the revival we got and the revival we need (this was originally written in 2019, but like, it still applies)

If you’re a millenial internet masochist like myself, and also if you’re a person who had an extremely not okay time in 7th grade, like myself, you have probably seen some enthusiasm for #BringBackScene2019 (Note: this same type of shit exists in 2021. Just look up the scene tag on Tik Tok). The motivations for this admittedly insular trend are mainly kitsch and centered on the garishly morose fashion of aughts young people.

You probably don’t need a reminder of how Bush era counterculture looked. If you’ve liked this silly little meme page, you probably experienced that black-and-pink joie de vivre in the most intimate sense. But, just in case, here’s scene as modeled by some of the more pronounced bands at that moment:

Scary Kids Scaring Kids

From First to Last

Escape the Fate

I need to be forthright. All of this is fucking atrocious. And it also didn’t really go away. If you truly still crave artists tarted up in scene wardrobe, click this link:

https://www.last.fm/music/Lil+Uzi+Vert/+similar

The ethos of scene fashion is more in vogue now than it ever was during the Hot Topic epoch. Myspace defs passed the swag torch to Soundcloud.

When I say “scenecore revival,” I don’t mean the superficiality of raccoon hair and jeans tailored to an ill-advised, scrote crushing tightness. Candidly, I think it’s crucial that serious artists, musicians, and writers dissuade ourselves from understanding ~scene~ as the aggressively bawdy appearances of that vein of post-hardcore. I’ve always been more intrigued by the fervent ADHD amalgam that was 00core songwriting.

The bloggy genesis of the 2000s deluged the world with raw, artisanal data. In some respects, having fluid access to gigainformation has been positively formative. I can say that the internet has definitely made me smarter, but also, it’s made me dumb as shit too. This is the fundamental dynamic, that I contend, produced a lot of compelling scenecore.

In 2021, the internet is comprised of various brand outposts all beholden to a miniaturizing marketplace of corporate, digital metropoles. Facebook, Disney, Google, like 3 other companies, own a multiplicity of properties within the Dirac Sea that is the world wide web. Logging onto twitter becomes a BDSM sesh of imperial propaganda and whatever dumbshit pop culture phenomenon memetically Frankensteined months earlier. It wasn’t always like this.

In The Postmodern Condition (yes, you will have to read a quote from it to complete this article), Lyotard delineates institutional communication from general conversing: “an institution differs from a conversation in that it always requires supplementary constraints for statements to be declared admissible within its bounds…there are things that should not be said” (17). Capital has been steadily institutionalizing the internet into a select number of media fiefdoms for the past decade-plus. Prior to that, however, plugging in was distinctly more communal, unsupervised, and communicatively wild; things should not be unsaid. A lot of 2000s internet-oriented art represented this ethic, but scenecore especially was brazenly loquacious.

I’m not going to get too rosy here. A LOT of scenecore bands, most noticeably the ones that committed to the chemical look with religious ardor, were categorically detritus. No reason to wax elegiac about every band as if it was a unilaterally laudable collective. Asking Alexandria’s discog is a human rights abuse.

The output was often pestilent, but the digital phenomena underlying the formation of core bands way back in the fledgling internet is retrospectively fascinating.

Jodi Dean’s Blog Theory, a superb criticism of the internet’s effect on human personnage, dissects various modes of online conference. I can’t say that Dean ever expected her studies to offer insights regarding the communicative conditions that engendered a subgenre of punk rock, but I found her analyses to be pertinent.

Many of Blog Theory’s conclusions are disconcerting. I agree with Dean that the internet has degraded leftwing political organization and violently affronted the human psyche: “in other words, for the possibility that in choosing for ourselves, in participating in the production of the spectacle, we might contribute to our own capture” (109). Fortuitously for post-hardcore fans, however, much of what Dean considers more generally problematic, I would claim formulated commendable aspects of scene music.

Hardcore mutated into several distinct subspecies with the exit of Reagan. The Replacements and Drive Like Jehu and Braid and the Jesus Lizard et al. weren’t hardcore, but they weren’t not hardcore.

The zoology analogy evolved quite monstrously as the 2000s loomed, and inevitably slammed “Understanding in a Car Crash” style, into the burgeoning internet era. Through the creative transmutations of digital contact, punk subspecies became their own genus in some beautifully/bestially fucked up aural deviations. My Chem de Vries’d into mainstream popularity with Iron Maiden riffs, an innumerable brood of v-necked 19yos were posting hair metal choruses to Myspace, and now synths were apparently a very normal instrument to be playing in a -core band. If 90’s post-hardcore was experimental, 00s scene was paradigmatically seditious, for better or worse or emphatically worse.

The internet implores one to insistently not know. Search engines trawl millions of sites in .3 seconds, social media hosts your thoughts and emotions in a sanctum that could very well get zero response, and music platforms supplicate artists to upload whatever they want, whenever their timeframe. Dean describes the aimlessness of the internet, the pursuit of content within its expanse, in Lacanian terms: “What was the subject supposed to know supposed to know? Not just how to find information, but the truth of the searcher’s desire. That is to say, those searching on the internet might not know what they actually want. They might call it one thing, but mean another” (42). This concept of “subject supposed to know” intrigues me. How did desires, both mercurial and veiled, impose upon heavy aughts music?

Well, it just takes a brief traipsing through any streaming service to remind oneself just how significantly the internet culture of digital antiquity rearranged the expectations of the core corpus.

When I use “scene,” I’m intentionally applying a broad definition. Yeah, I’m referring to Brokencyde. I’m also including bands like Minus the Bear, Armor For Sleep, and The Devil Wears Prada into the discussion as well. I’m aesthetically obligated. POST-hardcore entered into its arguably most multifaceted, POST moment. The internet opened up punk to the whole of its global ubiety, but also to the contemplation of genres once socially demarcated. The intercultural forum of Myspace, of file sharing sites, of blogs, cultivated a curiosity that hardcore decorum, once regionally constrained, couldn’t stifle: “mass media made crowds visible to themselves as a unity, providing the crowd with an imaginary collective body…networked communication and entertainment makes particularities visible to themselves as particularities” (Dean 73). Bands like June of 44, or Nirvana, or Lungfish, or whatever 90s outfit, were the first to cordially disagree with hardcore orthodoxy. Scenecore was far less deferential with its yowling distaste for the dogmas of the 20th century, its broadband-fueled anti-reverence.

With a near infinite surplus of data and a continent made smaller by jejune social media nerds in the Bay Area, punk subculture glitched into a spliceculture. Thrash, synthwave, RnB, idm, shoegaze, bubblegum pop, (seriously throw some spaghetti at the subgenre wall diagram) more so than ever, became an object to experiment with, to meld into diy sensibilities. In 2021, the occurrence of stumbling upon a new, novel sound is less common. In 2003? And you’re a punky teen figuring out whatever the hell online is? Baby genius Google beamed creative desires and what ifs into porous, angsty brains, and an increasing community of blogs and music sharing url’s begged for those ideas to be recorded and disseminated.

We’re forced to reckon with the basal inquiry of this article: “was this proliferation of post-hardcore music, generally speaking, good?”

It’s a wistful personal admittance, but a necessary one.

Not really.

Turns out that eccentric compositional novelties shit out onto the interwebz en masse did not prove to be unanimously compelling trend in music. I’m sorry to everyone that purchased multiple Alesana and A Day to Remember tshirts. But to be fair, one could make the argument that numerous genres feature disparate quality when you review their entirety. Think about all the terrible, inessential doom metal, pop punk, house music, etc etc etc that often detracts from the impressive material at its center. As unambiguously shitty much of aughts post-hardcore was, several bands recomposed the hardcore, diy ethic with admirable vision and ingenious approach.

Peep this companion playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2GzPQ9Ij1y1cHhS0VbyXQY?si=ZyXA0W0SQFmgAyl9ZXM4rQ

~Also, I’m sure some of you would adamantly refute that Circa Survive or Horse the Band counts as scene in the purest, grossest definition of the word. Again, I’m recontextualizing the term here as generously as I can to get the whole scope of the decade. Like it or not, lit and shit bands were creating music within the same cultural milieu.~

Scenecore stylings still persist. I’m from rural Iowa originally, and whenever I go back home, I always see teens with hyper-straightened (keratin mangled) hair in I See Stars garb. Truthfully, it’s a bit off-putting to see these kids skating around wardrobed in the ghostly couture of 2007, especially considering I feel like it’s more teen-chic-alt-punk to be into Lil Peep or 100 gecs, or Tyler, The Creator now.

MTVmo eventually nosedived out of popularity sometime around when Obama lost control of the House and proved he was actually not going to be offering change. Cornball metalcore/pop punk/Warped Tourwave still has plenty of fans no doubt, but it’s not like, a Panic! in 2006 tier of cultural diffusion. Many solid, or nearly solid, 2000s post-hardcore/emo/indie acts continued to tour past the halcyon days of checkered belts and weird Quiznos commercials, they still do, but more often than not, the reliance on nostalgic ticket sales is unabashed (No shade. Get that money). I feel a tad pensive as I edit this article. So much of what is deemed DIY now doesn’t utilize the same overzealous spontaneity as even the decidedly horrid scenecore acts.

When the Pitchfork/Stereogum/CoS Mickey Mouse Blog Club started to advertise Emo Revival as a legitimate trend around 2013–2014, it was wrongfully heralded as the redemption of emo, prodigal scenecore now returning as the most insipid and shameless reiterations of Bleed American and the Blue Album.

When I was an 18 year old moron, I agreed. I’m somewhat less of a moron now, less excited by whatever homogenous Transatlanticism nostalgia movements that goofy music commentators enjoy in the present. Emo Revival did not save emo, it just expurgated any instrumentation that didn’t conform to a banal mimicry of Mineral and the Get Up Kids. Scenecore was not ousted by a more respectable and rightful Emo Revival, the digital landscape tectonically dissevered into multiple surveiled platforms.

Unlike 15+ years ago, the internet is now designed to autonomously decode your interests and incessantly spit them back at you, typically in their most basic form. Economist Philip Mirowski expounds on this fucked development in his excellent Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste:

“Facebook is the ultimate in reflexive apparatus: it is a wildly successful business that teaches its participants how to turn themselves into a flexible entrepreneurial identity…It distills the persona down to a jumble of unexplained tastes and alliances, the mélange of which requires the constant care and management by an entity that bears some tenuous relationship to the persona uploaded” (113–114)

Social media is a hydra of dozens upon dozens of multimillion dollar applications now. Facebook is no longer the ultimate, it’s one of several ultimates that have appeared since 2010, all of which have been retching out the Wiki definition of emo. To be clear, I’m not saying Zucc personally killed aughts online and spurred the Emo Revival. I am, however, doggedly asserting that social media of the last decade, and the blogs inexorably interwoven into it, have conditioned us to conceive and compose according to base templates.

Scenecore was by no means completely sublime. Many of the bands I enjoyed at 12 now incite severe gastrointestinal distress. Despite the innumerable flaws of its execution across the culture, the receptivity to timbres and techniques once deemed to be schismatic within the bounds of hardcore was a tendency that should be passionately extolled and revived today.

Go back and listen to a You Blew It! record, or a TWIABP album post-2011, and tell me any of that damp flour “fake real emo” (https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/hxdhqj/real_real_emo_real_fake_emo_fake_real_emo_fake/) worship is compositionally and thematically more determined than Define the Great Line or Dream to Make Believe. Do it. Desperately try to argue that.

Ian Cohen, a writer who has been effectively beatified by people my age (90s indie babies) as the Augur of Emo, has spearheaded this superficial Saddle Creekian hagiography. I don’t hold him in contempt or anything. I actually appreciate his past mission to “convince people at Pitchfork and people who were my age that not only was there great music in the 90s but in 2013 and 2014 there’s this wave of stuff that draws on it and it sounds like emo.” I don’t admire the subsequent proviso “but I gotta tell you guys it sounds nothing like crabcore or Panic! At the Disco” (https://thewaitingroom.substack.com/p/a-conversation-with-ian-cohen-on). The objective he and his ilk strived to fulfill was commendable, but unfortunately, it was also Sea of Azov shallow.

Yes, I would like more people to recognize that Wolf Parade x New Pornographers x Shins indiewave sounds like sweaty butthole, but I don’t believe the exchange should be awooga eye-ing “awww shucks” revival bands like Modern Baseball, Sorority Noise, et al, who fester in the same sort of “i’m weepy and horny and brooding” heart-on-sleeve horseshit that fake fake emo outfits like Bullet For My Valentine got excoriated for.

Sorry, but I Set My Friends on Fire’s You Can’t Spell Slaughter Without Laughter eclipses Never Hungover Again — precisely because it’s not nudging and winking at you in hopes you’ll be like, “uhhhh oh yeah this sounds like Through Being Cool, which is good real emo good awesome emo, so it’s good.”

In their masterwork A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari proclaim that, “The musician is in the best position to say: ‘I hate the faculty of memory, I hate memories.’ And that is because he or she affirms the power of becoming” (296–297). Aughts post-hardcore, in all of its expressions, vigorously rejected punk credo. Emo shit, be it the revival, or the revival revival, or the fratmo gloop, from like, 2008–2020, unquestionably did not.

Fortunately for all of us, I think bands like For Your Health, La Petite Mort/Little Death, and Your Arms Are My Cocoon (so many others) represent the foreshadowing of a shift back to holistic, metamorphic emo composition, not just Pinkerton facsimile power pop marketed as true DIY emo realness. Here’s hoping for that transformative wave. I don’t know how much more “beer makes me sad and horny” emo I can personally take.

Works Cited:

Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari Félix. A Thousand Plateaus. University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Dean, Jodi. Blog Theory. John Wiley And Sons, 2010.

Lyotard, Jean Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester UP, 1991.

Mirowski, Philip. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. Verso, 2014.