The suicide of a schoolgirl who had apparently become obsessed with ‘emo’ culture has, once again, drawn attention to the movement and its teen followers. Recording a verdict of suicide after Hannah Bond, 13, had hanged herself, the coroner noted that she had “become an aficionado of the emo fad.”

Emo has deep and spreading roots, which few who are close to it regard with much alarm. What began as narrowly defined musical genre more than two decades ago has since broadened into an attitude, a lifestyle and a fashion statement that has found a spiritual home on the internet.

The movement sprang from Washington DC’s energetic mid-Eighties punk scene, picking up its name when the music was described, perhaps dismissively, as ‘emotional’ or ‘emotive’. After falling in and out of favour over the next decade or so, the bands and their followers migrated onto the web, where lyrical veneration of pain, loneliness and depression combined with a largely teenage fan base to create an extensive online culture.

It was, according to Andy Greenwald, the author of Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers and Emo, a “perfect storm of music that is comforting, welcoming and wants to draw you in and make you feel better, and then the great democratisation of subculture by the internet”.

As the internet entered the mainstream in the mid to late Nineties, its forums and fan sites quickly became home to subcultures of all descriptions, many based around celebration of – and arguments about – pop culture. The growth of file-sharing websites like Napster and increased access to high-speed web connections laid the foundations for an online music culture, and when MySpace burst onto the scene, the music-based social network (now owned by News Corp, the parent company of Times Online) soon became the epicentre of emo. Facebook, Bebo and other social networks now all play host to thriving emo communities too.

As with so many musical movements past and present, from hip hop all the way back to mods and rockers, the look and the attitudes of the bands evolved into an identity which many fans, especially those who considered themselves to be part of the hardcore following, would consciously seek to adopt. For emo kids, that meant dying their hair black, growing a fringe and wearing dark clothes and skinny jeans. To a casual observer, the uniform resembles that of another teen subculture: the goth.

Countless websites sprang up to feed the interest in emo culture, some attempting to document or define it, others providing emos with ways to express their affiliation. While new bands were trying to emulate the emo music they were hearing on MySpace, teens with web skills were creating dark and doom-laden backdrops for MySpace profile pages. Type “myspace layouts” into Google and the top result divides its products into six categories: guy, gurly, retro, abstract, music and emo.

All this darkness and introspection can seem alarming to parents who drop in and see what looks like a glorification of unhappiness, but most online emo hangouts reveal little that’s different from run-of-the-mill teen angst. In a feature published previously in The Times, Andy Greenwald found that emo bands and their fans were unexpectedly clean living. “I could not have picked a duller genre in terms of spending time on tour buses and not being able to get a beer,” he said. “These guys don’t drink or smoke or do drugs. They like comics and video games and art. And the kids ‘hang out’ in MySpace. If you live in the suburbs and don’t have a car, here is this place where life goes on 24/7 and you are plugged into a community immediately, and you have the freedom online to have a second, heroic version of yourself.”

When a young person commits suicide, there is of course an understandable urge to find someone or something to blame, but today’s emo forums don’t differ all that much from non-emo forums. One discussion group at EmoCorner.com does include the alarming topic heading of “Cutting… is it worth it?”, referring to the habit of self-harm which some have associated with emo culture, but the resounding reply from the online community is: “Don’t do it. Seek help” – but expressed a little more robustly.

Much more common are questions about being a better emo. Discussions centre around the clothes to wear, the mannerisms to adopt and the music to love or hate – even, rather touchingly, whether it’s OK for straight emo boys to greet each other with a kiss (the answer seems to be yes). Plenty more words are spent rubbishing bands deemed to have jeopardised their credibility, but emo groups generally seem to be far more accommodating and peaceable than the rival teen tribes that line up against them, crashing online forums to attack their dress sense and taste in music.

Even in their more emotionally charged moments, the emo forums seem to have more to do with adolescent self-dramatisation than anything more sinister. In any case, most psychologists suggest that expressing feelings of angst or depression is healthier than bottling them up.

Emo culture is, if anything, a celebration of the unbottling of angst. It may not be all that appealing to an outsider, but it is probably not too different from many adolescents’ playground conversations. Ultimately, reactions to the emo web culture will probably depend on the preconceptions of the observer: those who find young people frightening and incomprehensible will find it frightening and incomprehensible, while others will see nothing more or less remarkable than a group of like-minded teenagers trying out an identity as they struggle their way into adulthood.

EMO LINKS

Are you an emo, a goth or a skater?
A quiz that helps you find the subculture best suited to you

How to be emo
YouTube video documenting the birth of an emo

Emo forums
Discussions of all things emo