When We Were Young (shows didn’t cost $250)
A lot has been written about the much ballyhooed When We Were Young music festival, whose innaugural edition came and went in Las Vegas this past weekend.
The concept is blisteringly simple: if a band had its shirt sold at Hot Topic or was featured in Alternative Press between the years of 2003 and 2009(ish), and are still active, they probably played this festival. Don’t call it a punk festival, or a post-anything gathering, this was an unabashedly Early 2000s Emo (short for “emotional,” short for “emotional rock” which was never all that good of a moniker and has not aged well) event, distinct from Gaineville’s The Fest (whose audience tends to be less mainstream) or Chicago’s Riot Fest (whose audience tends to be older), and its lineup reflected a wide swath of the bands who contributed to and pioneered that particular era of the genre.
Bands that reached super stardom during that span, like headliners My Chemical Romance and Paramore, shared stages with their contemporaries with more modest (and in many cases more important) fanbases and contributions to emo culture, such as Taking Back Sunday, Silverstein, and (my personal favorites) Thursday. Even beloved stallwarts Jimmy Eat World and Avril Lavigne (who exist today somewhere between the above two categories) were along for the ride.
The audience a festival like this was meant to appeal to was a both incredibly specific and vastly profitable niche 20 years ago; a niche of which I am very much part. Elder millennials who distinctly remember a time before ubiquitous internet access, communicated almost entirely over AOL Instant Messenger for well over a decade, and who anxiously awaited the day they could scrape enough money together for their first chain wallet or studded belt. (And, if they grew up in New England, practically lived at Newbury Comics back before they were primarily located inside malls.) Dysfunctional, disaffected youth with disposable income who grew into tired, jaded, adults…with disposable income. It was the first time a large scale operation like this was uniquely and specifically targeted at my own youth culture and demographic. Had I lived anywhere even remotely close to Vegas, I would’ve given strong consideration to going.
But ultimately I would not have, for one very important reason.
Before I get to that though, I want to address the motivation for this piece: a video of Paramore front-woman Hayley Williams making the rounds on socials this morning and passed to me by a friend. In this video, Williams engages the crowd in a “history lesson” about the scene and the different ebbs and flows it saw over the years. She laments how a scene founded in ideas of acceptance and shared struggle was so deeply unsafe for women, people of color, and members of the Queer community in the early 2000s; how frequently non-white-cis-male individuals were left on the outside looking in until bands like hers blazed more inclusive trails. She saw this festival as a celebration of all the scene has been able to accomplish in this regard; in creating a truly inclusive scene, they and bands like them served to achieve the goals of inclusivity and non-conformity that punk rock always claimed to ascribe to, and that the “crusty old fucks” on the internet who were gatekeeping for the sake of gatekeeping needed to get the hell out of the way. And in that sense, she was absolutely correct: emo music widened the walls of independent music and made space for voices that were otherwise absent. As someone who found, accepted, and learned to start loving themselves within and adjacent to that scene, a lot of what she said resonated with me. There was just one problem…
She said all of that on stage in front of an audience who paid, minimally, 250 dollars each to be there.
(And that’s IF they lived in or knew someone who lived in Vegas; otherwise you can tack an additional 500–800 dollars on there.)
In championing the inclusivity of the scene which birthed that festival, she forgot one of the most important aspects of that scene: not only was everyone welcome, but everyone could afford to be there.
The first time I saw Paramore in 2006 was at a 600 capacity venue that wasn’t even full. It cost me 9 dollars to get in and they weren’t even headlining. It is one of my absolute fondest concert memories.
The average CD price was 10 dollars; t-shirts were 20. A full day at the Warped Tour cost 32 dollars.
Now, obviously I understand how inflation works. I also understand how commercialism, large scale music festivals, manufactured nostalgia, and post-pandemic production costs work. It just strikes me as more than a little tone-deaf to hear an icon of a small scene wax poetic about inclusivity at a venue a LOT of people couldn’t afford to even enter. Yes, there were countless women, people of color, and Queer folks in attendance, which is fantastic and an achievement worthy of celebration. But, I’d wager, not an awful lot of lower class folks…or folks with children and middle class salaries…or folks who live hand to mouth were in that audience. So if inclusivity was the goal, the mark was not exactly met.
It makes me wonder who a festival like this is even for; the ones who this music helped to find themselves and grow up…or the ones who never did? Was this a celebration of individuality and inclusivity, or just the easily marketed echo of both? Am I touching on something important, or just ruminating on an idea of little consequence just like I did when I was seventeen?
These questions have no answers (except that last one, which is clearly “yes”). Perhaps, though, this manufactured behemoth of manufactured nostalgia has layers to it: when the first day of the festival was cancelled due to dangerous wind conditions, Thursday (currently featuring Norman Brannon of emo legends Texas is the Reason, without whom many of the bands playing the festival would not exist), along with Bayside, Senses Fail, and Anthony Green, put together a last minute show in downtown Vegas for anyone left stranded and listless by the cancelled event. (Other groups followed suit as well.) Cover charge? Zero dollars. And the videos that surfaced from that show? Pure joy for all involved.
The scene takes and the scene gives — now, as it was then…when we were young.
