[1] Judith May Fathallah's Emo traces the developments and changes within emo fandom from the first decade of the twenty-first century up to the present day, ranging across several different platforms. As a music scene, emo is shorthand for emotional hardcore, a style of punk(ish) rock that privileges vulnerability and often confessional lyrics, with the bands Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, and Panic! at the Disco—referred to as the Emo Trinity—finding significant mainstream success. Beyond the music itself, emo also refers to a goth-adjacent, androgynous fashion aesthetic, particularly haircuts featuring distinctively long bangs. In the early days of the twenty-first century, emo culture often was associated in the popular imagination and tabloid press with depression, self-harm, and suicide. Given that the history of emo fandom also tracks alongside the development of online social media in the first decades of the twenty-first century, it also offers a provocative study in the ways that this online fandom shaped the genre and formed many of its key discourses, particularly concerning gender. The Emo Trinity bands have also long been associated with fannish activity, forming the core of bandom (band fandom) real person fiction. However, these fan discourses also interact with more official fan club-style activity that sometimes proves an awkward fit. Fathallah pays particular attention to the gendered discourses in emo's online fandom, exploring how its questioning of entrenched gender hierarchies in punk and rock music filtered out into the wider pop culture beyond the fandom. Her overall argument is that fans' history of active, continuing, and often messy work defining emo resulted in the fandom's definitions and ideals being taken up and validated by the mainstream music press rather than a top-down or resistant reading sort of process.
[2] Emo fandom offers no shortage of interesting avenues for scholars working in fan studies, popular music, and gender studies, and Fathallah's approach provides a useful model for nuanced, critical, and reflective study. As with her earlier book Fanfiction and the Author: How Fanfic Changes Popular Cultural Texts (2017), Fathallah's methodology is heavily informed by Foucauldian discourse analysis, tracing the actions of language as an active creator of meaning rather than merely a reflection. Given that 2020s online fandom of all types relies on deep layers of intertextuality and interdiscursivity, whether through fan fic or the playful absurdity of shitposting memes, this kind of methodological rigor is most welcome. Fathallah is then able to parse the minutiae of emo fandom spread across both time and web space. By focusing on discourse as it existed on the web rather than employing surveys or interviews, Fathallah also casts a wider net across the fandom as a whole. As a result, her data sets are also not necessarily dominated by the types of fans who would take the time to respond to academic inquiries.
[3] One of the most valuable and applicable aspects of Emo is that it undertakes a longitudinal study of emo fandom across multiple online platforms, making note of the variations in community climate while also taking stock of persistent themes. In many studies of fan discourse, there's a tendency to focus on a single community or online platform, and Fathallah's approach signals some of the limitations of this mode of study. In particular, Emo highlights how foundational design aspects of platforms shape fan communities—for example, noting that the text-based thread format of LiveJournal and older bulletin board sites encouraged detailed and direct discussion and debate, imparting a sense of seriousness to emo fandom much in the mold of older rock fandoms. These sites also served communities that were rather self-contained, if not hermetic. The more freewheeling and, importantly, visual and video-based world of Tumblr, YouTube, and other social media untethered emo fandom, opening up new possibilities for irony, deeply layered memes, and intersections with broader web culture. Fathallah also notes how lurking behind all of this are opaque algorithms that complicate any efforts to draw generalized conclusions from the available data. Studies involving music fan communities and the online discourse of music scenes often don't appreciate the ways in which the designs and financial motives of these different platforms might contribute to the workings of those communities. While clear answers may be elusive on those fronts, it's an important aspect for scholars to consider.
[4] The main concerns of the book, however, are the gendered discourses that have long been a part of rock music and rock-music fandom, and the varying degrees to which emo fandom replicates and subverts these cultural tropes. To my mind, one of the main strengths of Fathallah's methodology is that it demonstrates how these attributes varied across time and across different platforms. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, emo fandom centered on sites like LiveJournal and MySpace and seemed to largely mimic long-standing ways in which so-called good fandom revolved around displays of authoritative knowledge about the bands and individual musicians—this also functioned as a form of gatekeeping, shoring up the boundaries of authentic emo. Bad fandom, on the other hand, focused on attraction and heightened emotional responses in the Beatlemania mold and frequently was disparagingly coded as juvenile and feminine. These value judgments about fan behavior have a multigenerational and often strictly gendered history within rock fandom, in addition to criticism that continues to echo within current fan communities. LiveJournal-era fandom also often went to great lengths to align emo with punk and to distance it from pop, which fans associated with both commerciality and feminization. For example, Fathallah notes that when My Chemical Romance appeared on MTV's Total Request Live (1998–2019) in 2004, both official band communication and fan reactions adopted a tone in which the band's appearance was framed as an assault that happened to the show. Once these earlier sites gave way to Tumblr and YouTube, most concerns over genre and authenticity receded in importance, and the self-satisfied seriousness of fan discourse was often held up for ridicule and mockery. Female emo fans who once went to great lengths to set themselves apart from the bad fan stereotype now find little backlash, and fans actively deconstruct many of the gendered hierarchies of rock fandom more generally.
[5] Emo then moves from the relatively LGBTQ-positive ecosystem of Tumblr to emo communities on Reddit and 4Chan, spaces that had not been a part of Fathallah’s fan experience and have a reputation for antagonistic displays of toxic masculinity. Somewhat predictably, the emo communities on these sites privileged the sort of good fandom rooted in displays of cultural authority and knowledge, with frequent misogynistic and denigrating comments aimed at female fans and the excesses of bad fan behavior. Yet these trends were also sometimes laced with ironic overstatement, and fans in these communities often had to walk a tightrope of sorts, authenticating themselves as knowledgeable without inviting charges of pretentiousness and elitism. This suggests that at least some of the critical reflections of emo fandoms on other platforms had filtered in. Perhaps surprisingly, Fathallah also found that discussions of masculinity on both sites were more nuanced and reflexive than expected, with significant openness to male expressions of queerness. Finally, the carnivalesque atmosphere and the increasing interconnectivity between the fandom's various nodes of activity undermines gatekeepers' attempts to establish order and boundaries around any exclusive, noncommercial, or pure ideal of emo.
[6] Fathallah's final chapter explores how these fan conceptions of emo were incorporated and reauthorized by the mainstream music press, often with a markedly nostalgic tone. Alongside this, she explores the short-lived moral panic around emo that took place in the middle of the twenty-first century's initial decade, driven by sensationalized and exploitative tabloid articles that played up emo culture's connections to self-harm and suicide. In contrast to earlier moral panics about popular music prior to widespread internet availability, such as the Parents Music Resource Center's campaign against heavy metal and the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s, emo fans were able to mount an intense campaign in protest and affect the media discourse. Further, the increasingly circular nature of the interactions between emo fandom, the music press, and the bands' official platforms reflects changes that will likely affect all sorts of texts and categorizations beyond music.
[7] In the end, though, Fathallah cautions against utopian thinking regarding emo and gendered discourses in popular music, even as many fans recognize how hierarchies of value and community gatekeeping unfold in ways that mirror wider society's masculinist tendencies. She notes that although emo provided a vehicle for reevaluating and widening the scope of emotional expressions and gendered identities afforded to men, it did so without providing similar space for women. Further, there has long been an undercurrent of antagonistic misogyny in emo; the sensitive, sad-boy emo stereotype is also grounded in song lyrics that portray their protagonists as victims of hostile, uncaring, and disloyal women. Fathallah ends by reminding the reader that although the art form of emo music remains a largely male-dominated space, the fan communities have always had a significant population of women that somehow remains, as she puts it, "uncomfortably quiet."
[8] Fathallah's refusal to wear rose-colored glasses makes Emo a welcome entry into recent studies of gender and popular music, as does the exploration of fan-driven genre construction and canonization. From my perspective as a musicologist, one of the more provocative sections in the book is Fathallah's brief look at emo rap in the final chapter, a recent development that will surely inspire further inquiry and analysis in the near future (if it hasn't already). While Gen-X music fans like me often default to relatively rigid genre categorizations conditioned by decades of radio programming and record-store organization, the fan and industry acceptance of rappers like Juice Wrld and Post Malone under the umbrella of emo speaks to a new level of genre osmosis. Fathallah notes—correctly, in my opinion—that the shift from physical media to streaming services like Spotify served to erode boundaries between musical styles and subcultures. As popular music and its discourses continue to evolve in online spaces—which are themselves constantly evolving—those of us studying popular music scenes (and teaching related courses to undergraduate students) will likewise need to take these shifts into account. It serves as a good reminder of the limitations of our academic and generational perspectives and underlines the need for rigorous methodology and critical reflexivity in such endeavors.