On Jan. 18, ticketing and touring giant Live Nation announced a festival called When We Were Young, set for October in Las Vegas. The bill includes more than 65 acts that constitute an “epic lineup of emo and rock bands from the past two decades.” Genre stalwarts like My Chemical Romance, Paramore, Taking Back Sunday and Dashboard Confessional will perform at the Las Vegas Festival Grounds, a stadium on the Strip with a capacity of 85,000. More than a million fans liked the announcement posts across various social media. When tickets went on sale, they sold out so quickly that organizers added two additional days to the event to meet demand.
This wasn’t unpredictable. The emo and pop punk of the Aughts is experiencing a resurgence as the fans who were in their teens and 20s at the time revisit the songs that soundtracked some of their most formative years. And I get it. Nostalgia flooded my synapses when I saw the poster, too. When I was young, I saw several of those acts get their start in cramped clubs, community centers and theaters too broken-down to be used for anything but all-ages punk shows. Some of their songs were with me when I thought my entire world was ending — heartache that would pale in comparison to the wrecking balls of adulthood, it turned out. But I still listen to bands like AFI, Bright Eyes, Jimmy Eat World and Alkaline Trio — all of whom are slated to perform — with wistful appreciation.
But when I was young, I was also groped in mosh pits. When I was young, I was treated as a commodity — a groupie at the rock show who could be belittled and dismissed. When I was young, bad behavior in the male-dominated music scene largely went unchecked. Because when I was young, some of the most popular punk and emo bands were contributing to a toxic culture that today’s rose-colored sentimentality has all but erased.
When I was young, the worst thing a woman could do was break a man’s heart. It was a crime punishable by death. There are multiple revenge fantasies on Senses Fail’s 2004 album Let It Enfold You. In the song “You’re Cute When You Scream,” Buddy Nielsen sings about pushing his heartbreaker off the top of a building and then running down the stairs so he can see her face as it hits the street. In the song “Choke on This,” Nielsen is so resentful over a failed relationship he asks the girl he admires to “play Russian roulette” — “I’ll be your cheap novelty / Blow your brains out on me,” he sings.
Taking Back Sunday loved a bloody metaphor too. In the song “Cute Without the ‘E’ (Cut from the Team),” singer Adam Lazarra equates being cheated on to a bullet through the head. “Which would you prefer? / My finger on the trigger or me face-down, down across your floor?” he asks. The woman who betrayed him gets to choose: commit murder or witness suicide?
Alkaline Trio is guilty of it too. Their creepiness factor is lessened by the fact that the band has long made tongue-in-cheek morbidity a part of their punk rock shtick, but it’s hard not to feel a small twinge of “What the fuck?” when listening to a song like “Radio,” in which singer Matt Skiba soothes his sorrow by hoping his ex gets electrocuted in the bath.
Are these songs more an example of men awkwardly spilling their guts through clunky metaphors rather than actual threats against real people? Sure. It ain’t called “emo” for nothing. Nielsen never pushed someone off a building; Lazarra never held a gun to his head and dared a woman to pull the trigger. The genre’s flair for drama is partly what makes it so intriguing to young people who are trying to make sense of their own overwhelming emotions.
But what is often forgotten when people recall these good ol’ days is that the fantasies sometimes did bleed over into reality. Young women and girls were often objectified, exploited and abused. Many tried to tell us then, and many more have shared their stories since finding support in movements like #MeToo and Time’s Up.
In 2020 Paramore singer Hayley Williams told Vulture about some of the sexism and harassment she experienced on a regular basis in the early and mid-Aughts. While playing Warped Tour in 2005, fans threw condoms at her. While touring with the band Straylight Run, a friend of the band — who was about a decade older than Williams at the time — made a comment about Williams’ vagina.
“I can’t remember what this guy said because I saw red so fast,” she told Vulture, “but he referred to my pussy. I was literally 16, about to turn 17. Everyone was laughing. No one paid fucking attention.”
British metal band Bring Me the Horizon is set to co-headline all three days of When We Were Young — theirs is one of the more prominently featured names on the festival’s poster, right below Paramore’s. The band’s singer Oli Sykes was arrested in 2007 for allegedly peeing on a woman who turned down his advances after a show. She said a member of the band or their party — it was never established exactly who — also threw a bottle of Jägermeister at her head, resulting in a gash above her eyebrow. Those charges were dropped due to lack of evidence, but Sykes made headlines again in 2016 when his ex-wife Hannah Pixie Snowdon posted on Instagram that he “slapped and spat on” her “on a number of occasions.” In the same statement, she wrote, “I wasn’t the first girl this entire pattern happened to.” Sykes has not been charged, and he’s still performing with Bring Me the Horizon.
Just underneath Bring Me the Horizon on the WWWY poster is A Day to Remember, a band that has toured with Bring Me the Horizon in the past. In 2020, A Day to Remember’s bassist Josh Woodward was accused of sexual misconduct for an incident that allegedly happened years prior. Woodward responded at the time, writing, “the events described never happened and these allegations are false.” Woodward threatened legal action, and the tweet containing the allegations was removed. The allegations resurfaced last year and Woodward left the band in October.
Then there’s Pierce the Veil, a hardcore band from San Diego. In 2017, drummer Mike Fuentes left the band after one woman accused him of statutory rape and another alleged he solicited nude pictures from her when she was a minor. Both incidents allegedly happened in the 2000s. Fuentes performed with Pierce the Veil during a livestream in April 2020, but after fans asked about his presence in the video, band members confirmed he wasn’t involved with current projects. They haven’t announced who will replace him at When We Were Young.
There are also accusations of sexual misconduct or assault against former members of Dance Gavin Dance, Motionless in White and Black Veil Brides, three more bands slated to perform. While the men who stand accused will not be performing with their respective bands, it’s true that many of the alleged incidents happened years ago, when they were in the bands whose names now adorn the flyer, back when we were young.
The festival is being sold as a stroll down Memory Lane — elder emos, gather ’round and relive the days of yore! But when we were young, we ignored the red flags. When we were young, we turned a blind eye to abusive behavior. Maybe it’s time to recognize that when we were young, things weren’t so great after all.
