My early high school years were, unsurprisingly, not amazing. Being a gay band kid in a rural, sports-centric school district was not easy, especially as an underclassman. In those first two years, pop-punk music became a huge escape for me. Ever since the first time our band played “Thnks Fr Th Mmrs” by Fall Out Boy my freshman year, I was hooked.
That’s why this installment of Metal Mondays is simultaneously very painful for me to write and also very important. The 2000s scene music community that gave rise to bands like Asking Alexandria and Bring Me The Horizon was also incredibly predatory toward young women and girls.
The scene subculture formed out of the emo subculture (it’s complicated, but they’re different), and the 2000s were never the same. Because of this movement, whenever a large portion of people think of Y2K, they think of fingerless gloves, studded belts and terrible haircuts. Undeniably, scene music groups left a huge cultural imprint on the decade that can still be seen now.
However, while this subculture was forming, so was toxic masculinity. While brooding, eyeliner-wearing men with dyed purple hair may not seem like the best representation of misogyny, for a lot of women in the 2000s it was. Bands and musicians consistently released songs about the pain of the breakups they were going through and their hatred of their ex-girlfriends.
A prime example of this would be Brand New’s Jesse Lacey. Lacey has been accused of grooming fans who were minors for years, and his songwriting should have been a warning about this behavior. In “Jude Law and A Semester Abroad,” Lacey sings about wanting his ex to die in a plane crash because she decided to take a semester abroad. In “Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis,” he sings about getting girls blackout drunk and then having sex with them in his car.
Lacey’s grooming allegations aren’t an alienated incident, either. In 2017, Pierce The Veil drummer Mike Fuentes left the band after a woman came forward with grooming allegations against him. The rest of the guys in Pierce The Veil made no effort to support victims of Fuentes and continued making music as if the band’s co-founder never existed.
Jake McElfresh, the multi-instrumentalist behind Front Porch Step, has faced multiple accusations of sending explicit texts and pictures to underage girls, some of whom were freshly 13. Despite this, he still performed at the Nashville location of the 2014 Vans Warped Tour just months after he was dropped from the main stop of the Warped Tour.
There are numerous additional accounts of assault and grooming in the scene music community but very few of accountability.
For so many long-time fans, especially those who identify as women, it can feel exhausting to be a listener of scene music. In numerous online essays, women detail trying to enjoy this music but only being viewed as someone to date and nothing more than a nameless figure in a song. Condescending, gatekeeping and overly-physical male fans of the genre have turned local music venues and large arenas alike into places where they are the self-pitying centers of the scene universe.
The problems of misogyny in scene subculture run so deep that even the biggest, most well-liked bands have their issues. Fall Out Boy, one of my all-time favorite bands and a repeat offender among my top artists has released songs that have aged poorly. On reflection, lines like “I'm just a notch in your bedpost, but you're just a line in a song,” reduce the girl Pete Wentz sings about to something less than human while also shaming her.
For years, I sang “Sugar, We’re Going Down” with pride. I loved it — and numerous other songs — without acknowledging how they might impact a female listener. It is only now as I write this column on a subject I thought I knew a decent amount about that I’m reflecting on the music that I love in a genre that owns music I both love and hate.
However, I’m not going to become one of the melodramatic scene boys I’ve been writing about. There’s still hope for the genre and scene culture, with more and more women entering the genre.
Pop-punk titan Paramore, led by vocalist Hayley Williams, has been the leading feminist charge in a man-dominated genre. Williams and co. have inspired several artists, and groups like Against the Current and singers like Zand have grown in popularity. Tonight Alive, PVRIS and Royal & The Serpent are also making waves in the ever-changing music of the scene, continuing the tradition of combining pop elements with traditional emo and hardcore.
While there is still much to be desired in terms of representation and treatment of women in the scene, things are still looking up. More and more acts with women in them are helping to turn once toxic corners of the music world into safe spaces, and more fans — myself included — are beginning to reflect on our old Fall Out Boy CDs and ask, “Was that really okay?”
Jackson McCoy is a freshman studying journalism at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. Want to share your thoughts? Let Jackson know by emailing or tweeting him at jm049122@ohio.edu or @_jackson_mccoy_.
