In 2021, Indiana PBS station WTIU debuted Flyover Culture, a webseries about midwest pop phenomena. Flyover Culture began its third season in January, and its second episode was about midwest emo. This subgenre—a regional strain of scrappy, melodic posthardcore that arose in the 90s—has long been an obsession of mine. In August 2013, the Reader ran my story “Midwestern emo catches its second wind,” a snapshot of an emerging fourth-wave emo scene that bore the influence of 90s bands from downstate Illinois, suburban Chicago, and Wisconsin.
That story helped shift the attention of the indie music press toward a genre it once reviled (or simply ignored). I could see the change happen almost overnight. A couple weeks later, Pitchfork ran Ian Cohen’s review of the debut album by the World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, Whenever, If Ever, which hyperlinked to my story. My piece apparently has some miles left in it even now, though emo has evolved radically in the intervening decade: Flyover Culture host Payton Knobeloch quoted it in the midwest emo episode. I took note of the episode mostly because it was the first time I’d seen anyone in media admit to learning about midwest emo through TikTok memes.
Memes can be a great indicator of a subculture’s popularity. After all, a meme’s success depends on how many times it’s shared or remade, and for it to spread, lots of people have to be in on the joke. You’d probably have to spend the equivalent of a couple weeks on r/emo to recognize the kind of genre purist satirized by the “Real Emo” copypasta, first posted in 2017. This dogmatic diatribe, peppered with ALL CAPS, sounds just like a hair-splitting argument among superfans: “What is known by ‘Midwest Emo’ is nothing but Alternative Rock with questionable real emo influence.”
Know Your Meme traces the copypasta to a Facebook page called “Memelords against furries and fake emo.” But it feels older than Facebook. It sounds like something ripped from Fourfa, a sparsely designed Web 1.0 site dedicated to emo’s underground history that hasn’t changed much since 2001. I could imagine it appearing in the letters section of HeartattaCk, the crucial 1990s zine that Kent McClard launched after Maximum Rocknroll founder Tim Yohannan announced in the January 1994 issue that the “punk bible” would cease reviewing emo records (as well as major-label releases and any other music deemed not sufficiently punk).
Like any good meme, the Real Emo copypasta has traveled widely and long. Two of my favorite Instagram accounts dedicated to evangelizing about emo with memes—RealoEmo and the now defunct real_emo_only_consists_of_the—took their names from it. The former has since become a record label and partnered with boutique printmaking company Low Grade on a line of shirts that adds the Real Emo copypasta to an approximation of the label for Dr. Bronner’s soap, whose cartoonishly dense text takes a similarly wild-eyed tone.
The TikTok memes Knobeloch discusses in Flyover Culture can express more complex jokes by dint of the video medium. During the most distressing stretches of the pandemic, I spent a lot of time with the inventive and funny emo duets I found on TikTok: a user would record a twinkly, mathy arpeggiated guitar part evocative of fourth-wave emo, fitting it to another clip from TikTok or TV where somebody is yelling or crying or otherwise getting emotional in such a way that makes it sound like they’re in an emo song. One of my favorites, by chain-mail–wearing rapper and emo artist Joe Mulherin (who performs as “nothing,nowhere.”), features a weepy Tim Robinson from I Think You Should Leave: “I just don’t want to go home. What’s waiting for me at home is really bad.”
My favorite videos encapsulate my ambivalence about the fetishization of cathartic expression in emo vocals. I could write a small book unpacking the history of this fetishization, but it’d be easier to just show you one of the cluster of TikTok duets that all pair somber, wistful guitar with a guy screaming about a scorpion falling on his head while he’s on the toilet. I can quickly find several tagged with “midwest emo.”
As much as memes help give midwest emo a new subcultural portability, they also tend to flatten the idea of it. That’s evident in the Flyover Culture episode, which makes “fourth-wave emo” interchangeable with “midwest emo revival.” There’s some truth in this—fourth-wave bands definitely took inspiration from 90s midwest emo—but it erases the ways that the fourth wave innovated and incorporated new sounds.
Chicago critic, zinester, and podcaster Miranda Reinert wrote about TikTok’s flattening of “midwest emo” in her newsletter a year ago. “I see a lot of videos that are listing off a certain kind of band or referencing a certain kind of band and calling it ‘Midwest Emo,’” Reinert wrote, “but they’re mostly the kind of bands getting posted about on Tumblr in 2014.”
Memes create a web of in-jokes and associations, of course, and none of that depends on factual accuracy to propagate. I wrote about the midwest’s influence on fourth-wave bands, and I can recognize my observations in meme-ified form in TikTok’s simplified idea of midwest emo. But the fourth wave also expanded beyond the throwback sound of quintessential midwest emo—I’d have found the World Is a Beautiful Place a lot less interesting if they’d limited their ambitions to reimagining American Football’s “Never Meant” or Cap’n Jazz’s “Oh Messy Life.” TikTok’s midwest emo memes present the style as trapped in time—they’re 2024 jokes that rely on a 2013 reinterpretation of a twinkly guitar loop from 1999.
Emo has changed considerably since 2013. We’re now roughly five years into emo’s fifth wave, guided by a more openly queer and experimental class of young musicians who’ve made better use of the Web than previous generations. The pandemic more or less guaranteed that these musicians would have to rely on the Internet to form a community, and they got good at it: fifth-wave emo cheerleaders are savvy about using digital tools to spread the word. Home Is Where front woman Brandon MacDonald created one of the defining documents of the fifth-wave scene in March 2021, when the Home Is Where Twitter account posted several charts attempting to describe the scene’s various subsets. MacDonald has done a better job than almost anyone at using the Internet to welcome interested newcomers into fifth-wave emo.
Honeysuckle Records and RealoEmo released this compilation in 2023 to benefit the International Rescue Committee.
Fifth-wave emo does have some roots in the midwest. Chicagoan Tyler Odom leads the band Your Arms Are My Cocoon, an inventive home-recorded screamo project that’s the lodestar for an entire class of bedroom skramz musicians. Missouri label Honeysuckle Records is one of the primary outlets for bedroom skramz, and its catalog also includes collaborative compilations made with RealoEmo; as much as memes can flatten the idea of emo, some of the people behind them are also responsible for helping expand the idea of what it can be.
One of emo’s most indelible images appears on the cover of American Football’s 1999 self-titled debut album: a photo of the facade of a drab white Urbana house, looking upward toward a second-story window that glows brightly from within against what looks like a murky green dusk. The house has become a symbol of midwest emo and a tourist destination. In May 2023, American Football and their label, Polyvinyl, announced that they’d bought the house as part of a larger consortium, ensuring that the site remains intact for future emo pilgrims.
The burning American Football house on Captain Jazz adds the correct street number.
I’ve seen the American Football house visualized as a building in the video game Animal Crossing for a 2020 chiptune album of American Football covers by c h point. I’ve seen people post photos where they give the house the finger, and they usually get the angle right. In December 2023, a new screamo band called Captain Jazz released a self-titled album whose every detail lampoons emo history. It features songs named “Oh Sussy Life” and “The World Is a Marketable Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Sell,” and on the cover, the American Football house is engulfed in flames.
Ian Cohen named Captain Jazz one of his favorite emo albums of the year at Uproxx, and I’m inclined to agree. Shitposting culture and smart-ass memes may have saturated the emo scene, but if anything, this is a sign of vitality—and the self-awareness that drives that sort of humor bodes well for the future of the music.
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