In photos: The angsty era of emo music

By Sandra Song, CNN

(CNN) — The sun is setting on the Badlands as Amy Fleischer-Madden squints through her camera’s viewfinder, searching amidst the red rock and prairie grass for a figure wearing head-to-toe black.

The year is 1999, and the young photographer has been touring with Saves the Day, four baby-faced kids from Princeton, New Jersey who recently released their sophomore album, “Through Being Cool.” They don’t know it yet, but the record will eventually become synonymous with “third wave emo,” a nebulous genre emerging from suburban garages, church basements and all-ages venues across America.

Both controversial and confessional, emo music is a softer approach to hardcore punk, with warbly vocals and evocative lyrics that have other bands derisively calling it the sound of “teen angst.” But that doesn’t matter right now to drummer Bryan Newman, who Flesicher-Madden spots crouched on the ground, lost in the quiet of the South Dakotan landscape. She presses the shutter button, knowing that the candids are just as important as the concert when it comes to the story of emo.

“It was like, ‘This is as much a part of the story as the guy on stage,’” Fleischer-Madden said of the spontaneous moments that so often happened during a band’s downtime between shows, whether a goofy greenroom joke or a mad dash for the shower in their seedy motel room. Many of these images serve as anchors in her new book, “Negatives: A Photographic Archive of Emo (1996-2006).” And that photo of Newman remains her favorite, twenty-some years later, Fleischer-Madden told CNN.

“The entire middle section (of the book) is called ‘Everything and Everyone,’ and that whole section is just chaos,” she laughed. “It’s the van, backstage, sleeping in a bathtub, behind-the-scenes of photoshoots, stuff like that. And for me that’s the pulp. That’s the good s**t.”

Making a scene

An overview of the bands that helped shape emo after the musical genre’s first wave emerged in the ‘80s from D.C.’s hardcore scene, “Negatives” features hundreds of images, drawn from Fleischer-Madden’s own archives and the work of other photographers documenting the scene. Some of the musicians featured are instantly recognizable — Death Cab For Cutie, Jimmy Eat World, Fall Out Boy — others less so. But every single band in the book helped influence the emo scene in some capacity, and Fleischer-Madden said it became her job to figure out where each stood, historically and sonically, within the trajectory of emo.

“I asked myself things like, ‘Why did that band matter? Did they inspire future sounds and looks? Are their records part of a legacy?’” Fleischer-Madden explained of her process. “There are a lot of bands in the book that I’m not personally fans of, but they mattered and influenced the movement.”

Growing up in Miami, Fleischer-Madden was an active member of the local punk scene in the mid-’90s, throwing shows and writing about up-and-coming bands for her zine, Fiddler Jones. At 16, she started Fiddler Records and released an album by The Vacant Andys, a band fronted by Chris Carrabba of Dashboard Confessional, before going on to book tours, work A&R for other labels, and travel around the country taking photos of many of the bands mentioned in her book.

As Fleischer-Madden wrote, she was a “fan” during the second wave, circa 1996-2000, which was defined by bands like Bright Eyes, American Football, Cursive, Sunny Day Real Estate, and The Get Up Kids, and a “participant” for the third wave — an era spanning from 2000 to 2006 that included bands like Circa Survive, Say Anything, and New Found Glory, as well as heavy-hitters like Paramore and My Chemical Romance.

And while she acknowledged there are plenty of purists willing to split hairs over her decision to label a certain band “second wave” instead of “third,” or vice-versa, Fleischer-Madden said she tried to approach the issue by using objective measures like “the age of the band members, how they dressed, what the photos look like and if they’re on film.” (Beyond that, her opinions are her own.)

“I sort of became an emo Sherlock Holmes,” she explained, “where I tried to find the answer in the details.”

A musical diary

Emo’s third wave, in Fleischer-Madden’s eyes, saw the emergence of pop-punk, screamo, and post-hardcore, subgenres which “share the same emo DNA” and “heart on your sleeve” lyricism, just done louder, faster, and punchier. And since then, the definition of “emo” has only continued to expand, much to the chagrin of older fans, who lament the “mainstreamification” and “commercialization” of emo music and culture.

Fleischer-Madden refutes this criticism, arguing that discovering new music (even if it’s technically “old” music) has always been a teenage rite of passage.

Similarly, Emo Nite founder Morgan Freed — whose emo-themed party night has become a nationwide phenomenon amongst younger fans — echoed the sentiment, pointing out that emo has in recent years spawned dozens of TikTok trends and a popular music festival produced by LiveNation.

“This is music to listen to when you’re in the suburbs, sitting on the roof on a summer night in your cul-de-sac drinking a beer,” he said, adding that the alienating experience of being a teenager is universal and timeless — especially in an increasingly digital world. 

“There are always going to be 15-year-olds who need to latch onto something relatable to them,” Freed said. “And this music is for (the people) growing up as outsiders or nonconformists.”

That said, there’s no debate when it comes to the authenticity of Fleischer-Madden’s “Negatives.” It’s a book that chronicles her own lived experience within a scene that still has its hold on pop culture at-large, more than two decades down the road.

And for her, there is no room for gatekeeping a “wholesome artifact” meant for people “to put on their shelves and show their parents or their kids and be like, ‘I was a part of this thing.’”

She recalled an “amazing” conversation she had with a 20-something at her recent L.A. book event: “He was like, ‘I wasn’t old enough to see these bands in this era, but now I’m into all of it. I’m catching up and learning, and I use your book as a rulebook,’” she said, smiling.

“So I’m like, ‘That’s amazing,’” she continued. “And he goes, ‘It’s a map. It’s a map to the whole scene.’”

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