This past weekend was my college friends’ third annual Summer Camp - a tradition that began by accident in 2021 when a spur-of-the-moment trip to Rochester, NY landed us all at Canandaigua Lake for a day. Last year our group grew - one friend even flew in from LA to be with us - and Vinnie Caruana came to play the songs we love one night. Between bonfires and homemade garbage plates, we also discussed a book that half of us were reading (or had read) and the other half had on their To Be Read list: Where Are Your Boys Tonight: The Oral History of Emo's Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008, by Chris Payne. And holy shit, we were not prepared.
Sometimes - not unlike my relationship to My Chemical Romance’s fourth album Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - you need to experience something at exactly the right time. Was it a coincidence that I was reading a book about the height of emo music while surrounded by the people that lived through that exact time period with me? Technically yes, but perhaps also no. I’ve been going to more shows lately, participating more in my local music scene than I ever have before. I’ve found myself ruminating on what I could have done differently in the past, and what I ought to be doing to be more supportive of the music I love now. I think it was a little meant to be, not unlike emo itself.
I’m not going to rehash the entire book because, dear reader, you really ought to experience it for yourself. But in the same way that what we call “mid-2000’s emo” (sometimes “third wave emo” and in one horrible instance “Hot Topic emo”) couldn’t exist without the genre’s predecessors and a whole host of bands outside of the genre (think Smashing Pumpkins or The Cure), I was not born to love emo. I grew up on Long Island, but I had no older siblings or friends who were trying to get me into the local music scene - I liked pop music and classic rock. I had significantly older cousins who had been teenagers a decade or more before me and turned me on to things like Animal Bag and Buffalo Tom once I was in middle school, and I eventually wandered unsupervised into New Wave (though how I got there I could not tell you.) By the time I began high school - just days before 9/11 - I didn’t even know what hardcore was, much less that I was living inside a massive hardcore scene.
When I think back on the first emo song I ever heard, it had to be “Sic Transit Gloria…Glory Fades” by Brand New. In the fall of 2003 I was a junior in high school and a girl who sat next to me in my Sociology class made me a mix CD that included that song (it immediately followed “Lover I Don’t Have to Love” by Bright Eyes and those two songs will forever be intertwined in my brain.) I didn’t know what I was listening to, but it changed me forever. The following year My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy came into the collective consciousness and it was like I’d become a whole new person - gone were the days of ripped bell bottoms and my beloved t-shirt featuring Robert Smith’s face (and I lament letting this shirt go, for the record). By the time I started my freshman year of college in the fall of 2005, I’d already been to Warped Tour on Randall’s Island and emerged, as though from baptism by dust storm, as Scene Jordan.
I didn’t live the lives of the people in this book. I was never in a band (you’re all welcome.) I never became a rock critic or zine maker, though perhaps I ought to have pursued that particular dream. I was just another face in the crowd; another Long Island kid with an Envy on the Coast song on their Myspace page. One of the things I loved about Where Are Your Boys Tonight is that I didn’t feel left out. For the most part, no one tried to demonize the fans. None of what happened could have ever occurred if it wasn’t for the people buying the CDs, calling the radio stations, and going to the shows. That was me. One of millions, but I was in there. And while I may have been a tiny speck in the scene, the flip side is that any number of these bands were also only a tiny speck of my life - a song to soundtrack a moment I can relive whenever I want. And just like any good album needs quality liner notes, we now have a compendium of the story of what happened.
When you read Where Are Your Boys Tonight, it’s going to trigger a tidal wave of memory. Maybe you weren’t at the particular shows discussed in the book, but I’ll bet you remember where you were the first time you heard The Used’s In Love and Death or Thursday’s War All the Time. No matter how hard you try, there’s an ex-partner you still associate with that one Say Anything song, and you can tell a story in vivid detail about a trip to a show that became an unmitigated disaster (shoutout to the Blink-182/FOB show at Darien Lake in ‘09 - it took us four hours to get out of the fucking parking lot.) But those stories, that soundtrack, make you who you are now. And whether you love it or hate it, I’m certain that, behind closed doors, you still put those records on from time to time and slip away into another version of yourself.
I’m so glad Chris Payne put Where Are Your Boys Tonight together. There’s a lot of stuff in there that fans have posited conjecture about for decades, and other things that people just never thought to write down before - like how monumentally fucked up it was to go from a band with a small following to being a nationally recognized brand in a matter of minutes. As dozens of our favorite musicians, writers, producers, and taste-makers wax poetic about the past, my favorite quote comes from Hayley Williams toward the end of the book. In talking about the success of Riot! and how it felt like it was this one perfect moment to be revisited over and over forever, she ponders the effect of that tendency:
“If you’re always turning around, facing the direction you came from, how can you appreciate where you’re standing today? You have to give yourself a chance.” - Hayley Williams
For a person like myself who loves to write about what has been, this was like a kick in the teeth. It’s important to recognize where you came from and what got you to where you are - but eventually you have to let the past be the past. Does that mean we should stop going to all these anniversary shows for bands we loved 20 years ago? Of course not. But maybe we should show up early enough to catch the opener because they’re probably the future of where our scene is going. We don’t want to be like the French radical who watches a mob run past and says “there go my people. I should find out where they’re going so I can lead them.”
This was all just a very long and rambling way of saying thanks for all your hard work, Chris. The book is exquisite and painful and hilarious and perfect. For everyone else, get yourself a copy or request it from your local library - as libraries are, in fact, extremely punk rock.