What is emo subculture? Learn about the origin of emo music and the fashion trends, lifestyle, and personality traits that came from the musical genre.
Updated: 11/21/2023
Emo Subculture | Definition & Lifestyle
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is an emo person like?
An emo person tends to be quiet, introspective or shy, and can be creative. They spend time alone or with people who share their interests listening to music or making emo-influenced art. They have deep emotions but aren't always only angry or sad.
What is the emo lifestyle?
The emo lifestyle includes dressing in emo fashion (tight pants, band shirts, statement patterns) and listening to emo bands (or going to their concerts). Contrary to some harmful stereotypes, self-harm and extreme anger and sadness are not parts of the emo lifestyle.
What defines someone as emo?
Emo stems from "emotional hardcore," a style of music in the mid-80s that had introspective and emotional lyrics. Today, that idea holds true: strong, inward-focused emotions tend to be what defines someone as emo.
What are the signs of being emo?
The signs of being emo can include deep feelings and creativity, expressed by listening to or making music. Outward signs can include emo fashion like dark, straightened hair, tight band T-shirts, and tight pants in dark colors.
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Tight pants, long bangs, band shirts, solitude, and extreme sadness. These and other stereotypes, some of them hurtful, are hallmarks of the emo lifestyle. The emo subculture arose in the years between the mid-1980s and the 2010s following bands that were categorized into the emo music genre. Teens and young adults who followed emo bands and wore the emo style formed this often-misunderstood group. This lesson will look at emo's definition and development as a musical genre and youth subculture, from obscure to mainstream.
Characteristics of Emo Music and the Subculture
The emo subculture grew out of scenes following emo music through the '80s, '90s, and 2000s. The emo stereotypes and behaviors were those common to the scenes following the popular emo bands of the era. Emo bands had many different sounds and styles, but they had some common elements:
- Introspective, poetic lyrics
- Deeply-felt emotions
- Rock instrumentation (guitars, bass, drums, sometimes keyboards) and song structure (verses, choruses, and bridges)
- "Hooks" in guitar or vocal melodies that varied with bands' individual stylistic focuses
A notable variant of emo music is "screamo," music that included screamed vocals. Screaming is not a characteristic of all emo music, though many screamo bands like Underoath, Thursday, The Used, and others were at the forefront of popularity at emo's peak.
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Since the emo subculture as a whole rose out of emo music as a genre, it's important to see the ways the genre grew and developed. With origins in the hardcore punk of the mid-80s through heights in the mid-2000s, emo subculture and emo stereotypes grew along with the bands that inspired them.
Beginning: 1980s
Emo music as a genre grew out of the Washington, D.C. hardcore punk music scene of the late-70s and mid-80s. Hardcore bands were known for aggressive music, angry lyrics, and heavy moshing at concerts. The first emo band, Rites of Spring, focused their lyrics inward, on emotions and ideas within rather than anger at the outside world. Rites of Spring, and bands like them, began to be known as "emo-core," a contraction of "emotional hardcore" to mark this shift in focus. Other notable bands from this "emo-core" scene include Embrace and Dag Nasty; these groups were heavily influential on later emo bands like Taking Back Sunday.
Growth: 1990s
By the early '90s, emo-style groups had cropped up on the West Coast and the Southwest, united by that introspective emotion and lyrical intensity more than any signature "emo" sound. Bands like Seattle's Sunny Day Real Estate, and Chicago's Cap'n Jazz and Promise Ring (featuring some Cap'n Jazz members) all popped up during this time, and all became widely influential (Sunny Day Real Estate's bassist and drummer would go on to form the Foo Fighters with Dave Grohl). San Diego's emo scene in the 1990s also saw the first iterations of screamo, emo music that included screamed or yelled vocals akin to metal or hardcore vocals. By the mid-1990s, local emo scenes had grown and merged into a wider national network. Jimmy Eat World, Saves the Day, Saetia, Joan of Arc, and American Football sprang up in this bigger environment.
Explosion: 2000s
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Between 2002 and 2005, emo went truly mainstream. Dashboard Confessional songs played on the radio and in movies. Jimmy Eat World had a massive hit in "The Middle." Emo bands toured the country with the Vans Warped Tour, taking over for punk rockers of the past. Emo CDs were more widely available through stores like Hot Topic, and the internet made finding and hearing emo music easier than ever. Bands like Taking Back Sunday, Brand New, Underoath, The Used, and Senses Fail hit it big during this time.
After this boom period of the mid-2000s, emo was fully entrenched as part of pop culture. From 2006 on, My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco, and Paramore established themselves, not just as successful emo acts, but as huge pop music groups. It was this early-mid 2000s wave of emo that entrenched the stereotypical "emo" style associated with the subculture.
New Era: 2010s and beyond
Emo as a genre and subculture was on the wane by the 2010s, though many bands, including My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, and Panic! at the Disco kept touring through the decade and becoming even more mainstream. New bands did pop up during this time, like The Hotelier, Modern Baseball, and others; just like their predecessors, these groups keep the introspective and intense lyrics, and have some lineage in the punk/hardcore/rock sounds of the earlier emo decades. More recently, some hip-hop artists have blended the emo sensibility with the hip-hop sound. Lil Peep, Princess Nokia, and Ghostemane are some notable examples of this trend.
Emo Bands
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Major emo bands across the evolution of the genre and subculture include:
- Rites of Spring
- Embrace
- Sunny Day Real Estate
- Joan of Arc
- American Football
- Promise Ring
- Jimmy Eat World
- Saves the Day
- Dashboard Confessional
- Thursday
- Taking Back Sunday
- Brand New
- My Chemical Romance
- Fall Out Boy
- Panic! at the Disco
- Paramore
- Modern Baseball
- Lil Peep
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Other than following emo bands, what is an emo person? There's no single set method for how to be emo, but some common emo personality traits do exist. These can include:
- Shyness and introversion
- Creativity and artistic tendencies - writing emotional poems, drawing morbid pictures, etc.
- Feeling misunderstood or angsty
- Dislike of "mainstream" music, movies, or other art
Stereotypical emo behaviors also include going to emo band concerts, spending time alone, and discussing feelings, music, and the like in online communities like MySpace. Remember, emo as a subculture came up alongside emo music; it makes sense that people in the subculture would gravitate toward music that reflected their feelings and sensibilities. In turn, as people within the subculture started to create their own music, they drove the genre forward. Both sides fed each other.
Emo Fashion
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Just like emo music, emo fashion evolved across a few broad generations:
- In the 1980s, emo fashion was largely the same as the D.C. hardcore aesthetic: solid color T-shirts (usually white), jeans or jean shorts, and sneakers (usually Converse).
- In the 1990s, as emo evolved from grunge on the West Coast, emo fashion adopted loose flannels over graphic or plain T-shirts, with darker jeans and shoes.
- Later in the '90s, as emo took hold in the Midwest, vintage sweaters, tight jeans, and other easy-to-thrift looks took over the emo fashion scene. This era also saw the emergence of the swoopy bangs and shaggy haircuts.
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The major emo explosion of the mid-to late 2000s solidified the emo style associated with the subculture today, bringing in Goth-like touches but not fully associating with the Goth subculture:
- Long bangs with straightened dark or dyed hair
- Severe makeup, including thick eyeliner (on either sex)
- Studded accessories, including necklaces and bracelets
- Tight graphic tees (often band tees, often black), white button-up shirts with skinny ties, or deep V-neck T-shirts
- Studded or otherwise statement belts
- Tight jeans in dark or black wash (girl jeans on guys is another stereotype of this era)
- Converse sneakers, or sometimes combat boots
Emo fashion also has associations with black and white checkerboard or stripe patterns on shirts, wristbands, and other clothing items or accessories.
Emo Stereotypes and Criticisms
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Several negative emo stereotypes exist, as do criticisms of the genre and subculture. The most damaging, and perhaps the most enduring, is emo's association with self-harm or cutting. Emo jokes and stereotypes in the heyday of the genre focused on this issue, ie: "I wish my grass was emo so it would cut itself." It's true that some emo lyrics mention self-harm, but the emo subculture largely pushed back against this association and didn't celebrate or encourage self-harm as a part of an "emo test" or "how to be emo."
Other emo stereotypes or criticisms have included:
- Being overly emotional or performatively emotional.
- Making their lives harder than they really are, when many emo youths are from relatively well-off middle-class families.
- Bad music: whiny, "girly" vocals, derivative songwriting, impenetrable lyrics.
Many of these criticisms have a grain of truth but may be a matter of taste.
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The emo subculture was at its highest popularity between the late 1980s and late 2000s, growing alongside the emo music genre. Emo music featured introspective lyrics, catchy hooks, and distinctive vocals: falsetto or high voices in many cases, or screamed vocals in the case of the screamo subgenre. Notable emo bands across its development as a genre include:
- Rites of Spring, recognized as the first emo band
- Dashboard Confessional, emblematic of the transition period between '90s emo and the boom in popularity of the 2000s
- My Chemical Romance, who exemplified emo fashion of the mid-2000s
- Paramore, a female-fronted emo group who hit it big in the mid-2000s
- Lil Peep, a hip-hop artist of the 2010s with emo sensibilities
The traditional emo personality and emo lifestyle puts a darker inflection on classic teen behavior, with a focus on introversion and creativity, and a dislike of the "mainstream." Emo young people tended to spend time going to emo shows, listening to music, or discussing it online.
The emo "uniform," emo fashion at its most popular, would look something like this:
- Long bangs with straightened dark or dyed hair
- Severe makeup, including thick eyeliner (on either sex)
- Studded accessories, including necklaces and bracelets
- Tight graphic tees (often band tees, often black), white button-up shirts with skinny ties, or deep V-neck T-shirts
- Studded or otherwise statement belts
- Tight jeans in dark or black wash (girl jeans on guys is another stereotype of this era)
- Converse sneakers, or sometimes combat boots
While many negative stereotypes and criticisms of emo exist, including self-harm, these are just that: stereotypes. For the most part, participants in the emo subculture were just normal young people with a specific interest and style.
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Video Transcript
What Is the Emo Subculture?
Vanessa, age 16, is currently seeing a counselor after school for feelings of anger, loneliness, and depression. On her way to the counselor, she wears her headphones and listens to a song by My Chemical Romance on high volume. She relates to lead singer Gerard Way in that he went through a period of depression like she did. Vanessa presents a journal to her counselor; in the journal are all of Vanessa's feelings and deepest thoughts about life. Vanessa has dark black hair with pink highlights, and she wears thick dark eyeliner and a long-sleeve striped shirt. Vanessa is part of the emo subculture.
The emo subculture sprouted from fans of emotional hardcore, or emocore, a style of punk rock in the 1980s. Emocore music is known for its loud, confessional, expressive, and emotional characteristics. It's generally associated with youth who are dispirited and angry with society, other people, or themselves. The emo subculture is widely followed by youth who identify with emocore music--they may not feel like they fit in, have negative emotions, and dress in dark, eccentric apparel.
Emo Music
Many of the hardcore punk bands, such as Velvet Monkeys and Iron Cross, came out of Washington, D.C., in the late 1970s and 1980s. But the emo subculture sprouted from a fan base who were not only attracted to the hardcore punk bands but also a newer genre of hardcore punk bands, emocore, whose lyrics were more expressive and emotional.
Often, singers of these bands would sing about depression, drugs, societal problems, political corruption, parental resentments, and other problems. Youth who felt misunderstood, lonely, and like they didn't fit in with mainstream culture were able to identify with the messages that emocore music conveyed. Among the biggest bands to pioneer the emo subculture were Rites of Spring and Embrace.
Examples of more modern-day emo bands include My Chemical Romance, Dashboard Confessional, Fall Out Boy, Taking Back Sunday, and Panic! at the Disco. From emo sprouted another subculture, screamo. Screamo music is a genre of emocore that evolved in the early 1990s that involves screaming and aggressive vocals. Some popular screamo bands are The Used, A Day to Remember, and Hawthorne Heights. It's clear that music is at the foundation of the emo subculture and encompasses much of the history.
Emo Style and Fashion
Youth in the emo subculture want to express themselves through their fashion and show that they're not afraid to be eccentric and different from others. To properly paint a picture of an emo youth, we'll discuss appearance from top to bottom - hair down to shoes. The following descriptors are not typical of all emo youth but are generalizations of what's considered a standard emo.
Males may spike their choppy dark hair, and they often have a side-swept bang covering one of their eyes. Females often have dark hair as well and may have eccentric colors added to their hair, like hot pink or neon green highlights. Emo youth, no matter their sex, often have pale white skin and wear dramatic eyeliner, which they sometimes smear below their eyes. Eyeliner may be the only makeup that people in emo subculture wear.
Youth in the emo subculture typically wear dark clothes. They are known to wear graphic T-shirts and often have studs, spikes, or skulls & crossbones on their clothes. Males in the emo subculture sometimes wear a casual striped or polka dot tie on top of a T-shirt or collared shirt. In fact, stripes are a big style for the emo subculture.
Males often wear skinny jeans, and girls may wear jeans, shredded or striped leggings, or fishnet stockings. Converse sneakers are popular shoes among both sexes.
Emo Personality
Youth in the emo subculture are typically emotionally sensitive, introverted, reserved, and quiet, and they're often believed to have dark personalities. As we discussed, those who follow this subculture may feel like they are not understood or part of mainstream society. A common stereotype applied to those in the emo subculture is that they're depressed and suicidal.
They tend to place an emphasis on their outward appearance to differentiate themselves, wearing their emotions on their sleeves. Many express their emotions through journaling and song or poetry writing. It's important to note that not all youth in the emo subculture have these qualities - this is a depiction of the archetypal emo youth.
Lesson Summary
The emo subculture is a lifestyle based on emocore, or emotional hardcore punk rock music. Emo youth may identify with the expressive and confessional lyrics of this genre. Rites of Spring and Embrace were the pioneer emocore bands of the 1980s. Taking Back Sunday and Dashboard Confessional are examples of modern-day emocore bands.
Youth of this subculture often wear dark clothing and have dramatic, dark hair and makeup. They're often sensitive individuals who place an importance on expression of feelings through writing or singing. They often feel like they don't fit in and are lonely and misunderstood, and they often are stereotyped as depressed and even suicidal.
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Emo Subculture | Definition & Lifestyle
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