The ‘Transcendent Tastelessness’ of MySpace

During the years when the social-media platform MySpace ruled the internet—roughly 2005 to 2008—it fueled a cultural phenomenon known as the “Scene.” The term encompassed young people who liked to flat iron and dye their hair until their bangs resembled sheafs of carbon fiber. They wore skinny jeans and vampiric eyeshadow; they listened to energetic rock possessed with strident vulnerability (signature bands: Fall Out Boy, Dashboard Confessional, Panic! at the Disco). This movement of disaffected youths was as recognizable, visually and sonically, as the flannel-clad grunge crews of 1990s Seattle, or the two-toned punks of 1970s Britain. But its social construction was unprecedented, a true 21st-century invention.

The Scene’s name, which suggests tight-knit cohesion, was a glorious oxymoron. The subculture had deep roots in the suburban Northeast, but the internet allowed emo to also simultaneously thrive in California, Mexico, Russia. Radio, television, and print media, which were accustomed to controlling the flow of mainstream music, had to play catch-up. My Chemical Romance, an exemplary Scene band, was “able to reach areas of the country that didn’t have rock clubs, that didn’t have VFW halls, didn’t have venues, didn’t have record stores,” the journalist Leslie Simon recalls in Michael Tedder’s new book, Top Eight: How MySpace Changed Music, an insightful read about a baffling era. “We’re talking small towns, Middle America, where you still have a bunch of outsiders, but they can’t get out.”

The rise of virtual tribalism in the 21st century is a familiar story by now. But Tedder’s book, an oral history featuring Scene stars such as Dashboard’s Chris Carrabba and Say Anything’s Max Bemis, makes an important point about how we got here. Arriving after the false start of Friendster and before the global takeover of Facebook, MySpace, founded in 2003, was the first social network to capture the masses, becoming the most popular website in the U.S. for a short while. It taught a generation of kids how to package their identities and how to flirt—or fight—with strangers. But what’s equally important, Top Eight suggests, is how MySpace unleashed a hurricane of angst and innovation in music—in a manner that technology seems to do, one way or another, for every generation.

As the ’90s turned over to the 2000s, alternative rock was being recycled to ever more generic effect. Radio stations around the country had become calcified and corporatized. Napster broke up the record-industry cartel by enabling new, unregulated methods for finding songs, and then MySpace made the hunt social. “Music was intentionally infused into the site at the beginning,” Nate Auerbach, a former MySpace marketing manager, told Tedder. The songs that users posted to their page could be as important as the selfies they took. Bands fermented obsession by writing personalized notes to fans. Tom Anderson, the smiley company co-founder who was automatically “friends” with anyone who joined the site, could mass-message users about any band he wanted to promote.

All sorts of music thrived in this ecosystem, but a pattern emerged: The sound of MySpace was raw, DIY, and dramatic. The term emo predated the platform by years; a 2002 Seventeen magazine spread, “Am I Emo?,” portrayed the style as defined by shy, sweater-wearing earnestness. But MySpace pushed emo in aggro directions; its users wanted intensity, theatricality, and screen names festooned with x’s and random capitalization. Fall Out Boy captured the sense of constant escalation with the title of its 2007 single: “This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arms Race.”

[Read: How everything became emo]

This frothing energy was formidable, but not respectable. MySpace arose just as The Strokes and various indie-rock bands were being lauded by traditional tastemakers—as well as by new influencers such as Pitchfork—for a taciturn approach to rock. “Emo was sort of a reaction to that,” the singer Norman Brannon told Tedder. “[It said] ‘Hey, there’s something that’s cool about expressing yourself.’ And then you have this medium that is essentially an identity machine, it’s asking you, in no obscure terms, define yourself. Tell me who you are.” MySpace’s customizability—users could play with colors, fonts, and sounds—encouraged creativity, to fun and horrifying effect. Writes Tedder, “Do you want to make it so that your five favorite Avril Lavigne videos play at once when someone visits your page, resulting in an avant-garde cacophony of mall pop? Well, no one is stopping you, though someone probably should have.”

Indeed, though MySpace culture was defined by emo aesthetics, it was also defined by anti-aesthetics: a “transcendent tastelessness,” as Tedder puts it, enabled by the swap-meet-like sprawl of the internet, where identity signifiers could be endlessly browsed, mixed, and matched. The gatekeeping that ruled real-life music scenes gave way to gleeful omnivorousness. Rock kids listened to the MySpace-era rap king Lil Wayne, and Lil Wayne listened back. In the later years of MySpace’s reign, emo merged with hip-hop, metal, and dance music. Bands such as Cobra Starship, 3OH!3, and Gym Class Heroes made bratty, Frankenstein-beast hits that still, today, sound like a satire of what technologically accelerated future-pop—hyperpop?—might sound like.

And then it ended. MySpace was bitten to death by the many now-familiar demons of the internet era: hackers, copyright disputes, child-endangerment scares. After Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp acquired the company in mid-2005, MySpace entered a phase of imperialist expansion— remember MySpace Karaoke? No?—while its technological infrastructure began to go out of date. Glitches mounted, and sleek competitors in Facebook and Twitter emerged. In 2008, MySpace began leaking users at the rate of 1 million a month; in 2011, News Corp sold it off to an ad company. Subsequent attempts at a relaunch have mostly just inspired talk-show punch lines.

Tedder and his sources speak mournfully about what happened to music culture after MySpace’s collapse. The social-media platform’s popular replacement, Facebook, was a notably adult social network, with samey, résumé-like profiles. Spotify and other streaming-music services made music more accessible than ever, but they also attenuated the art form’s social significance by emphasizing passive listening over active engagement. In the past decade, Tedder writes, “sometimes you wondered if anyone was having fun anymore. The spirit of finding the next new band that would change the lives of you and your friends, and that being everything, was giving way to a culture that … preferred one already huge superstar to ten smaller acts.”

[Read: The polarizing emo record that captured teenage angst]

This analysis is pretty right on if you discount the latest online upheaval in music, TikTok. The video-sharing platform is structurally unlike MySpace, but its spirit—and its social and sonic footprints—is oddly similar. After Drake-style sullenness ruled pop for much of the 2010s, TikTok implemented a hard aesthetic reset around 2018. The TikTok era is a teenage era, an emo era, a cringe era, a chaos era. Its breakout stars (Lil Nas X, Olivia Rodrigo, JVKE) are emotionally excessive genre-smashers who sing with sneering, pop-punk affectations. Lately, I’ve had a new song from the 22-year-old musician underscores on repeat, and it’s making me wonder if I need to reevaluate 3OH!3.

How comforting, in a way, to feel that a cycle is being repeated. Whenever commerce hijacks new technology to deaden popular culture, teenage values—mayhem, excess, defiance, open-mindedness—sluice through some new channel. The ’70s punk explosion, for example, was also partly the result of young misfits using new recording and distribution tools. And just like early punk, MySpace music has, in a way, become a nostalgic touchstone, romanticized for its haphazard authenticity: Not long ago, the 24-year-old experimental pop singer That Kid told me that his primary influence was MySpace, a platform he was too young to have ever used himself.