I was a Myspace emo, AMA

I’m fortunate that since moving to LA, I’ve built up a network of friends and acquaintances that’s full of musicians. There’s a whole world of session singers, touring musicians, theme park entertainers, home studio producers, songwriters, bar acts, corporate/wedding performers, and truly independent artists recording and releasing their own material - these are people who fucking grind it out day after day. I tip my hat to those that make a career as a working musician, and I’m in awe of how they make it work despite every hurdle in their path.

This week I got to see a few of those friends play in one of their many side projects, Emo After Dark. That show recap is below.

My friends inspire me - and they are why I am able to not only dream up the idea of pursuing my creative interests, but to also have the balls to actually do it.

Next week I’ll have a recap from the California stop of the Is For Lovers Festival - pls drop me DM if you’re also going!

Missed last week’s newsletter? Read it here

🖤 Elisa

IT’S NOT A PHASE

Things found on the interwebz this week:

• Green Day put out a boxset for Dookie’s 30th anniversary and I wish I had the cash to throw down for it → Merch 

• Bust out the popcorn, tickets for Fyre Fest 2 are apparently now on sale. Who’s gonna take one for the team and snag tickets? → Stereogum

• Movements new album is pretty fucking solid → Spotify 

FROM THE PIT

I’m pretty sure that Emo After Dark was the first emo-themed cover band in SoCal. Since 2018, EAD has made the Gaslamp in Long Beach their home turf, with occasional shows at other venues around LA and Orange County.

Going to an Emo After Dark show is like going home. I always know I’m going to run into other friends there, and I get to hear a few sets totally comprised of some of my favorite songs of all time.

Nothing beats a live band, like emo nights that are DJ-driven just don’t hold the same appeal to me anymore (that and I have personal beef with Emo Nite LA, but that’s another story.) It’s emo night every time I’m in my car with the radio on - so I don’t need to show up to a bar and buy an overpriced cocktail to have that experience.

But bring in a full band that can not only do those songs justice, but also add a little kick with their dual vocalists trading off verses? Oh yeah, to me that is worth driving from LA to OC, and after Tuesday night’s show, I drove home tired but satisfied. Late night weekday shows can be rough but they’re worth it when a solid group of musicians give their crowd a good fucking time.

Emo After Dark’s next show is on October 24th.

FROM THE SHELF

This is a book I didn’t know how badly I needed until I was reading it. Michael Tedder’s Top Eight: How Myspace Changed Music covers a bit of the background that went on behind the scenes for Myspace as a company and also shares anecdotes from a few of the musicians that were on the platform.

Top Eight completes an unofficial trilogy with Chris Payne’s Where Are Your Boys Tonight? and Dan Ozzi’s Sellout. Even though all three books rehash a couple similar band and industry stories, the way each one deep dives into a different corner of this late 90’s to early 2010’s music scene is worth the complete read-through. Every kid who went to Warped Tour or bought a band t-shirt at Hot Topic between 2002 - 2009 should have all these books lined up on their shelf.

My only problem with all three of these books is how the interviewees all harp on how deeply they rejected the label of “Emo.” I think this is one of those things where the bands and fans really saw things differently. Those bands wanted to self-curate how they were perceived but fans just wanted to feel a sense of belonging.

“Emo” used to be such a dirty word, a high school hallway slur that “popular kids” used to sling around, yet I wore that label on my sleeve with pride as my way to stick it to the man. And now with the “Emo Nostalgia” resurgence, it has evolved into a broad term to cover “music from the early 2000’s that probably could’ve been found either on or adjacent to Warped Tour.”

I was in high school when Myspace was king - sometimes I feel like I hit the generation jackpot for being actively online during that magic time window for its existence. I spent so many hours perfecting my profile’s HTML and choosing songs for the little playlist widget. I also ran pages for my high school crush’s bands, found new music, and posted my bad angst-ridden poetry.

But, as Tedder reminds us in the book, for as much as we romanticize this centralized place of early social media - there was plenty that went wrong as well. It was the last hurrah of the Internet when it was still the Wild West. And at the time I had no idea how involved Rupert Murdoch was to the fall of the site - and it was eye-opening to read that whole side of the story as a disillusioned 32 year old that’s lived through the last decade of Fox News.

Tedder sums up the Myspace experience well in the book’s intro: “The same problems of greed, prejudice, and unthinking cruelty that have always been part of society were amplified by the new digital tools. But so were the eternal virtues of connection, curiosity, and community… The height of Myspace now feels several lifetimes away, and the idea that the right MP3 could change your life overnight now reads as a romantic idea too quaint to be true. But for a while, it was a regular occurrence.”

NOSTALGIA BLAST

While reading Top Eight I kept thinking about all those Dallas Fort-Worth bands I used to worship back in those days. Its such a fucking shame that nearly all of them now exist in memory only - the purge of Myspace’s servers was my generation’s fall of the Library of Alexandria.

Listen, if anyone gives you shit for taking or posting a crappy cell phone recording at a concert - just keep your phone at a respectful height for the people around you and record the fuck away. There’s an endless list of bands that I wish I had ANY footage of. These were bands that made me fall in love with being part of a local music scene - and with the loss of Myspace it is almost like they never existed at all.

I had to dig to find this… here’s one of my old favorites from In Fair Verona:

CHEER UP EMO KID

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