“ Punk and rock’n’roll started with Black folks and then all suddenly disappeared because of access and privilege,” says Lawson. All are welcome to attend, but “we want the messaging to be clear that are more the majority versus the minority” at these events and that they “always prioritize queer and trans folks”, says Becerra-Lewis.īipoc are often erased from the history of emo. The project has since flourished into a loose collective of emo fans hosting Bipoc emo events in their home towns across the US, featuring local drag artists and bands. “People were so interested in joining and collaborating that I was like, ‘What if we do this in other cities?’” Becerra-Lewis remembers. So they hosted their first Bipoc Emo Night in December of 2021 and returned to the idea in November and December 2022 with events in New York City and Los Angeles. “I realized this was not actually a welcoming space for everyone.”īecerra-Lewis went home and searched for an event that prioritized the safety of people of color, but didn’t find one. They knew emo had always been predominantly white, straight and male, but seeing what they felt was a symbol of intolerance worn out in the open shifted something within them. “It shocked me,” says Becerra-Lewis, who could be seen taking photos throughout the night in a spiked harness that complemented a tapestry of body tattoos. As an adult, they remember attending a local emo night event in 2021 in Las Vegas, where they saw another partygoer proudly sporting a “Make America Great Again” hat. Before the evening began, they helped set up, covering the bar in posters featuring the Venmo handles of that night’s drag performers so attendees could send tips.Īs a 12-year-old enduring racist schoolyard taunts about their Mexican family, Luna Becerra-Lewis found solace in the emo music their older sister blasted while surfing MySpace. The renewed interest has made it possible to create space specifically for “people who grew up in that scene but feel unseen”, explains Luna Becerra-Lewis, 27, who says they are an “emo kid for life”. Photograph: Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet/The Guardian The best known is Emo Nite, a franchise founded in 2014 whose founders played a DJ set at Coachella and secured a residency in Las Vegas. That resurgence has coincided with millennial nostalgia and the explosion of popularity of “emo nights” across the US.
In the last few years, emo and its aesthetic have seen a resurgence in popular culture thanks to Gen Z’s embrace of the genre on TikTok, emo and pop-punk-infused hits from artists like Olivia Rodrigo, and music festivals championing the bands of that era. Someone in my seventh grade class took my iPod and said, ‘You don’t look like you’d like this stuff.’ And I was like, ‘That’s not how this works.’” “That’s the culture I grew up around and it was one of the most confusing experiences I had as a kid. “We get out of the poison that was dealt in the 90s and mid-2000s, where all the movies we saw were like, ‘Black people like this music and white people like this music and that’s the way it is,’” Odaga says. “You have to watch in line waiting for the show for people you don’t want to go near, like, ‘Who looks like they’re going to try and hurt me?’”īipoc (Black, Indigenous and people of color) Emo Night is changing the narrative, says Hanz Odaga, a collective member who was born in Uganda and now lives in New Jersey. “I’ve played shows and been to shows where people are wearing white pride T-shirts,” he says. He was eager to join the collective behind Bipoc Emo Night because even in 2023, he says, traditional emo spaces are “still super white dominated”. “As a kid, I didn’t think going to emo shows was an option because I’d feel so afraid and alone,” says Andy Lawson, 29.
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