WHERE ARE YOUR BOYS TONIGHT?

A full immersion into a musical genre that “was never supposed to be cool.”

The music called emo (often with derision) rose gradually in the early 2000s, made an explosive popular impact, and then experienced a quick descent. With this oral history, music journalist Payne seeks to keep the legacy alive. Drawing from more than 150 interview sources—musicians, crew, journalists, and fans—this is a book by fans for fans, a celebration of a musical phenomenon too often dismissed as punk lite. The text will satisfy any emo obsessive, those who know everything about the scene that spawned Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance and are still hungry to know even more. Others might have trouble keeping all the names and the bands straight, though the author provides an effective overview of how the scene developed and what went right and wrong. For the uninitiated, emo is short for emotional. An offshoot of the DIY punk scene, it was initially branded emocore, a response to the hardcore punk that was so abrasively aggressive and dominated by male stars. Emo was music for and by more sensitive boys as well as the girls who loved them and broke their hearts. It was a grassroots movement from suburbia and flourished on video, in shopping malls, and on the Warped Tour. Some of the bands were so young and became popular so fast that they couldn’t possibly have been prepared for the pressures of stardom and international popularity. Record companies were still throwing massive amounts of money at them in the early 2000s. There were plenty of casualties—drug overdoses, rehab, psychological treatment—and a couple of huge success stories. Payne covers it all in exhaustive (and occasionally exhausting) detail. The multiple cast-of-characters lists are helpful for non–die-hards.

A must-read for emo fans but not likely to win the genre many new followers.