The TikTokification of Screamo
Making peace with "skramz."
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I turn another year older next week. Aging doesn’t happen the way you assume it will. When I was a kid, I used to look at my parents and think: I guess that’ll be me one day—I’ll wake up a grown-ass adult in an old-person body. But aging is more subtle than that. It’s not a switch that gets flipped. It’s more like a beer gut or a bald spot, slowly expanding over time until one day you’re looking at a photo of yourself from 20 years ago and realize: Hm I don’t look like that anymore, do I?
But I can pinpoint the moment when I realized I was stepping onto the other side of a generational divide. I was in my late 20s. There was a family party happening at my aunt’s house and I was off in the living room flipping through channels on basic cable. Billy Madison was on the USA Network and my remote finger instinctively stopped dead. I’d first seen Billy Madison in the theater when I was 12 and it was the hardest I’d ever laughed in my short life. Every single scene made me gasp for air so hard I thought I was going to die. And here I was more than a decade later and it was still making me laugh. Then the pee-pants scene came on. I grabbed the only other two people in the room, my two cousins, ages 9 and 12, and said, “Guys, you gotta watch this part, oh my god it’s so funny.” A man-child was pretending to pee his pants and my cousins just sat and watched silently. “OK now watch this!” I said while nudging them. Eh? Eh? All of Billy’s classmates peed their pants and still… nothing. “If peeing your pants is cool, consider me Miles Davis.” My cousins watched the entire scene stone-faced. Then the movie went to commercial and they took out an iPhone and watched a Minecraft tutorial video on YouTube in silence for the next 15 minutes. That was the moment it really hit me that a new generation was stepping in and pushing me and my culture out. It has been all downhill since then.
I ran a long interview with Jayson Green from Orchid this week and the research for it sent me down a deep rabbit hole of screamo memes. After flipping through several dozen Instagram accounts with names like @skramztraphouse420, I realized something. I don’t know what the fuck any of them are talking about.
I should know. This was a genre I loved and a scene I experienced in real-time in the late-90s/early 2000s. I attended these shows, I saw these bands, I bought these records. It is perhaps the one subject besides The Simpsons (seasons 1-11) on which I would consider my knowledge to be above average. And yet, here I am, looking at a jacked Shrek fighting with some sort of anime woman over the Jeromes Dream skull split and my mind draws a blank trying to surmise a guess at what it could possibly mean.
Over the last few years, teens have taken screamo and run with it. They’ve even redubbed it “skramz,” a term that makes me cringe every time I hear it. Green also hates the term, but had some insightful perspective about it: “Every generation wants to define their own terms and everyone wants to create their own way to speak to each other so you know a person's in the same tribe as you. So I get wanting to take it and make it your own thing.”
For a while, I was bewildered by Gen Z’s interest in the genre I grew up on, mainly because nothing that I enjoy is cool or culturally relevant. It’s a real mindfuck to feel aged out of culture while at the same time see every band t-shirt I’ve ever owned being sold on Depop for triple-digit prices. How, why, and when did this interest begin? I considered writing a long investigative article where I traced the origins of the screamo revival to its ground zero. I recently had lunch with Jeremy Bolm from Touché Amoré and asked if he had any insights. “The answer is a lot less sexy than you’d think,” he said. “It’s TikTok.”
Of course. TikTok. The place where all culture goes to be born, revived, or die. The social media network so effective in spreading information that the U.S. government wants to ban it. Our elected officials have decided that skramz memes are too powerful and they have no choice but to shut it all down.
I treat TikTok like my girlfriend’s side of the medicine cabinet. Lots of weird, mysterious stuff going on over there and none of it is my business. TikTok is a language I don’t speak. I can make out the general gist of what skramz TikTokers are talking about, but the words themselves don’t register. It’s like watching one of my favorite movies in Spanish—I’m catching a word here and there but am otherwise just along for the ride.
Apologies for sticking two metaphors into that last paragraph.
A few years ago, the TikTokification of screamo might have bugged me. The culture I grew up on being reappropriated? Without my permission? How dare you! To quote The Blood Meridian: “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” But I find myself at peace with it, for a few reasons.
Who gives a shit what I think? Culture will move on with or without me, so best to be on the right side of it.
The interest is genuine. Screamo very well could have been the Morbius of music, an ironic internet fad that failed to convert to reality once the bluff got called. But it’s not. These young fans are actually remarkably engaged. The Orchid reunion shows sold out very quickly, as did the Saetia shows. The internet kids are physically showing up to stand up front, to buy merch, and to document. “[It] was like 70 percent young people,” Green told me of his audience at the reunion shows. “I'm talking, like, 14-, 15-, 16-year-old kids. There were definitely people my age and in their 30s and 40s, but it was really young, especially up front.”
The nerds are winning. The entire reason I was drawn to screamo as a teenager was because I was so turned off by the macho side of hardcore. Bands like Madball and Hatebreed did not appeal to me. As I told Green, “I didn't want to feel like a singer was going to beat me up; I wanted to feel like they read more books than me.” So as long as that tough-guy stuff still exists, I’m glad an alternative to it does as well.
The scene is more diverse than ever. To my last point, while screamo did attract the scrawny Youth XL shirt-wearers of hardcore, it was largely made up of young white men and a few women with Zelda haircuts. Today’s scene is so much more diverse in regards to race, gender, and sexuality. Not to go off on a tangent, but the Hardlore podcast recently had a great chat with SeeYouSpaceCowboy singer Connie Scarbossa in which she broke down the history of screamo. The hosts were genuinely curious and interested, but the commenters were transphobic losers. You can’t pick your fans, of course, but it was so disheartening to be reminded that, even in 2024, a scene built on outsider art like hardcore still attracts these sorts of bigoted chuds. I’m glad a sanctuary from it exists.
The genre is living on. One of my biggest gripes with culture today is that it’s dying. Social media’s attention economy has made it more instantly gratifying to celebrate the culture of the past than to create something new and move it forward. Mark McCoy of Charles Bronson recently lamented it well: “The society we live in has basically killed its culture and all that’s left now is to rummage through the past.”
Emo has suffered the most humiliating fate in this Age of Culture Death. It is forever frozen in the year 2003. Most of its denizens are downright prideful about their cultural obstinance, dubbing themselves “elder emos” and attending Emo Nites where they can timewarp back to high school and avoid hearing any music released after George W. Bush’s presidency. How fucking boring. At least the screamo kids are actively trying to add their mark on their genre. Years ago, I published a weekly column highlighting the extensive new class of screamo bands around the world—Infant Island, Ostraca, Gillian Carter, etc. Not only have those bands continued to evolve, they’ve inspired countless new ones.It doesn’t change my love for the genre. Like, at all. I can still put on a Reversal of Man record and it sounds the same. Someone else’s enjoyment does not detract from mine. (Except in the case of Rick & Morty fans. I genuinely hate those motherfuckers.)
Lastly and most importantly, my records are worth more now. I don’t have a “retirement plan,” per se, so I’m banking on my copy of the Eronel seven-inch to be the investment that carries me through my golden years. The more paying customers, the merrier. (Thank you to everyone who bought my Twelve Hour Turn and CombatWoundedVeteran posters on Depop. I paid off a parking ticket with the money.)
And if you’re reading this, laughing to yourself at the aging hardcore guy trying to wrap his brain around shifting culture, I have some exciting news for you. You are aging as well. Right this moment. The cells that make up your body are gradually decaying as you gravitate ever so closer towards that eternal circle pit we call death. One day you will wake up to find the things you like have moved on without you and you’ll have to adapt or die. To put it more succinctly:
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Great read. Absolutely paused on the Blood Meridian quote. Damn.