskin and sleep token to name just a few and one artist in particular that stands out to me in terms of emo is Young Blood if you're not familiar with him he basically looks and sounds like an updated version of the 2000's Hot Topic screamo thing but this whole argument of all the new bands suck compared to the old ones is to be blunt because in 2007 they said that MCR and Paramore and Fallout Boy were trendy crap that wouldn't stand the test of time they said the same thing about slip knot and Linkin Park basically that's what people have said about every new generation of Music That's come along as far as I've been alive and I'm sure that will continue to happen until climate change kills us all which hopefully will be a long time but uh we'll see so I don't agree with the whole argument that new music sucks but what I do think happens is that Nostalgia and just the passage of time is kind of a filtering device where we forget about all the mediocre artists of the past and only remember the very best ones so yes MCR are objectively an incredible legendary band and I do think it's fair to say that they're better than probably 99 of current rock artists but that's really always been the case right like for every MCR in 2007 there were literally a thousand mediocre underwear calming generic emo bands that we all just forgot about because honestly they weren't good enough to stand the test of time and that's really always been the case in every genre of music we forget the 99 of it that was crap and remember the one percent that was great so that's always been the case but it's never stopped young people from going crazy for new artists for example when I was a teenager in the 90s the fact that great bands like Led Zeppelin or the Beatles existed didn't stop us from loving new bands like The Offspring Soundgarden no doubt or Oasis but with all of that being said I do think that there is some truth to the criticism of new rock I've always been someone who Champions new music and new artists so I really don't want to admit it but when I listen to a lot of these new artists even really good ones like young blood and suaco most of it really is just a version of something from the 90s to the 2000s maybe just with some trap drums added to make it feel a little bit more modern [Music] [Applause] [Music] so it's possible that in 20 years people will be holding up young blood 100 gecks and monoskin up as these like legendary iconic artists the same way that we now look at Green Day and Paramore but I kind of doubt it I think that things really are different now and here's why there's an even more recognizable one note Melody I think the biggest difference between now and the era in which Paramore Fallout Boy and panic at the Disco came out is what people call the death of the monoculture and in terms of Pop Culture the monoculture essentially refers to the time when everybody paid attention to the same things for example back in the 90s whether you liked the show or not everybody knew who Rachel was on friends and knew about her haircut and the fact that she and Ross were in this weird thing everybody knew about the big movies like clueless and Titanic and everybody could sing along to hit me baby one more time and of course subcultures definitely did exist but because the media was basically limited to TV radio newspapers and magazines everybody was more or less aware of the same things in pop culture in the 2000s was maybe the peak of monoculture and music that was the very top of MTV's dominance especially their daily video countdown show TRL it was when radio still mattered a lot and before social media platforms like Myspace came along and gave artists the ability to directly connect with their fans basically that was the last time that the old school major label mainstream media system decided what was popular and if you look at the artists that a lot of young people are rediscovering now almost all of them are from that era in fact as much as we like to think of emo as this sort of romantic Outsider music now the truth is the 2000's emo was almost completely a product of that monoculture system these were all big major label bands that were on the radio MTV and all the magazines this was not underground stuff Blink 182 and Fallout Boy both won TRL many times Paramore was on TRL with Rihanna of all people like this is how much a part of Pop Culture they were and MCR in particular was very much a product of MTV they won TRL over 10 times with songs like Helena the ghost of you and teenagers and their most iconic breakout moment was on MTV's Video Music Awards in 2006. with their now legendary rooftop performance of Welcome to the Black Parade [Music] a big part of why we haven't seen a new generation of bands breakthrough like MCR Paramore or Fallout Boy is because the machine that created those bands simply doesn't exist anymore there aren't any new stars like them because it's no longer possible to create a new star like that now instead of the monoculture we have an almost infinite number of these little siled subcultures each with its own set of star personalities and each of these people are a huge deal within their subculture but unless you're a part of that subculture it might as well not even exist because everyone is really in their own little bubble or should I say more accurately Everybody is watching their own feed precisely curated to their individual tastes and speaking of feeds I'll talk about Tick Tock in a minute because I think it in particular is a huge part of this basically my point here is that I think because of all that emo is basically Frozen in the mid-2000s and probably always will be which I think is ultimately the fate of every subculture for example if you think about the metal fan that Persona hasn't really changed since the 80s or 90s it's the guy with the battle vest and long hair that listens to Metallica Megadeth and Slayer you see teenagers now who look and act exactly the same way as their counterparts did when I was their age back in like 1990. what made you take this anatomy class oh Anatomy uh I just thought it looked like this death cover oh my there's also this template of the punk rocker who listens to the Ramones and The Clash there's the alternative kid that listens to Nirvana and Green Day and dresses like it's 1993 and to be fair this is not a new thing for example the classic rock kids existed when I was a teenager too and they basically looked and acted exactly the same way as classic rock kids do now like Pink Floyd The Beatles and queen [Music] foreign here is that I think every subculture kind of gets frozen in time at the moment at which it was perfected new artists may come along in the genre but in terms of the sound and aesthetic we really kind of anchor to the ones who perfected it and I think that's the case with emo yes there have been tons of emo bands since the mid-2000s and like I said I think a lot of them are really good but can we honestly say that any of them did it better than MCR Paramore Fallout Boy and panic at the Disco I don't think so so those are the bands that will probably always Define the genre because honestly they perfected it and speaking of tick tock I do think it's key to all of this and not even really Tick Tock in particular but just the tick tockification of pretty much all social media with these algorithmic for you feeds Tick Tock makes it easier than ever to discover new music because it is the exact opposite of the monoculture what I mean by that is that if the monoculture was defined by showing absolutely everybody the same music and TV shows and movies to absolutely everyone on TV and magazines and radio Tick Tock does precisely the opposite of that as we've all found out over the past few years its algorithm is insanely good at creating a feed uniquely tailored specifically to you and your interests so when a kid hears their parents or someone talk about My Chemical Romance or sees Metallica on Stranger Things They go look it up on Tick Tock and then they get served more and more and more of it it's easier than ever to go down this rabbit hole and discover old music plus it all kind of ties in with this larger Trend right now of Y2K fashion and Aesthetics being cool and bringing back everything from new metal to stamps to Newsboy caps I also expect to see huge belts that are there for literally no reason you had best be bringing back the white shimmer eye shadow with all of that being said I do have a few questions the main one being is this way bigger than just emo meaning are we seeing the real-time death of mainstream pop culture and celebrities as we know it because if you think about it most of the biggest stars right now are still from the monoculture era The Rock Drake Taylor Swift Selena Gomez I'm not sure if we'll ever have stars on that level again with that kind of just super super broad appeal where absolutely everybody knows who they are in this new Tick-Tock era I could be wrong if I am let me know in the comments but I feel like not many things that came from the post monoculture era had the same kind of like super broad resonance that things like friends or Destiny's Child did 20 years ago even someone like 21 Savage who's obviously a huge mainstream rapper I don't think he has the same level of recognition to just a random person off the street as little John or even young jock wood in like 2007 and if so is any of this a bad thing I'm not sure that it is for the most part I think I would rather live in a world where we each get to create our own feed of the things that make us happy rather than the media forcing that onto us but I do wonder if maybe we collectively missed that sort of shared connection to a larger culture and maybe that's actually part of what's behind the email Revival I don't know so I'm not sure about all of that but we'll listen forever summon an emo kid all right my friends that does it for this video as always let me know what you think in the comments and I want to thank everyone who supports me on patreon especially those of you who support at the true cult level or above patrons get all my videos and podcasts early I also do giveaways and there are VIP members only channels on my Discord that I'm super active in and there's a way to have me review your music so if any of that sounds cool hit the link in the description of this video and I'm gonna sign off for now but I will see you next time

Channel: The Punk Rock MBA

Views: 408,366

Keywords: emo revival, when we were young festival, hayley williams, paramore, my chemical romance, my chemical romance tiktok, welcome to the black parade, pierce the veil, green day, finn mckenty, punk rock mba

Id: VKj7ssJexZ0

Length: 18min 17sec (1097 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 11 2023