Millennials who grew up in the suburbs circa 2004 actively repress their musical heritage more than any other generation I know of. Boomers fifty years ago had the Rolling Stones and Beatles. In fact, the olds have canonized their youthful musical preferences into G.O.A.T. lists and gaudy museums. Did they also listen to a lot of embarrassing music they don’t tell us about? Has it been conveniently lost to the wastes of time? Or perhaps the whole mechanism of cultural authority requires the pure will and bad faith to tell future generations “Things were good then.” Millennials are too self-effacing for that. Regardless of cultural relativism, though, it’s hard to make a case for early-aughts “emo” pop-punk of Avril Lavigne and Good Charlotte– it just kinda sucks.
I’m talking about Hot Topic stores and nasally three-chord anthems complaining about parents. Summers of puppy-love MySpace romances that ended in disappointment and left you wondering why nobody cares about you. In a historical irony not without precedent, a (temporarily) very privileged generation couldn’t see the contours of their blessings because they were focused so much on how much “life sucks.” This sort of critique motivated the inevitable taunting emo kids faced in their heyday. It’s also why Millennials who successfully made the leap into life-long middle-class membership shy away from memories of their muddled youth.
But where were the cultural gatekeepers in all this? That’s a joke—the major record companies and executives did exactly what they were put on this capitalist earth to do. Emotional turmoil as a teenager isn’t anything to be ashamed of. Indeed, kids my age responded to the music as a reflection of certain emotional realities of petite bourgeois life. But that mimesis we consumed was lazy and dishonest. The bands (barely grown themselves, and who I hate to blame) turned our sometimes genuine pain into a commodity. Our dissatisfaction (basically with bourgeois existence) was funneled into a narrow frame of reference and concerns. This aspect of youth culture (not limited to the subject of our discussion) is at its basic level anti-life. The naturally inquisitive and tumultuous minds of youth are co-opted into fake rebellion. That said, us kids did receive something in return. The music was comforting; it gave the pit of teenage malaise a (socially conservative) bottom. I guess I was happier then than when I later discovered no-wave punk and descended into the “true” ideological abyss.
How should kids look back on all that? Kids got high for the first times to that music, attendant self-absorption/pity and all. When you experience things on such a visceral level early in life, it doesn’t just leave you as you age. The eventual disillusionment was perhaps teen’s first lesson in capitalism’s schizophrenic nurturing style. “All your dreams will come true” until you’re an adult and they don’t, but then your kids’ dreams might in return. In my most paranoid moments of magical thinking, I think culture was, through that music’s emotional constructs, prepping us to deal with the dismal life prospects we’d come up against ten years later.
That should provide some context for the wildly subversive current trend of young African Americans donning Metallica and Papa Roach t-shirts. This isn’t like the cultural sharing between metal and gangsta rap in the 90’s which served mainly to harden the unfortunate traits of both genres. I see these shirts mostly on apparently middle-class black kids who have hope and expectation in their eyes. And the shirts aren’t just crummy mono-color band t-shirts—the band logo in my fave is set off by a purplish haze that centers the album art and stretches around the rest of the shirt. Such adornment and the slightly larger-than-customary size of these shirts freezes those metal and emo band logos as something to be reflected upon. I’m not too ashamed to say I wondered at first…Hey, does that kid really listen to Breaking Benjamin? That’s the question the shirts joyously shout at us to ask, and then reflect on what that question means. I still can’t find the exact brand of those shirts, but creeping towards thirty I have to start admiring hipness from the sidelines.
Young black people’s flirtation with emo culture, though, isn’t destined to be a simple rehash of the sad-sack story recounted above. Their use of those previously white cultural signifiers lies in the magic space between irony and genuine appropriation. In the age of Soundcloud rappers and songwriters, a culture that was originally not intended for them is being subverted into a joyous beat of Arrival. Musicians like Texas-originated Kevin Abstract use the emo genre to express ways of feeling (queer in Kevin’s case) usually excluded from black culture.
It’s odd that a genre so depressive and maligned could be resurrected in 2018. NYC-based Princess Nokia does just that in A Girl Cried Red, her newest mixtape. Princess Nokia is a musical chameleon who followed up her early pop experiments with a full-length rap album, last year’s 1992 Deluxe. Her very presence as a queer Puerto Rican female rapper demanded attention. When she rapped about both beauty salon etiquette and being a “Goth kid” it provided relief from mumble-rap’s muted emotional and narrative palate. The wordplay of “I’ve been the G.O.A.T./ Eatin’ off the land” tore up the mainstream rap game’s worship of money and fame. Like Millennials forced into the gig economy, she navigated each musical excursion with aplomb and an authenticity that went past whatever particular musical parts she was currently working with.
It was still a surprise, though, when her latest opened up with a few Taylor Swift-sounding chords leading into poppy, hyper-Autotuned vocals of “It don’t even hurt/I’m already dead.” Princess Nokia adopts the nasally vocal delivery of past pop-punk but that Autotune lifts it out of mere homage. Pop-acoustic guitars atop trap beats orchestrate eight tracks navigating that line between irony and genuine fondness for emo culture. This happy tension shines in the video for “Your Eyes Are Bleeding.” “Classic” pop-punk always had difficulty in creating effective music videos because the juvenile emotional content would dissolve in contact with another medium—like when you say that really profound idea out loud and it turns out kind of stupid. Princess Nokia instead uses tour footage to accompany the music. The contrast between the music’s slick solipsism and the video’s verite footage is pleasantly jarring. Gaudy yellow subtitles provide tenuous commentary on the video’s contents. Princess Nokia’s in a car on the freeway. At one point she’s (mutedly) shouting in excitement to the subtitle of “I love Metallica!” She messes around in a White Castle that also provides the backdrop for the album cover—Princess Nokia flipping off the camera in Slipknot apparel. “Dramatic emo pause” declares one subtitle. Nokia’s stunning beauty and barely concealed smile keep the self-absorption at a happy level of ambivalence. But with such cultural generosity, even affectionate irony becomes its own sort of sincerity. Fans of all ethnicities delve together back into a collective cultural memory which they’ve either repressed or been excluded from. “This is just what I needed today!!” sums up most of the comments. It’s not an EP that you might consider a classic, but it is one that will provide joy through five back-to-back listens.
“My experience is that white kids love hip-hop, and brown and black kids love rock music. That shows that brown kids carry emotion, they carry pain, they carry oppression and strife.”[1] Nokia said that in a recent podcast. It’s a strange cultural route that leads music of white origin and dubious quality to inspire black and brown youth. But the exchange gives back too. The appropriation finds the best in emo culture—some of which was probably never there in the first place.
On “Morphine,” Princess Nokia internalizes the privileged perspective of the “emo little boy” who was the genre’s first audience. “Smash my heart in pieces” starts off the song again as the album’s running refrain. Then she dives into a verse that simultaneously condemns and humanizes the narrator:
People think it’s fun and games but my life is really lonely
Ain’t nobody that can save me, ain’t nobody that console me
I’m an emo little boy and I want someone to hold me
Got my money like a blanket and I hold it when I’m lonely
Princess Nokia delivers the ridiculous lyrics without a hint of malice or mockery. That’s remarkable because she spent an unfortunate adolescence between foster homes and homelessness. She stares both into and through the eyes of the sad white boys who’ve probably hobbled on from their self-absorbed adolescence. And maybe we see a hint of their current (medicated) selves: “Got my blanket and my bottle, yeah, you know I like to sip/Said her lips taste like morphine, asked me if I want a drip.” Princess Nokia dramatizes the emotional stakes of emo while moshing atop the underlying self-pity. In the second verse her identification shifts to autobiography: “I spent a month on the road…/Got a new tape and I’m excited.” Her empathic switcheroo achieves a subtle yet triumphant cultural revision. Her music and scene are joyously soundtracking the recovery and democratization of a time white Millennials would prefer to pretend never existed.
NOTE
1 https://www.npr.org/sections/altlatino/2018/04/13/602044140/princess-nokia-goes-full-emo