When We Were Young Was a Surreal Emo Paradise

Like 59,999 other people decked out in black attire and heavy eye make-up, he’s in Las Vegas for When We Were Young – the one-day alternative music festival with a line-up boasting My Chemical Romance, Paramore, Avril Lavigne and over 50 more veteran acts from “the Myspace era”. The guy’s eyebrows are positioned halfway up his forehead in an expression of disbelief that he’s here at all, and indeed there were many reasons to suggest that – despite forking out nearly half a grand for a ticket and hotel package – he would not be.

Announced back in January, with zero preamble and to overwhelming response, When We Were Young seemed to come out of thin air. Partly as a result, it was met with a 30:70 split of excitement to scepticism. With a hard-to-believe bill of mainstream emo and pop-punk titans, very little weight to its name (the inaugural festival was held in 2017) and promoted by Live Nation – newly hated for mishandling Astroworld, WWWY had more red flags than the boys I was dating when I saw The Used the first time around.

Some called it a scam, others dubbed it “Emo Fyre Festival”, predicting a shambolic and even dangerous turn of events as 180,000 victims of high school bullying descended upon the strip hoping to see 60 bands in the space of 12 hours in the middle of the desert.

Nevertheless, it’s late October, the stages are set-up, and the grinning man finds himself standing – as do I – in the exact same spot on the sidewalk where Hunter S. Thompson pulled up his 1973 Chevrolet Caprice in Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing and said, incredulously, “is this not a reasonable place to park?”

The narrative around When We Were Young has been one of overwhelming failure. From the minute it was announced, people expected it to flop. Seemed to want it to, even. Which made it all the more unfortunate that the first of the festival’s three dates was cancelled an hour before it was due to start. Not because of any of the aforementioned reasons, mind you, but thanks to the arrival of winds so powerful they almost blew me off a connecting bridge between Caesar's Palace and Ballagio. To call it a bitter disappointment for everyone involved would be an understatement, and on Saturday the city was host to the tragic scene of heartbroken elder emos wafting aimlessly around casinos between seasoned gamblers getting back massages while playing blackjack and children queuing for one of the many indoor roller coasters.

A few bands were able to organise last minute pop-up shows – Bring Me The Horizon, The All-American Rejects and The Wonder Years among them – but, held in smaller venues, they could only accommodate so many. Most people flocked to Fremont Street, which became a sea of dejected faces and black lipstick and felt very much like Billie Joe Armstrong’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” made manifest. By Sunday the weather calmed down and thankfully – or infuriatingly, depending on what ticket you had – the festival site threw up its enormous checkerboard arch and finally welcomed the masses to emo mecca.

Considering the fact that its entire appeal is rooted in the acute nostalgia of people in their 20s and 30s, I expected When We Were Young to feel more like one of those late-00s social media meet-ups where teenagers with fringes all head to their capital city to sit cross-legged in silence on the floor outside McDonalds. Not so. In reality it felt the same as any other festival, just with more extreme drop armhole vests. Wherever you looked there were couples in matching hoodies sharing overpriced noodle boxes, people disco napping solo on the astro turf, queues for merch stands that did not at any point between 11AM and 11PM drop below 300 deep.

Endearingly, a lot of bands leaned into the throwback factor (performing early in the afternoon, Senses Fail closed their set with a nu metal medley that began with “Chop Suey!” and ended with a condensed version of the solo from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird”), and pretty much all of them did something special as fan service.

The typically grave La Dispute bookended their set with their unlikely TikTok smash “Such Small Hands”, My Chemical Romance wore the classic red/black suit and tie attire from their Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge era, Paramore performed “All I Wanted” for the first time ever and Avril Lavigne brought out All Time Low for a cover of “All The Small Things” – a warm nod to next year’s festival, which Blink-182 are scheduled to headline longside Green Day.

When emo went mainstream in the early 00s – evolving from a disparaging term for D.C. hardcore bands that deviated from the scene’s more traditionally masculine sound in the 80s, into an international subculture whose evolution is inextricably tied to trends across fashion, fandom and social media – it did so unceremoniously. No matter what decade it is, noone likes an emo.

The bands the term was originally ascribed to famously thought “emo” was fucking stupid, the bands in the 90s and 00s it was also applied to thought it was fucking stupid, all the other alternative cultures as well as the “normies” who bullied them for their massive trousers all thought it was fucking stupid, and parents all over the UK thought it was downright petrifying – at one point attempting to have it stamped out of society because The Daily Mail told them it was a “suicide cult”.

In fact, the only people in history to embrace being “emo” are the fans themselves, i.e: the millennials and older Gen Z kids that make-up the vast majority of ticket holders at When We Were Young – a festival that, despite being cursed by doom harbingers on Twitter and interference from the elements (also not unprecedented), has panned out like any other. In the words of Bayside frontman Anthony Raneri, who tweeted back in January when the announcement was met with so much doubt: “Why is everyone acting like the largest promoter in the world and like 60 veteran bands are just winging this? Is this what scientists have felt like for the last two years?”

Even now, there’s something about mainstream emo culture that makes it a natural punchline. Perhaps it’s the sincerity, perhaps it’s the hysteria, perhaps it’s the determination to go to war for bands with lyrics like “with my one last gasping breath I’d apologise for bleeding on your shirt”. Perhaps there’s something about the fans (counting myself among them) that’s just really annoying. But two decades on and there is still a real resistance to emo, both critically – slightly more understandable – and commercially, which is strange its fanbase is made up of people who got disciplined at school for smoking, have grown into reckless adult babies with small-to-modest amounts of disposable income and will happily throw it all at anything willing to cater to their interests even when there are thousands of people screaming “it’s a scam!” in their ear.

All things considered, it isn’t surprising the festival actually happened, it’s just amazing it didn’t happen sooner. In the end When We Were Young, much like the subculture it’s indebted to, marched on against the odds.

@emmaggarland