Tell All Your Friends: A Cultural History of Mainstream Emo

Emma Garland examines the lasting impact of 2000s mainstream emo―with original interviews from members of The All-American Rejects, Say Anything, Thursday, and more. Emo is one of the most enduring subcultures of the 21st century. It’s also one of the most maligned. The stereotypical emo kid remains fixed in the cultural consciousness as a morose teenager with a lip piercing, a fringe plastered across one eye, and Converse scribbled with song lyrics. But that’s only part of the story. With Tell All Your Friends, Emma Garland offers a long-overdue corrective. Beyond the stereotype is a world of music and fashion whose legacy has shaped pop culture for over two decades. With sharp wit and gleeful nostalgia, Garland unpacks the way emo exploded into the mainstream in the 2000s, and everything that came with it: the looks, the sounds, the MySpace profiles, the moral panics, the complicated sexual politics, the fan fiction, the genre-bending crossovers (some more questionable than others), and more.