The (Slightly Abridged) Dictionary of Emo

My Chemical Romance is touring again, Paramore and Jimmy Eat World are headlining a major festival this fall, and there’s a skinny, tattooed white dude with a guitar dominating the charts. In case you haven’t heard, emo is back, baby! In honor of its return to prominence—plus the 20th anniversary of the first MCR album—The Ringer is following Emo Wendy’s lead and tapping into that nostalgia. Welcome to Emo Week, where we’ll explore the scene’s roots, its evolution to the modern-day Fifth Wave, and some of the ephemera around the genre. Grab your Telecasters and Manic Panic and join us in the Black Parade.

WhyWhy is the word “emo” so hard to define? At first, “emo” was short for “emo-core,” which itself is short for “emotional hardcore.” The term was born in the D.C. music scene, where the band Rites of Spring is credited with introducing a new kind of hardcore that focused on the personal instead of the political. But Rites of Spring didn’t embrace the term. Neither did Embrace, another pioneering D.C. band that gets lumped into the category. (Isn’t all music supposed to be emotional?) So if the supposed forefathers of the genre didn’t come up with the word “emo,” who did? Was it Thrasher magazine, who first committed it to print in 1986? Haters jealous of the cultish success of bands like Rites of Spring and Embrace? Just some guys Mike and Dan, as someone hypothesizes in Andy Greenwald’s 2003 book on emo and pop-punk, Nothing Feels Good? Ultimately, some people there at the beginning felt it didn’t even matter. “It didn’t mean anything then and doesn’t to me now,” D.C. musician and activist Jenny Toomey told Greenwald.

But the word clearly means something to some people—or else, why would The Ringer be holding an entire Emo Week? After its humble D.C. beginnings, the movement traveled around the country, and then the world. In the ’90s, emo spread in basements throughout the urban Northeast and small rock venues in the Great Plains. In the 2000s, it spread to Hot Topics in suburban malls and the MTV offices in New York City. Today, with the genre firmly entrenched in its Fifth Wave, it thrives on Bandcamp, where sullen kids from across the globe tap into the spirit of Rites of Spring, sometimes trading guitars and drums for Ableton and sample packs. Along the way, it’s made stars: We owe emo for the likes of My Chemical Romance, Paramore, Fall Out Boy, Jimmy Eat World, Dashboard Confessional, and dozens of other aughts rock stars, even if all they shared with Rites of Springs was a propensity to turn a mirror onto themselves and write about what they saw.

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