You always think you’ll never get old until it finally happens to you. My Chemical Romance, visionary as ever in their early 40s, got a jump on the inevitable.
Headlining last Sunday’s When We Were Young fest, the hyped-to-death Las Vegas spectacle featuring dozens of 21st-century emo-punk fixtures, Gerard Way and the gang looked old. Not stuck-in-2004 old, even as they took the stage in re-creations of what they wore touring that year’s Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge: red ties, arm bands, flak jackets, fake blood. More old as in having just spent four hours becoming geriatrics in a Hollywood-grade makeup artist’s chair. As Gerard Way howled the opening lines of “I’m Not Okay (I Promise),†pangs of Sin City light revealed about 30 years of extra wrinkles; same goes for guitarists Frank Iero and Ray Toro, the latter with a musty gray dusting in his trademark ’fro. When you’re surrounded by teen alts dressed as you and aging millennials unironically identifying as “elder emos,†why not cosplay as the retirement tour version of yourself?
In on the joke or not, 80,000 people packed Las Vegas Festival Grounds last weekend and salvaged what started as a spirit-crushing weekend. When We Were Young was supposed to premiere with the same lineup on Saturday, before high winds forced organizers to pull the plug an hour before gates opened — this despite the small village already queued outside. Fans were issued refunds, but that did little to placate those who’d just flown out cross-continental or to keep Sunday tickets from pushing well into four figures on StubHub. Some bands rallied and organized ad hoc shows: Hawthorne Heights performed inside a casino as “Ohio Is for Lovers†battled slot-machine jingles for airspace; Bayside, Thursday, Senses Fail, and Anthony Green drew a line that snaked around an entire block for a tiny club show; when the Wonder Years attracted far more fans than their last-minute bar gig could handle, front man Dan Campell grabbed an acoustic from Guitar Center and played an impromptu set for the masses outside. Even for a genre known for its chaos and absurdity, packs of dejected emo kids wandering the Vegas strip among ads for Wolfgang Puck and Michael Jackson Cirque du Soleil is an image I won’t soon forget. “Someone told me there’s a new level of emo unlocked,†Silverstein singer Shane Told joked to me Monday morning. “It’s like, ‘No, no, man, I’m not just emo today; I’m day-one-of–When We Were Young emo.’â€
Emo’s resurgence in recent years has been striking, especially for those who watched its mainstream peak fade in the late aughts. My Chemical Romance’s worldwide reunion tour has surpassed all expectations, emo DJ nights thrive in most major American cities, and acclaimed 2022 albums from newer, post-boom bands like Oso Oso and Pool Kids continue to advocate for the genre in critics’ circles. “I think a lot of young people are discovering old music thanks to pop-punk finding its way back into the mainstream,†Avril Lavigne told me after her performance on Sunday. “It’s really cool and exciting to see, and I’m happy to be a part of it.†Still, the energy around this past weekend feels like an entirely new chapter in emo’s nearly 40-year history.
The legend of When We Were Young was born back on January 18. An ad promising MCR, Paramore, Avril Lavigne, Bright Eyes, and more than 60 other artists on the same day in Vegas ascended to Main Character On The Internet status like no other festival announcement in recent memory. But the excitement was tempered with suspicion. “Like a lot of people, I thought it was fake,†Used front man Bert McCracken admitted to me. Sure, the words “Live Nation Presents†appeared atop the poster, but this was a lot of bands to be playing in one day, and it certainly didn’t help when a few performers claimed they didn’t know they were performing until the flyer went live. Even last week, Alkaline Trio front man Matt Skiba mused that the poster had gone up before any band confirmed; thus the whole lineup eventually agreed to play on a sort of follow-the-leader groupthink. We’re all obsessed with scams and scammers, and When We Were Young may never shake “Emo Fyre Festival†from its Google footprint, as non-scandalous as its origin story actually is.
“Early 2021, when things were looking up post-lockdown and events were starting to happen, they called me to ask about My Chemical Romance,†said Matt Galle, the then freshly reunited band’s booking agent since 2002. “My Chemical Romance’s tour was going to have just ended and they were gonna be on the West Coast with all their crew and production. I said, ‘We’re down,’ and shortly after they started asking me about other talent I work with.†At CAA, Galle and his longtime business partner Mike Marquis represent numerous other artists who wound up playing the fest, including Taking Back Sunday, PVRIS, Jxdn, and the Maine. The lineup coalesced over the course of 2021; for example, Jimmy Eat World told me that they were approached during the latter half of the year about performing. “There was this festival in Vegas they were looking to book us on; that’s when we first heard rumblings,†remembered drummer Zach Lind. Gazing at the busy scene in the press tent, front man Jim Adkins continued, “There’s people here we’ve toured with over the years, like Taking Back Sunday, Dashboard Confessional, AFI.â€
The festival was helmed by producers Andy Serrao and Jeffrey Shuman. “When people were like, ‘This is Fyre Fest,’ I was like, ‘Dude, the people behind this are the most legitimate punk and hardcore promoters,†said Buddy Nielsen, singer of post-hardcore vets Senses Fail, who performed Sunday afternoon. “Andy Serrao is the curator, I’ve known him for 20 years and he books Chain Reaction. It’s a legendary all-ages club in Anaheim. The reason everybody said yes is because so many of them played there.†Added Galle, “Shuman is a creative mastermind. He had some great ideas, thinks big, and pulled it off.â€
On Sunday, 65 artists performed under friendly blue skies across five stages over the course of 12 hours. Two adjacent main stages and two mid-size stages alternated their performances in lockstep, making use of almost every second. The whole thing went off with hardly a delay or discrepancy, save for fans’ overcrammed, logistically impossible itineraries. Paramore or Thursday? The Story So Far or A Day to Remember? Wide-eyed attendees shuffled schedules within the festival app like MySpace top eights. The festival grounds were well-manicured and clean — mostly artificial grass over blacktop — evoking an idealized version of what a 16-year-old might imagine Warped Tour was like, or just about any present-day festival minus the mudpit that’s somehow always around even if it hasn’t been raining. After 11 a.m. doors, the crowd packed in around 1 p.m. and converged around central points of interest, with merch lines rivaling the draw of most early-lineup artists. Band-merch demand was predictably torrid (MCR sold fest-exclusive shirts referencing their aged alter egos), but the appetite for official festival merch blew away anything I’d ever seen at Coachella, Bonnaroo, or even old Warped Tours (Galle informed me the fest wound up selling out of its Sunday stock). Yes, we’re going to be seeing that lineup poster for a long time.
“It was one of the best festivals ever, especially for the artists,†Edith Victoria, singer of Gen-Z pop-punkers Meet Me @ the Altar, told me Monday morning. “Everyone was super-accommodating; the crowd was very emo and loving.†Indeed, the evaporation of shame and pretension around the big e-word was on full display: When Hawthorne Heights front man J.T. Woodruff proclaimed “We’re playing all old-school emo classics!,†he was met with screams and devil horns from clusters of teens. For younger emo kids — at least those devoted to the genre’s more mainstream iterations — it’s abundantly clear the tag has been removed from any strict sonic definitions and reapplied to music’s emotive textures. You’d know it from the amount of people wearing nu metal shirts, from the lingering influence of rappers like Juice WRLD and Post Malone over younger performers like Jxdn, from the Used slipping the “Smells Like Teen Spirit†riff into their set’s finale.
One dark cloud that did hang over the festival was concertgoer safety. It’s been almost a year since the Astroworld tragedy took 10 lives in November 2021, as anyone holding a microphone Sunday seemed to be well aware. Bring Me the Horizon singer Oli Sykes halted his band’s space-age post-hardcore for several minutes when a distant fan appeared to be in distress; Paramore’s Hayley Williams did the same soon after. My Chemical Romance opened their set with a giant, onscreen memo about looking out for the people around you.
If someone falls in the pit, pick them up — that was common rhetoric at mid-2000s emo and punk shows, and the most enduring bands truly practiced what they preached. While MCR exploded into MTV stars across 2005 Warped Tour, they’d frequently stop, mid-song, in the face of crowd avalanches and resume only once everyone was safe. Gerard Way was one of the most vocal supporters of young women, queer kids, and anyone who was different, really, in a scene where they were frequently ignored or exploited. Williams was Warped’s biggest (and often, only) female superstar. She’s grown into a bastion of emotional strength and, by most accounts, earned a more diverse following than any of her contemporaries. Midway through Paramore’s set, in a heartfelt address on the evolution of emo, she promised, “We’re gonna keep doing whatever we can alongside our friends and peers in this scene, to make it feel safe for every single one of you.†Is it any wonder these are the two bands headlining a festival that’s taken on such mythic proportions?
While the bank accounts of millennial Hot Topic veterans may have funded the majority of When We Were Young, the fest couldn’t have taken off without its multigenerational appeal. A significant portion of the crowd was clearly too young to have caught MCR or Paramore on the Warped Tour in 2005 or even Bring Me the Horizon and Pierce the Veil in 2010. Avril Lavigne somehow never spent a summer on Warped, so teens and a self-identifying “EMO MOM†or “EMO DAD†(both T-shirts available at the festival merch stand) could scream along to “Girlfriend†and “Sk8er Boi†together, perhaps for the first time. “There was so much buzz being up there, especially since Saturday didn’t happen,†Lavigne told me Monday. “The crowd was alive.â€
A final 2022 showing, nearly identical to Sunday’s lineup, is slated for this Saturday. The festival’s more Cali-pop-punk-inclined 2023 edition has already sold out its first date. When We Were Young is indeed very real, and, weather issues aside, its premiere went surprisingly smoothly. So is emo now older and wiser? In the hands of My Chemical Romance, Paramore, and their disciples, it’s getting there. The business of misery is already here to stay.