Musical trends, youth subcultures, fan cultures, online applications and offline and online communities play an important role in the lives of millions. However, looking at different trends in pop music of the last decade, few have received as much attention as Emo has. By the 2010s, Emo was referred to as the leading subculture of the youth, not only by pop music, pop culture and fashion professionals but also by teachers, psychologists and educational consultants – in short, by all those who were in contact with the scene. Yet what exactly is Emo, and what influences have shaped this genre? What are its characteristics and how did they emerge in different layers of subcultural discourse? Judith May Fathallah, who is an insider of the Emo scene, provides unparalleled answers for these questions with the help of fan research and the study of the relationship between the music industry and fans.
‘Insult, identifier, genre, youth scene: the label “Emo” has a difficult history’ – writes the author in the opening line (p. 1). Indeed, the first and second waves of Emo remained almost unknown to the masses, as their development was largely determined by a narrow, “insider” group until the 2000s. In contrast, the third wave of Emo emerged as a global and mainstream style with a simultaneous presence in physical spaces, the mainstream media and online with social media platforms. For these reasons, Emo is a highly malleable genre difficult to describe and define – ‘no one knows what it means’ as Greenwald (Reference Greenwald2012, pp. 1–2) argued. However, one of the most important commitments in Fathallah's volume is to go beyond the axiom of the obscurity of Emo. With the help of discourse analysis performed on a varied corpus, the author proves that followers have played a huge role in developing the meaning of Emo.
One of the most important statements of this book is that Emo achieved its meaning retrospectively, through an activity led by fans in online discussions: ‘By charting the shaping of Emo, we can observe how fandom's statements and categorisations – not to mention humour – work their way back around into the statements of subcultural celebrities and the music press’ (p. 3). Fathallah claims that the meaning of Emo stabilised in the 2010s because of this dynamic development. As a result, today's fans can precisely pinpoint the meaning of Emo, and nothing proves this better than the one-word jokes or memes that every fan can decode accurately. The author suggests that such a high degree of referential shorthand can only function in a ‘well-defined discourse’ (p. 3).
One key theme in Emo discourse and the creation of its subcultural identity is gender and the role of women, following the work of Angela McRobbie (Reference McRobbie1980) on the ways in which women actively produce content according to their needs in a male-dominated environment. This theme runs through each chapter, while the author aims to identify and interpret each stage of the consolidation process that has resulted in the meaningful construct known as Emo. Here Fathallah engages with recent theories on fan activity in new media, including the works of Paul Booth (Reference Booth2017), Whitney Phillips (Reference Phillips2015) and Rayan Milner and Whitney Phillips (Reference Milner and Phillips2017).
The second chapter examines interpretations of Emo in popular and academic music criticism in the 2000s in relation to gender and genre, with the assumption that language does not simply describe but actively creates our social environment, after Foucault (Reference Foucault1971) and Austin (Reference Austin1962). The third chapter deals with MySpace and the blog ‘Fueled’ by Ramen, a US record label, both of which played an essential role in the life of Emo fans in the early 2000s. The author compares these sites with the simultaneous transformation of the website LifeJournal, also inseparable from the growth of the scene. By analysing the top 500 comments under their music videos on YouTube, the text also deals with the role of three iconic bands (My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy and Panic! At The Disco), also known as the Emo Trinity. In this context, Fathallah notes that there are four categories of meaning around Emo with overlapping discourses about genre, fans, credibility and gender.
In the fourth chapter, the focus moves from written texts to video content, specifically the place of Emo on YouTube and Tumblr. The latter application, as a typical multimedia platform and ‘polyvocal cacophony on online fandom’ (p. 6), contributed simultaneously to the deconstruction and consolidation of the scene. The author argues here that technologies provided by these platforms opened new possibilities for fans to define the genre in a self-reflexive way, which has led to today's interpretation of Emo. The fifth chapter analyses the process of meaning making on social media sites such as Reddit and 4chan, where the notion of humour through memes and Emo jokes is interestingly added to that of gender for new perspectives. Fathallah, who was a member of the Emo scene in the 2010s, navigates here outside of her comfort zone. The discourse of toxic masculinity characteristic of these platforms tends to create binaries between supposedly ‘good fans’ (masculine, authoritarian, knowledgeable, rational) and ‘bad fans’ (feminine, irrational, hysterical, uncritical). The last chapter focuses on the contemporary subcultural environment in the early 2020s by answering the question of how fan activities leave their mark on discourses in the mainstream media dominated by the cultural industry. The study reveals that Emo discourse is both consolidated and revitalised by fans, as they respond to the wave of ‘moral panic’ that developed around the genre in the mid-2000s considering risks such as self-harm, suicide and homo- and bisexuality.
Fathallah has succeeded in engaging scholars and the wider readership alike with her critical lens on youth subcultures generally. The book is a logical, well-edited, carefully executed work, whose chapters demonstrate the author's versatility. The rich and up-to-date bibliography is particularly welcome, as are the copious and accurate notes. By focusing on Emo discourse from different media environments, this book coherently articulates the complexity and subtlety of the genre.
