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In “Top Eight: How MySpace Changed Music,” author Michael Tedder tells the definitive story of the brief, improbable moment in the 2000s when new technology and a thriving underground scene collided to redefine mainstream music culture. The book features extensive oral-history interviews with many of the key figures from those days. In this exclusive excerpt, Dashboard Confessional‘s Chris Carrabba, the Get Up Kids’ Matt Pryor, and more remember the emo gold rush of the early 2000s.
Emo. It even sounds goofy to say it out loud, doesn’t it? No wonder every emo band hated the name.
Nearly all forms of music have some sort of emotion behind them, or are at least attempting to stir some type of emotion in the listener. The idea that there’s a music scene that has an implied monopoly on sincerity and feeling is ridiculous and borderline offensive to all other artists in all other genres. So much about emo is silly, from the fashion to the incessant debates about what wave of emo we’re currently in.
But emo is also deeply important and absolutely necessary for the people who need it. For fans of the genre, it can sometimes feel like the only true thing in the world for the listener. Maybe that’s silly. But silly things can have a lot of power if you believe in them. And if emo didn’t have any power, then it wouldn’t have made so many people so deeply mad.
Consider the intensely polarized reaction to the breakthrough success of Chris Carrabba, frontman, songwriter, and the only member of Dashboard Confessional who got to be on magazine covers. With his diamond-cut cheekbones and a voice purer than the driven snow, Carrabba was preordained to become emo’s ambassador to the mainstream.
Carrabba fronted a Boca Raton, Florida, pop-punk band called the Vacant Andys, whose debut single was released in 1996 by Fiddler Records, which was started by high school entrepreneur Amy Fleisher Madden as an outgrowth of her zine Fiddler Jones. She remembers that even in the beginning, Carrabba was worried that people wouldn’t like him.
“I put out a seven-inch for them. I was like 15, and he was probably 19 or 20. He was a little bit like, ‘Please don’t hate me on the Internet,’” Madden recalls.
After the Vacant Andys ended, Carrabba started fronting the harder-edged band Further Seems Forever, but it was an awkward fit. The sleeve tattoos that would soon become one of his defining images, along with his pointy, anime-esque “Chris-hawk” haircut, didn’t fool anybody. Carrabba was at his core a delicate man, and a life of screaming over muted palm riffs just wasn’t for him.
On the side, he began writing songs on his acoustic guitar after a tough breakup. It turned out that Carrabba was preternaturally good at tapping into an unguarded space that enabled him to write naked, openhearted explorations of hurt feelings that either instantly disarmed you or instantly elicited eye rolls.
Released by Fiddler Records, Dashboard Confessional’s 2000 debut, The Swiss Army Romance, was one of the first LiveJournal and file-trading peer-to-peer hits. For the 2001 follow-up, The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most, Carrabba signed with the Santa Monica–based independent label Vagrant, also home to Kansas City’s hearty the Get Up Kids and New Jersey’s cherubic Saves the Day, both of which were fast becoming emo institutions themselves, especially after the Vagrant Across America tour brought them into clubs nationwide with a ticket price that maxed out at $15.
Even if you weren’t inclined to make Carrabba’s explorations of heartbreak and loneliness into some sort of lifestyle, it was clear the guy knew how to do a lot with a little, turning bare-bones acoustic arrangements into room-filling anthems. The single “Screaming Infidelities” started to become such a word-of-AIM hit that offline outlets such as Elle and Teen People took notice of him and his scene.
“Screaming Infidelities” was such an obvious anthem that Carrabba recorded it twice, hitting the rising action parts harder on the Places version like the seasoned professional he had become. The song’s composition is a series of escalating, slightly de-escalating, and then almost worryingly re-escalating hooks, with Carrabba owning up to some truly dejected post breakup feelings (“I am alone/in my defeat”) with a palpable honesty that, for some, quickly moves the reaction needle from “this guy needs to get over it” to “yeah, been there.”
So, obviously the knives came out as soon as Dashboard Confessional started to break through. To Carrabba’s detractors he was a wimp, a whiner, or worse. Many of the insults were homophobic and sexist in nature, implying he was less of a man for putting his vulnerabilities on display, but that’s the Internet (and a society that needed to start unpacking its identity hang-ups) for you.
“I think I was a polarizing figure, ’cause my music’s not for everybody, and it got really popular,” says Carrabba. “And also, I’m one guy as opposed to a band. So it was really easy just to fling it at us. I was at the pinnacle of my success, so I looked at it as an even trade.”
Many critics at the time were down on emo in all its forms, especially Dashboard. One review of Places deemed it music for “sensitive, gender-role-enlightened, bedwetting emo boys,” while another memorably said that Carrabba wanted the terrorists to win, among other insults. Emo’s treatment in this time is a telling commentary on masculine insecurity during the Bush era.
What’s so bad about having emotions? Don’t deny that which makes you feel fragile; don’t tamp down your inchoate longing. It’s part of what makes you human. And because of ingrained ideas of how men should perform their masculinity that American society can never quite divest from — you know, the expectation to just suck it up and pretend whatever is there isn’t there — young men can often use the extra push to get introspective.
What makes emo special, and what Carrabba was smart enough to grasp, is that the genre took the vulnerability that’s always been at the heart of the best rock music and made it the main driver. The whole argument with this music is to just drop your bullshit and accept, if only to yourself and the emo dude singing at you, that you’re just a human being, which means you’re often sad and worried that you’re not enough. It’s just healthier if you admit it. And once you can connect with yourself, try to connect with someone else. We’re all in this together, and you have to start cultivating an inner life at some point.
There are certainly worse underpinnings for a genre and a subculture. And if it didn’t work for everyone? Well, even the haters felt something, which is still a win.
The e-word was originally a pejorative term, leveled at D.C. hardcore bands Rites of Spring and Embrace, whose members grew tired of yelling about Ronald Reagan and decided to interrogate their own feelings; their live shows became legendary for band and audience members openly weeping. Onlookers, perhaps uncomfortable with such displays of emotion in this most masculine of genres, immediately dubbed such bands emocore. Each band released one self-titled, scene-defining album before breaking up. (Their respective front men, Guy Picciotto and Ian MacKaye, also of Minor Threat, would go on to form the massively influential and respected underground institution Fugazi.)
“Embrace, when I listen to that record now I’m still like, ‘Wow. This took fucking guts,’” says Texas Is the Reason’s Norman Brannon. “Especially the guy from Minor Threat singing these words, his career could have ended right there. I think people listened to it and said, ‘This is real. He’s not faking it.’”
For the next ten years, emo was seemingly a cursed word, and for a while you weren’t truly about that life unless you burned brightly and then burned out.
Jawbreaker front man Blake Schwarzenbach wrote the sort of lyrics that inspired many tattoos, many of them from the crush anthem “Chesterfield King.” (“I left your house and kicked myself/I put those feelings on a shelf to die.”) Sunny Day Real Estate singer Jeremy Enigk developed an intense following thanks to an ability to make anything he sang feel like mystical wisdom from a newly unearthed ancient scroll. Texas Is the Reason was a New York group that specialized in writing anthemic songs dripping with ennui (“Same old shit just a different day/ Well I’ll wait around for one more day”) over guitars that sounded as anxious as they were furious.
These bands often had little in common aesthetically. But they all played with an intensity that set them apart from the often aloof and intellectual indie-rock scene of the ’90s. Their singers seemed like they were telling the listener a secret they couldn’t entrust to anyone else, and that was enough to qualify them as emo.
Sometimes you were called emo when no one knew what else to call you. Far was a Sacramento, California, rock group with soaring, whisper-to-a-scream choruses and intricate arrangements that Epic Records tried and failed to market as heavy metal and whose front man, Jonah Matranga, would go on to form a head-spinning number of projects in the ’00s. The 1998 release Water and Solutions would later become a touchstone for the heavier emo groups.
Emo could even, somehow, refer to Weezer, a major-label alt-rock band that went dormant after their second album, Pinkerton, flopped both commercially and critically in 1996, only to be rehabilitated as a cult classic a few years later. By then there were bands like Mesa, Arizona’s Jimmy Eat World — widely regarded as the first emo band to sign to a major label, as well as the first to have a Number One hit in rock radio and a video in heavy rotation at MTV.
Emo was still a dirty word by 2000. But a lot more people were starting to hear it.
CHRIS CARRABBA (DASHBOARD CONFESSIONAL): I was a little confused at first and felt like it didn’t apply to my music, because it existed before I started my band. And I had such reverence for the bands that I called emo. They were from a generation before my band, like Texas Is the Reason and Sunny Day Real Estate. But I understood later that it just boiled down to the commonality between those bands and my band, which was this sincerity. I embraced it; I thought it was aptly named.
MATT PRYOR (THE GET UP KIDS/THE NEW AMSTERDAMS): It was a derogatory term.
JUSTIN COURTNEY PIERRE (MOTION CITY SOUNDTRACK): I was at a party in 1997, and somebody was asking me what music I like to listen to. It was right after that second Sunny Day Real Estate record came out. I mentioned that name and they said, “Oh, so you like emo music?” And then they kind of turned and walked away. That was the only time I ever heard that term until maybe five years later.
AMY FLEISHER MADDEN (FIDDLER RECORDS): When Pinkerton came out, it was like, is this emo? It feels like emo, but this is on a major label and Weezer’s kind of pop; I don’t know.
JOSHUA CAIN (MOTION CITY SOUNDTRACK): People were starting to see this new scene evolving out of the ashes of what had been the alternative scene.
PRYOR: I listened to Embrace and Rites of Spring, and I already knew Mineral and Promise Ring had already put out their first record. So I was aware. It certainly wasn’t something that you wore on your sleeve, something to be proud of.
FLEISHER MADDEN: For a really long time, when I had my label, I never used the word emo with Dashboard Confessional. Not once. Because it was like something that either people made fun of it, or they didn’t know what it was. I would always call bands indie rock.
PRYOR: I think somewhere in my bones, I knew instinctively that there was nothing I could do about it. It is what it is, I’m gonna be called the singer of an emo band for the rest of my life, and I’m fine with that.
FLEISHER MADDEN: The first time I heard the word was when I interviewed the Vacant Andys for my zine before they were on my label. The guitar player, John Owens, described their sound as emo, and I didn’t know what it was. I was too young to be like, “Hey, what’s that, man?” And then I remember not too long after I got a promo of [Jimmy Eat World’s] Static Prevails from Capitol.
GABE SAPORTA (MIDTOWN/HUMBLE BEGINNINGS/COBRA STARSHIP): I remember I was dating this girl who lived in Long Island. She had a poster of it up and I’m like, “Who is this band?” Because they weren’t from the scene. That was the thing about Jimmy Eat World. They were a major label band. But [Clarity] was so revolutionary, everyone in the scene started adopting it and loving it.
CAIN: It’s got to be the spark of Jimmy Eat World.
PRYOR: They had been putting out good records, but then that one [Clarity] was just a studio masterpiece. If you were in the scene, it’s just Sgt. Pepper’s or Pet Sounds or something, like “Well, that’s significantly more advanced than anything … any of us have ever done.”
FLEISHER MADDEN: [Carrabba] would come over and play me these songs that I was like, “These are just awesome.” And he was like, “Yeah, they’re kind of good demos.” And I was like, “They’re not demos, this is the song. It’s done. Let’s put it out, let’s do it.” I put him in the studio with James Wisner to record what would become The Swiss Army Romance. And it was super-quick, because it was just obviously him and a guitar. It was like, “Let’s see what happens.”
CARRABBA: I was long from being on the radio. I didn’t even have distribution, so they couldn’t go to a record store. It wouldn’t be there on a shelf, no matter how small the record store was, or how indie it was or punk rock it was. So it was through word of mouth and e-mails and chat rooms and file sharing.
NORMAN BRANNON (TEXAS IS THE REASON): I often say how there were three people in our first show. Our first show was in my living room. So, these were people that were friends of mine from the hardcore scene who had become A&R people. We were nervous and we were awful. It was shocking to me that basically all three of them almost immediately were like, “You realize this could be a thing.” And when we went in and recorded our first demo, which turned into our first seven-inch, that’s when everything just blew the fuck up. Every label alive was just on it immediately.
JONAH MATRANGA (FAR/ONELINEDRAWING): I moved to Sacramento in the summer of ’91. We started a band, I was finishing university at the time. So the first couple of years, we were just big local heroes. I became a father in ’94 and I went to the band at that time and said, “Look, I’ve been having fun and everything, but I got a kid to raise, and I grew up really poor, and I do not want her to grow up really poor. So, we’ve got to figure something out to have a little more money around.” Then we got signed by Immortal/Epic. We toured with rock bands like Monster Magnet and Korn that we did not fit with at all; the sort of macho thing was always the thing I really just didn’t want anything to do with.
BRANNON: There were a lot of people who were constantly blowing smoke up our asses, constantly telling us what we should and shouldn’t be doing, and constantly filling us with dreams that I think essentially tore the band apart. Because once you start feeling like you’re more important than another person in the band, or whatever, this is not gonna end well.
MATRANGA: Just to go back to a perfect summation of how Far did not make sense in the world, at the same club in Florida within a span of a couple of months, we came through once opening for Monster Magnet and the next time opening for Promise Ring and Jets to Brazil.So we were just incredibly in between worlds and we fit sort of on both bills, but we didn’t fit on either bill.
BRANNON: Honestly, it was impossible for us to function as a normal band. I was surprised we got as much done as we did.
MATRANGA: Whatever kind of music it was we were making, which turns out to be sort of post-hardcore emo something — as that was starting to get more popular, we were breaking up. We broke up in the fall of ’98, and then by ’99 I was doing onelinedrawing because again my daughter was five at the time, and I needed to still figure out ways to have money.
BRANNON: If you listen to the lyrics to the song “Back and to the Left,” that song was about trying to survive in New York City, and hoping that you make it before you have to go back to wherever you grew up from. But in my case, I grew up in New York, so I had nowhere to go.
MATRANGA: Generally speaking, bands are comprised of people who started playing music because they weren’t that good at communicating outside of music. It’s their only way to really effectively communicate with the world and process their feelings. And then you add in ambition, fear, money, trauma. And then you add in spending more time with those people in a band for 12 hours at a time, and however many days straight.
BRANNON: We’re thinking we’re the shit. I think that was probably an experience that a lot of bands had at that time, but ours was definitely, I think, ramped up to the nth degree. There was no breathing room; that bidding war lasted over two years until we finally gave in, and when we finally gave in, we broke up.
MATRANGA: I guess the first time I really remember seeing it in writing, I think it was Kerrang, they’d have writers in L.A., like, reporting on little club shows that we were doing. There’s a picture of me and it said “Jonah Matranga, Emo King.” That was maybe ’96 or ’97, something like that. All of my friends outside of our little music scene, our little world, are like, “What the fuck is this thing that you’re supposed to be the king of?”
Excerpted from “Top Eight: How MySpace Changed Music” by Michael Tedder. © Michael Tedder. Used by permission of Chicago Review Press. All rights reserved.
