Where Are Your Boys Tonight?

Where Are Your Boys Tonight? The Oral History of Emo's Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008 (2023) by Chris Payne

Genre: In-depth oral history of a well-known and beloved music scene that has always been loosely understood as a genre but has rarely seen its dots connected from one key figure to the next, or in other words, Meet Me In The Bathroom but for emo bands.

Recommended for: Anyone who loves emo music or ever had a stage of life when they loved emo music or anyone who doesn’t know much about emo music and wants a crash course on what makes it harder to pin down than you might have thought.

Buy here or check out at your local library. (Don’t go to the Jeff Bezos website).

I’ve got to be careful.

I’ve been considering an openness to emo music, and it’s going to take baby steps. Too much at once or a dive off the deep end right into full-on My Chemical Romance could send me into a backslide of hair trigger eye rolls at a scene I never chose to relate to.

There’s a lot to unpack when it comes to music that aspires to reach young people. Obviously, most music is targeted at young people, but emo’s success was largely driven by its ability to make teenagers feel like someone is actually talking to them, or at the very least that the other teenagers who consume the music feel things the way they feel things. With stuff like that, the kids that buy in tend to really buy in.

I was not one of those kids. So, like a lot of the-non-emo-kids world, my reaction was “what the fuck is this?” I liked Jimmy Eat World well enough. Those just seemed like songs about a dude being nice. Easy enough to understand. And I think there was a general unspoken agreement to just not acknowledge that we all liked at least one Fallout Boy song.

But in terms of new music, being down in Texas, I personally was listening to red dirt country music and Houston hip hop. I was also young and had a lot of music before me to catch up on. My red dirt fandom was probably similar in some ways to how emo fans look back at that time of their life (though I was certainly not rabid about red dirt) in that I have a lot of nostalgia for it but can admit that at least some of that music doesn’t really hold up to my taste now (some still does!). The Houston (to a greater extent Southern, and to an even greater extent anywhere) hip hop provided the sense of localized world building and cinematic connective tissue that I could not (to this day) quit.

Both genres had a brashness and swagger that was exciting. Emo, on the other hand, invited its fans to be weird and have no shame, and I was clearly not comfortable with that. Willie Nelson would have pitied me. I didn’t even like Interpol. In what world was I going to like Plain White T’s?

—

The idea of dabbling in the music came from just knowing people who loved it. I can’t say that I’m specifically drawn to anything specific about the music itself. I don’t have any kind of intense obsession with punk rock, which is where the roots of emo came from. Most punk fans scoff at emo music, but anyone who really cares about punk, or at least anyone who is actually interested in and finds joy in learning more about it, would want to tug at that thread. There are way more punk rock blanks I would need to fill before needing to check emo off any sort of education.

But by the time you’re 37, hopefully you’ve done more than meet all sorts of people outside of your most immediate interests. Ideally, you’ve befriended those people and extended your curiosities to them. And I’ve found a surprising (or maybe not surprising at all?) number of people who really keep a special place for emo music in their hearts. Mostly, they have gravitated to a new version of indie emo music that seems to be some version of cool to Music Critics, but they also tend to hold a nostalgia for at least some of the enormously popular mainstream emo music explosion of the aughts, which absolutely none of the Music Critics thought was cool.

Without painting too broadly of a brushstroke, what I eventually noticed as common trait in emo fans was a general openness to all sorts of genres and an ability to meet people where they’re at when it comes to music. There are a lot of people obsessed with lots of different bands and genres, and that fandom usually invites a closedness and a chip on the shoulder. Some insufferable music makes people insufferable. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Emo fans, all grown up, in my experience, speak well of the genre.

It’s sort of irrelevant whether I’d be friends with these people when we were all 15, because none of us are 15, but listening to that music at that age did inform the people they became. Look, I’m not going to take music recommendations from someone who listens to a lot of Widespread Panic or Insert Some Other Artists That I Don’t Want To Offend Readers By Saying Their Fans Are Really Annoying To Talk To. But I’ve talked about jazz and country music with emo fans and enjoyed myself. I think it’s only fair I give a shot at my own emo moment.

—

Chris Payne’s Where Are Your Boys Tonight is hard to put down. It’s probably too long, but I think it’s generally self-aware of that fact, and understands that if you’re going to tell the history of mainstream emo music, you might as well make it too long because who is really going to complain about that?

It is a rip-off of Meet Me In The Bathroom, but it’s a worthy book to be in conversation with, and I think any music nerd should probably read both. It’s an interesting dynamic that the two universes existed at essentially the same time. The Meet Me In The Bathroom bands (The Strokes, Interpol, The Killers, etc.) were generally cool to twenty-somethings, and the Where Are Your Boys Tonight were (eventually) were uncool because of how popular they were with high schoolers and MTV.

That being said, those bands earned those high school kids by speaking directly to the one who felt not quite comfortable among the other kids at their high school (or in their families or wherever they spent a lot of time and felt anxious and needed something that felt both relatable and like a powerful release). They also earned it by coming out of a DIY scene every bit as stingy (likely more so) than those cool bands. I might generally not like sad boy music, but I can’t help but be a sucker for the stories of people figuring out how to organically cultivate music scenes.

It’s too simple to say but so simple it must be said: A book like this reminds you that a book like this should exist for every type of music scene or regional music explosion. Many do, of course. But the more the better. The more comprehensive, the better. They don’t all need to be oral histories, and I think it’s important that we look at this stuff with more critical eyes than the central figures can reasonably provide. But, man, it’s fun to hear from all the characters.

If you’re an actual emo fan - like 99% of the people who would read a book this enormous - it would be a different experience than me, who is literally just doing it as a learning experience, but the result is more or less the same, and the bands were mostly ubiquitous if you were 15 in 2004.

—

We’ll see where I go from here. I’m sure emo fans would be screaming to tell direct me one or direction or another. I think I’ll probably go song to song instead of diving into albums. The band I left the book most interested in was Thursday, and I’m going to dip into their work slowly. I’ve always liked Paramore, and I might investigate whether I have Paramore super fandom in me. Fallout Boy was arguably the most interesting band in the book in terms of the sheer cultural space they took up combined with the style and roots of the band itself. I’d be shocked if I legitimately liked My Chemical Romance’s music, but it’s worth a deeper look. I listened to Algernon Cadwalleder and was into that.

The music I tend to scoff at the most is music I deem “sauce-less.” Hip Hop is not sauce-less. Neither is jazz. Neither is country music. Or almost any Spanish language music or blues. Or — You know what? I’m mostly just referring to self-serious music that manages to confuse intent with sincerity. Someone who wants to tell something more than they want to be in conversation with you. (If you don’t want me to be a coward end this paragraph without naming names, The National is one of these acts, but there are many such examples).

Emo music is, I must say, not sauce-less. They are earnest to a degree that is extremely intense. And they have figured out how to be swaggering about their sad little feelings. Music hasn’t done that since…country.

I mentioned Willie Nelson earlier, and he’s worth revisiting. You don’t get much more emo than him. He once laid it out pretty great in a song.

“…Why don’t you write your own songs,
and don’t listen to mine. They might run you crazy.
They might make you dwell on your feelings a moment too long.”

If he might as well have been talking to me, then not for long. Let’s see where I go from here.

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