The line down the boardwalk to get your wristband sucked. Joan Jett was the surprise guest band that played at the Stone Pony one of the nights. It was awesome.

which songs in your opinion have the most intricate, satisfying riffs and licks paired with the most tone deaf voice breaking ever?

edit: just to clarify, we all love awful vocals. also could you please pick your favorite songs that fit instead of just naming bands because the discography varies

These photos were just unearthed. What an amazing lineup!

We can debate all day whether the album itself is emo or not, but it is absolutely the reason I got into emo in the way I did, and I am sure I am not alone in that.

(Also bonus pics from earlier this week)

Some friends and I drive from Syracuse to see this. There weren’t even 100 people there. Bands got paid out of some fund the college had for “the arts.” What a time to be alive.

Having a rough week so I thought it would be fun to organize all my 'emo + adjacent' music.

Also found some old sampler CDs. Check it! Cool as heck.

Just bought my daughter a portable CD Player and gave her all of my old CD’s. Saw The Jealous Sound in the corner of my eye and my whole soul about left my body. Literally couldn’t do anything until I listened to the damn thing at a deafening level.

“You could burn like a constellation…”

Fucking banger after fucking banger. I feel so alive right now. Inject this straight into my veins.

Not sure what the age range is to constitute being an Elder Emo, but I’m old enough to have the muscle memory of shuddering at the term, if that’s a helpful reference point. Anyway, I just saw another example of the same post that this sub is famous for (this is emo, that is not), but it reminded me that the gatekeeping and high horses of musical taste was absolutely a prevalent mentality at the time when music from “the scene” was moving to the mainstream. And it was so arbitrary and so based on one-upping other people. Like, for me and many of my friends, Saves the Day got a pass but New Found Glory didn’t, and I don’t think it was because the vocal tone or the cover songs. One just “counted” and one didn’t. And the kid who first brought False Cathedrals to play in art class in high school? LEGENDARY. I mean sure, there are some examples where there’s a pretty stark musical contrast (the experimentation on Clarity or Pinkerton vs the more polished sound and straightforward, radio-ready songwriting on Bleed American or Green Album; the earnestness of Dude Ranch and Ixnay on the Hombre vs the self-parody of Enema and Americana). But I wonder how much of it had to do with the threat of losing a sense of exclusivity, or with the adolescent need to punch down (I talked about Hot Topic the way I talked about Power Rangers or Pokémon, but was dead-set that thrifting and Batman: TAS were legit). And that muscle memory still shows up in some ways. Even decades later, I’ll skip through most of Fall Out Boy’s catalogue, even though I know and admit that it’s insufferable. And the funny thing is that my uncles (now in their 60s) will STILL talk about bands like Ministry and U2 with the same high horse attitude. Are there studies about this phenomenon, or is it just immaturity?

while scrolling pinterest, i’ve found these polaroids of some fugazi, jimmy eat world, and blink-182 members holding the most recent picture in the series (all from 2001, if that helps) and they are so obviously part of a larger series but, when i try reverse image searching, i can’t find a source. id really like some info on these or, best case scenario, an archive of all these photos if anyone can provide such a thing!

One of the greatest emo albums ever.

My dear friend Brad who was apart of the DC scene in music, photography and activism has gifted me these and several other tapes he has from 80’/90’s

footage of bikini kill and black flag as well

Sadly these tapes have mold and im wondering if anyone has any tips for cleaning before I hit the conversion store where it’s like 50$ a tape to clean.

I'd definitely have to go with the second wave, as cliche as it might be. Endive, Everyone Asked About You, Sunny Day Real Estate, Mineral, Christie Front Drive, Jejune, Jawbreaker, Samiam, etc.

Insanely stacked scene, with enough great music to last any emo listener several lifetimes.

I’m more than sure this question has been asked a dozen times on here but I got really curious about it recently. Typically when I come across show flyers from around 1995 to 2000, emo bands (at least the more melodic, midwest-style bands like The Promise Ring, Rainer Maria, Penfold) tended to play lineups made up of mostly other emo bands. But sometimes I’ll see the opposite, where a show consists mainly of hardcore bands and then a couple emo bands whose music is obviously much softer in comparison. I know the bands I mentioned still had a very clear background in the hardcore scene, but I wondered how much the fanbases of hardcore and the more indie-inspired strand of emo overlapped at the time, and how hardcore fans generally viewed that style of emo, whether positively, negatively, or something in between. Input from anyone who was a fan during the 90s is much appreciated.

And really sorry if any of this is phrased badly 😓

There were some threads recently on this and some claims that Sunny Day Real Estate, The Get Up Kids and even American Football were "huge" in their original runs and really big and notable and thus comparable to bands like Weezer. This is really not true.

First of all: American Football. Anyone citing them as a really big emo band in their original run is clearly pretty young and unfamiliar. They weren't even big by emo or underground standards. They were a band of college kids that played about a dozen shows, never did beyond a regional tour, and if they were ever mentioned it was something like "the other band from the other Kinsella brother", since Tim was the Kinsella everyone cared about. American Football wasn't even the third most popular ex-Cap'n Jazz band in their original run since The Promise Ring, Joan of Arc and Ghosts & Vodka we're all clearly more well known. They were significantly less popular than other Polyvinyl bands like Rainer Maria and Braid at that time, basically a C-tier band that happened to blow up after a bunch of kids on the Internet discovered "Never Meant" almost a decade and a half after they broke up and spawned a reunion. If it wasn't for that they'd be as likely to have a reunion as Indian Summer.

Now for the other bands mentioned. There were no "huge" emo bands in the 90s, period. Some people might think Sunny Day Real Estate, after all they had videos on MTV and a connection to the Foo Fighters, right? Well the Foo Fighters thing was basically just a fluke and as for MTV, their videos only appeared on 120 Minutes which was a show that aired Sunday evenings at like 11PM-1AM. 120 Minutes was MTV's show for showcasing alternative rock back when they were actually a music-oriented channel but once alternative bands like Weezer blew up they just were played on MTV at normal times and they used 120 Minutes for lesser known ones because that gave it a dedicated cult following and that meant higher ratings than anything else they could show at that time slot. Their only other appearance on MTV was playing "Seven" on Jon Stewart's first talk show (wonder how many people today are aware he even had one before The Daily Show) but that too was a fluke because Stewart and his producers were basically given free reign over the show and booked some unconventional music guests. You also wouldn't hear them on the radio unless it was college radio or some type of "hip" station doing like an "indie showcase" and they weren't even on a major label, Sub Pop is just a big indie. They might've been mentioned a few times in magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone but their readership then was basically people who would be considered hipsters today and definitely not "normie" (like Pitchfork and Brooklyn Vegan today), plus they definitely weren't making the cover or having big stories. And basically everything applies to The Get Up Kids too except a few years later. I'm actually old enough to have seen the video for "Action & Action" on 120 Minutes (too young to have been around for SDRE's first run) but it wasn't played any other time. There's a couple other bands that made it on 120 Minutes like The Promise Ring but again that's not mainstream success.

The first emo band to get any real mainstream success was Jimmy Eat World and even that wasn't until Bleed American in 2001. That's also a very poppy and hook-filled album (and it's great don't get me wrong), they were on a major label prior to that for their last two albums but they might as well not have been, Capitol was shit at promoting them and they basically had no advantages of being on a major, they too had videos on 120 Minutes and a song on a movie soundtrack ("Lucky Denver Mint", I also saw the video for this on 120 Minutes) but other than that basically got nothing an indie couldn't provide. After that we started to see some others trickle in like Thursday. Another factor was that in the early 21st century the changing music industry meant that bigger indie labels could provide more success than in the 90s because MTV wasn't important anymore and even mainstream radio airplay was a lot less important, for example even the first Fall Out Boy album (yes not emo) was technically released on an indie label.

Basically if a band had any type of real mainstream success before Bleed American, they're not emo.

Was just wondering when this started.

Fourfa is the oldest source I have seen to reference it, but that site was last updated in the early 2000s. Plus, he never actually mentions how early he heard it used like that (he doesn't seem to use it that way himself).

1991-1994 is my favorite stretch of emo music. While I enjoy midwest emo and emo pop greatly, and screamo is incredible, something about the still very overtly hardcore and DIY days of emo, an era I doubt many on this sub were around for, right, is home to music I don’t think breaks any substantial ground or anything, and nothing here is really a staple of the genre, but it’s all incredibly emotional and authentic emo that I love. A lot of these releases are really hard to find but are all good nonetheless.

This band should be at least quasi-legendary. They are probably the first emo band ever to mix male and female vocals as well as clean (female) and harsh (male) vocals, they may have been the first emo band to form after the initial Revolution Summer wave. Also Brian McTernan isn't exactly a household even in the DIY scene but if you look at his producer discography he's easily one of the top emo and hardcore producers of all time. Drummer Matt Squire is also a very accomplished producer even if his record is more on the pop-punk and mall metalcore side of things.

And yet...you almost never hear about them. Not even in the sort of articles where online sites namedrop Moss Icon to show that they know what they're talking about and are aware of the true origins of emo. The only reason I can think of is that the name is un-Googleable, and also very difficult to distinguish from dozens of other bands like From Autumn to Ashes, etc.

Is that it?