Further Research Into Our Target Audience

I looked online for further secondary research in order to gain a better understanding of our target audience and how to relate to them.

Exploring Dress and Behavior of the Emo Subculture 

The emo subculture, derived from “emotional hardcore,” or “emo-core,” is a sub-genre of punk music that came into existence in the mid-1980s. It consists of male and female youths transgressing beyond standard dress and expectations, often presenting an androgynous look as male and female “emo kids” share similar hair- and clothing styles.

Emo is kind of like gothic-light, to some, emo means not knowing how to deal with the large amount of emotions that rage through adolescent and teenage bodies so the emo-subscribing teens act as if they have no place in the world. Some say that they just don’t know where they fit in the world and don’t know how to deal with that lack of connection.

What was it about this subculture that allowed for boys to dress so androgynously that it both bordered on femininity and avioiding traditional masculinity to the point where, while observing these individuals in a public gathering place, many cannot immediately and definitively ascertain certain individuals’ genders.

Emo’s resistance to identity in general, whether as a fixed form or as an individual’s or even entire group’s. That is, most kids who appear “emo” are not willing to identify as emo. Referring to these individuals in the subculture as “emo kids,”, many believe that this is simply the most appropriate term allotted for these individuals, even though many would resist the term and would necessarily refer to one another as such. Because a distinct style, behavior, and musical interest is present within this subculture, one that all of my interviewees agreed upon, it seems to be the most fitting and organized way within which to refer to these individuals. Although they may appear similar, it is important to remember that these individuals are unique and differ from one another in addition to the rest of society, and that therefore can complicate understandings of these people as members of a distinct group.

Emo Music History To the emo kid, musical taste trumps all else in discerning potential friendships and in assessing an individual’s coolness. This is perhaps troubling in a psychological sense because membership, or acceptance, often is extended to others based upon surface similarities, as well as similarities beyond the individual’s direct control, such as his or her socioeconomic classification. Musical taste does not exist in a vacuum, but is instead developed and encouraged by many social and individual factors. It is, however, a primary method of including and excluding among many subcultures, with emo certainly being both excluded by others (including the emo kids themselves) who laugh at its silliness or femininity and by the emo kids who include those who wear the same band tees and attend the same concerts.

Emo kids all have one crucial characteristic in common: they are all drawn into the emo subculture by their love of music. The connection between the emotions and instances of their lives and the music speaks that to them is undeniable for teenagers in general, but for the emo subculture in particular. Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower shows the relevance of music and literature to high school student Charlie’s Schmitt 8 and his friends’ lives and has received wide support throughout the emo subculture. Though emo was not quite at its peak during the publication date of 1999 (and in the, presumably, years prior that Chbosky was writing the novel) it had been in the periphery, evolving from hardcore punk since the mid-1980s.

Though this book was likely not intended solely for teenage emo youth readers, their own lives and obsession with music seems to parallel the focus on music for the characters in the novel. Formerly a private space not present in the mainstream, emo initially grew out of the hardcore punk music genre (abbreviated to “hardcore”) during the mid-1980s, reaching its peak in the summer of 2002. According to the 2006 documentary American Hardcore, the hardcore genre emerged out of “a bad economy, inflation, change of administration. [The election in 1980 of Ronald] Reagan was the kind of antithesis or the reaction, a whole new, like a paradigm shift. There was a lot of concern of, you know, what might that mean in terms of all kinds of issues: freedom of speech, repression, and civil liberties, and that was sort of that era.”


The anger represented within hardcore is further expressed in the opening commentary of the film by lead vocalist and guitar player Vic Bondi of the Chicago-based band Articles of Faith: In the early ‘80s there was a sense of reestablishing the order: the white man, the Ronald Reagan white man order, is coming back.

Cultural symbols indicate that the members are similar, and they help the members of the group identify one another in a crowd. Without even speaking a word, two members of the emo subculture could identify one another by similar hairstyles and clothing choices; importantly, members of the emo subculture could also identify non-members, all without ever exchanging words.