Songs for the other: On Emo
- cryptidkidsideshow
- Dec 20, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: Dec 21, 2025
"You only hear the music when your heart begins to break"
My Chemical Romance, "The Kids From Yesterday"
"Hoping for the best, just hoping nothing happens
A thousand clever lines unread on clever napkins
I will never ask if you don't ever tell me
I know you well enough to know you'll never love me
(Why can't I feel anything from anyone other than you?)"
Taking Back Sunday, "Cute Without the 'E' (Cut From the Team)"
Ducking inside the Coney Island theater to avoid the unusually humid April day and the crowds that have begun to gather on the boardwalk, I slip backstage to meet the rest of the cast of New York's first Emolesque Fest. Everyone looks absolutely stunning. One producer is wearing a floor-length tartan gown with a skirt that barely fits through the stage door. A dancer with a rhinestoned tie and VANs snaps up her tearaway pants before throwing a boa made of shredded flannel shirts over her shoulders. Another is wrapped in leather and vinyl with a jet-black pair of horns atop her coiled braids (I am delighted later to find out that she has chosen to strip to AFI's "Miss Murder"). And my jaw hits the floor at the sight of the drag queen that towers over me in 10 inch black Pleasures. She's paying homage to the Black Parade with a rhinestoned band jacket with epaulets decorated with spikes and chains, a shako sporting a black feather that makes her 7 feet tall, and a black tulle skirt that billows around her like a plume of smoke. As for myself, I've traded rhinestones for hundreds of safety pins fastened to a black mesh bodysuit, my only color a pop of red in my school girl skirt. And of course, emo music is blasting from a tiny speaker in the corner as we use the filthy mirrors to apply copious amounts of eyeliner.
I started listening to emo music around the same time as I began paying attention to matters of the heart. I was a bit of a late bloomer when it came to romance. It wasn't until I was 14 that I had my first fantasy of kissing a boy, not out of some internalized pressure to prove I was normal but out of heartfelt attraction. When that happened, the music of all the sad-eyed, tousled, wailing boys I was listening to at the time resonated stronger with me.
The thing I loved most about emo music (and still love most today) is the yearning. Emo boys are always longing for something: love, death, forgiveness, closure - sometimes obliquely, sometimes explicitly, sometimes inextricably. There's always yearning for an other to satisfy or sedate or save you. This certainly became a blueprint for how I would come to experience desire, as I am given to spend far too much time longing for what is lost, soured, or not reciprocated to begin with.
But the same could be said to constitute all desire. In fact, when I first came across the philosopher Jacques Lacan and his theorizing about sexuality, I was reminded of my predilection for emo love songs. I'm hardly the first person to claim that emo shouldn't be denigrated or dismissed just because its primary subject matter is feelings. Eddie Reyes, founder and guitarist of Taking Back Sunday, wrote in "From the Basement:"
"The word “emo” is intrinsically problematic because emotions themselves are intrinsically problematic. Calling someone or something “emo” is to blatantly and singularly identify them as not just having an emotion, but having a more emphasized relationship with emotion to the point where it needs to be commented on."
Lacan theorized about sexuality as fundamentally oriented around a relationship with otherness. In "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Book XI," he elaborates upon the idea that "Man's desire is desire of the Other." The "Other," with a capital 'O,' encompasses the collection of symbols that constitute laws, language, culture, and social norms (initially imposed upon us by our parents). These symbols structure our reality from birth, dwell in our unconscious, and give shape to our desires, which are not innate impulses but rather reflections of culture and language. We long for recognition from the Other, but can never achieve this fully as we always fall short of what society expects us to be. We attempt to answer what the Other wants from us through how we present ourselves, but these efforts are never sufficient. This idea is echoed by queer theorist Judith Butler, who proposed that (as paraphrased by Luiz Artur Costa do Valle Junior in his thesis on Lacan and queer theory): "We participate by our failures to recite the norms whereby we come into existence." Most queer people understand the feelings of alienation and disenchantment that stem from this failure. And many enjoy emo music for its ability to give voice to these feelings of desperation and melancholy. As Vince Ruston writes in his blog post on queerness and My Chemical Romance, "maybe it's that MCR's work deals so intimately with themes of depression, death, grief and survival, and that if you're queer, you probably have a very particular relationship to those themes."
We cannot achieve the recognition from the Other that we crave, and it is in this gap of what we lack that our desires come into being. So we substitute people, what Lacan referred to as the "other" (little 'o'), in its place and seek to be recognized by them instead. Not only do we want to be seen and valued by the other, but we also want what the other desires. The need to be validated and the need to figure out and obtain what the other wants is always deferred and never truly satisfied, so desiring is always accompanied by feelings of alienation and discontent.
To me, emo is the perfect music for expressing the alienation and discontent that comes from desiring to be recognized from another person, and wishing to become what they desire in return. In his book Nothing Feels Good, Andy Greenwald calls emo "the sound of self-making," as it is a "specific sort of teenage longing, a romantic and ultimately self-centered need to understand the bigness of the world in relation to you." It expresses "the desire to turn a monologue into a dialogue."
There are some who analyze emo music that, while they don't reference Lacan, express criticisms of the genre that revolve around how it positions objects of desire as "other." Specifically, they take issue with how emo music "others" women through objectification. In his article "Cheer up emo kid," Sam de Boise argues that male emo singers are not deviating from normative masculinities in their music, but rather centering and weaponizing male emotions that "other" women in ways that are often overtly chauvinistic. In their blog posts, Jenn Pelly and Jessica Hopper make a similar claim as they lament how commonplace misogyny and assault is in the emo scene due to so many of its songs normalizing the objectification of women.
It is certainly true that emo music by men commonly position women as the "other" and the site for projecting all kinds of feelings, from lust to grief to rage. Male emo musicians even incorporate symbols of femininity into their aesthetic, from eyeliner to cheerleader outfits, to mark themselves as "other" in opposition to normative society. But if Lacan is correct that "othering" is an inevitable part of desiring, I'd argue that objectification isn't inherently violent or disrespectful. Objectification of any individual only becomes harmful when it is accompanied by entitlement and possessiveness, which if thwarted morphs into resentment and bitterness. I believe you can sing about a woman, even if you lust after or are enraged by her, in ways that don't devolve into hatred and misogyny.
In fact, it is this complex, often tense, interplay of masculinity and femininity that makes listening to emo music so appealing to me as a nonbinary person. Just as emo mixes emotionally vulnerable lyrics with aggressive music, there is something very queer to me about how it can switch identification between the singer and the object of his angst and desire. In his book, In Defense of Sex, Christopher Breu writes of a nonbinary artist's song:
"This ambiguity richly persists throughout the song, situating its desires in an indeterminate relationship between self and other, reflexiveness and a reaching out toward otherness. This oscillation between self and other, in which neither yields a stable position."
When I listen to emo music as a nonbinary person, I am drawn to both the lovestruck, confused, or grieving singer and the object of his emotions. I both relate to how he loves, whines, and grieves and also long to be on the receiving end of such heartfelt angst - remote, perfect, and infinitely desirable. I want to experience both the intensity of desiring another person and also being the object of another's desire whose own needs are intense and often inscrutable. I want to be both the boy who loves imperfectly and the girl who is loved imperfectly. To navigate, imperfectly, my own relationship with the "other" which is the core of all desire.
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