By the time of his death, he’d become the superstar face of the so-called SoundCloud-rap movement that included the emo rappers Lil Peep and XXXtentacion, both of whom also died untimely deaths. Look to the career of the rapper Juice Wrld, who died at age 21 of a drug overdose in December 2019. T he emo test’s joke that to ace it is to be “broken” has a dark, telling implication. The range of musical styles that have lately been called “emo” also confirms that the term doesn’t refer to a genre so much as a sensibility-one that plays well in the streaming economy where pop seems ever more defined not only by popularity but also by listener passion. As Rodrigo stormed the charts early in the year with “Drivers License,” a tale of one teenager’s road-related heartbreak, listeners treated the lyrics like Mad Libs by plugging in their own words without changing an iota of the emotional content. It is also easy when the lyrics are concrete, self-centered, cinematic, and human. Watching TikTokers lip-synch to, duet to, and remix their favorite songs makes it glaring why emo might be big right now: Hyper-identifying with a song is easy when singing along is partly a matter of affecting a certain tone of voice. Read: Pop is making happiness sound pretty dreary lately In his 2003 book Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo, Andy Greenwald argued that “emo isn’t a genre” but rather “a particular relationship between a fan and a band … the desire to turn a monologue into a dialogue,” reflecting a “specific sort of teenage longing, a romantic and ultimately self-centered need to understand the bigness of the world in relation to you.” His book analyzed the young suburbanites who worshipped then-trending bands such as Dashboard Confessional, and it was presciently written around the time that the internet was beginning to enable the mass interactivity that defines music fandom today. They alternated rat-a-tat bursts of syllables with sustained wails that slid dramatically, nauseously, from heights to depths and back again.
They sang around, rather than always neatly on, the notes of their melodies. Their tones were shredded rather than smooth. But many of this past year’s stars sang in ways that recalled punk rock. Although the past decade of pop didn’t lack for vulnerable singing, it usually came in the form of R&B silkiness (The Weeknd, Drake, SZA) or “indie girl” breathiness (Lorde, Halsey, Ellie Goulding). If any single factor unites what gets labeled “emo,” it is voice. Read: Olivia Rodrigo knows exactly what to say Emo is not only the music of sadness-it is the music of change, uncertainty, and desperate, joyful connection. But the trend also reflects our era in deep-seated ways. Partly it reflects nostalgia for the 2000s (Linkin Park made it into a version of the emo test despite being, as anyone who remembers the George W. Partly the new wave is just the coronation for distinct musical subcultures that have been burbling online for years. Rodrigo’s sing-along diaries don’t sound much like Lil Huddy’s goth blustering, and neither much resembles canonical emo bands such as The Get Up Kids. People have argued for decades over what emo really means, and 2021’s wave might seem to stretch the word to definitional incoherence. The year’s breakout newbie, the Australian singer/rapper The Kid Laroi, groaned and moaned his way to No. TikTok heartthrobs and onetime child stars collaborated on raging pop-punk with the Blink-182 legend Travis Barker. Olivia Rodrigo sent masses moshing with a Paramore update, “ Good 4 U.” Lil Nas X’s debut album spiced his technicolor raps with tender rock. The meme now feels like an omen for what would unfold in pop music in 2021, when many a top-tier artist had a whiff of emo-a label that evolved from the 1980s punk scene but has come to envelop all manner of anguished music designed to smudge eyeliner. If you got eight to 10 songs right, you were certified “emo.” If you got more than that, then congrats-you were “broken.”
A nyone who spent their teenagedom in a black hooded sweatshirt was served a nice piece of attention bait last year in the form of a TikTok phenomenon known as the “emo test.” In it, users listened to snippets of songs by such artists as Panic! At the Disco and Paramore to see how many tunes they recognized.
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