Emo Is Alive and Well

One evening in January, just before midnight, more than 300 people—most in old band T-shirts and ripped, black jeans—stood in line outside a bar in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. Empty Bud Light cans littered the sidewalk, and The Anthem by Good Charlotte thumped softly from speakers inside. “What’s everyone waiting for?” a passerby asked. “Hamilton!” a girl with purple lipstick shouted back, snickering. She moved ahead in line and swept her bangs under her hat, which read, in big, bold letters, “Make Emo Great Again.”

They were actually waiting to get into Emo Night BK, a semiregular series of DJ nights. It’s held mostly in Brooklyn but occasionally goes on tour to cities such as Denver, Detroit, and Las Vegas. Emo—short for “emotive hardcore music”—is a loosely defined subgenre of rock characterized by pop-punk hooks and sentimentally fraught lyrics. In other words, it’s hardly the soundtrack of a Trump rally. “This is for everyone who wants to relive their high school years”—specifically the late ’90s and early 2000s, emo’s peak—“when they didn’t have a care in the world,” says Ethan Maccoby, 26, one of Emo Night BK’s founders. He and Alex Badanes, 27, who host the parties, started throwing them while undergraduates at Tufts University and Berklee College of Music, respectively. Their original goal was simply to chill with friends and listen to great music, but since they graduated and moved to New York, the shindig has evolved into the largest emo night on the East Coast, with as many as a dozen parties a month.