The Curious Rise of Midwestern Emo

I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, a city that I’m sure you’ve heard of before with its bustling art scene and the Ohio State University. But if you pick any direction and drive you’ll hit within thirty minutes the still nothingness that are the fields of corn. Anyone who has driven through the Midwest is familiar with this: the long fields of flowing corn or wheat pockmarked by the occasional farmhouse and grain tower. 

In fact, on a closer look, it seems that this lack permeates not just the landscape, but the entirety of the Midwest itself. Cities that were once the center of American life are now fading husks left behind by government and industry. Acres of land that, years ago, provided locals with a stable income and home are being bought up, leaving the prior owners destitute and their hopeless families cursed to turn towards pills and college sports for some fleeting pleasure in their otherwise dreary daily experience. Yet, no land can escape its beauty and the Midwest is no different. There is a charm to the rolling fields alit by the setting sun or herds of cattle on the open pasture, and even the monuments to industry that once served as thrills for courageous (or stupid) urban explorers. Anyone who has been to a Big 10 football game cannot deny the mammoth energy they contain.  Something exists at this intersection of lack and beauty, something existential which escapes an outsider looking within or even those less-introspective Midwesterners. 

Uniquely capturing this existential phenomena is the genre of music known as Midwestern Emo. Coming out of the 90s miasma of post-Cold War ennui, Midwestern Emo leaves behind emo’s hardcore punk roots in favor of the what is now stereotypical sensitive, indie math-rock sound found at home on college campuses. Following Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason, this sound cannot have come from nothing, for everything must have a reason or cause. Such a reason could be music itself, for music evolves and builds upon the past as much as any natural science. Certainly the 80s punk sound held considerable sway in the resulting 90s sound, but there must have been something else to push the sound in this direction: that something being the Midwest. The Midwest, with its vast distances separating impoverished communities, turbulent history, huge universities of concentrated youthful experience, and tiny towns producing disillusioned or dissatisfied people provided the necessary hotbed for such sounds of unpolished teenage angst.

The Sound of Nowhere

Where better to start than where one probably listens to the most uninterrupted music: driving. Most of us have done it, probably a lot of it, and for those of us fortunate enough to call the Midwest our home are no strangers to its aforementioned emptiness. There is something especially unique about driving long hours through the Midwest. You’ll find mountaintops in the East, marshlands and forests in the South, and the (biblically) awesome terrain of buttes and canyons in the West. In the Midwest? Corn. Soy. Wheat. Billboards proclaiming that you will burn in Hell without the love of Jesus punctuating the stretches of highway. It's mind-numbing stuff, but that is precisely the point: you get in your own head. There is a phenomenon known as “highway hypnosis” where a driver enters a trance-like state and upon snapping out of it they forget how they even drove as far as they did. What better time to consider broken hearts and the vacuity of existence? During my pilgrimage in the passenger seat to the American Football house, so called because it features on the cover of emo-rock band American Football’s self-titled album, that’s exactly what I did. I cannot even fathom what my friend, the driver, was experiencing. To save oneself from being swallowed up in the vacuousness dominating these states requires a fervent energy stemming from the combination of youth, self-awareness, and time that only college kids ever seem to possess. Is it any surprise, then, that it is precisely this crowd producing hauntingly beautiful ballads of summer memories and lost love? 

No road trip is on a road to nowhere. The journey itself implies a destination in mind, even if the driver knows not what it is, and it could even be nowhere in the geographical sense of lacking any defining landmarks, but even then falls under the category of destination once the driver stops. Semantics aside and into teleology, the teleos of roads are to connect towns and cities. Major cities are undoubtedly the more desirable destinations, but this does not render those other towns passed through or by on the interstate imaginary. Real people with real homes and real jobs live there, just like anyone else. So the Midwest then has two aspects: the large cities and what’s in between. The business or political centers and the wheat/soy/cornfields. 

A brief aside about American Football: they are one of the most famous Midwestern Emo bands best known for their song “Never Meant” hailing from the town of Urbana, Illinois. While not small, Urbana lacks the size and luster of larger metropolitan areas, indeed being known primarily for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign shared with its sister city of Champaign. Picture quintessential Midwest: college town surrounded by fields of corn. Similarly hailing from Illinois is Cap’n Jazz, based out of Chicago. Both bands are undeniably Midwestern Emo, yet despite being in the same state come from the two ends of the Midwest spectrum, which, along with the previously established two aspects, begs the question: what actually is quintessential Midwest? The large cities or what is in between? The Great Plains or the Great Lakes? Far from settling the debate, and staying pertinent to arpeggiated melodies, it is not a stretch to see how it is necessarily both. Cities of manufacturing and wealth attract because of their proximity to vast plains, just as those very same plains only feel so vast because of their highly dense neighbors. Would the Midwestern void still permeate the drive from Lincoln to Chicago if not bookmarked by either city or without Nebraska’s corn? Both regions exist in a flux which is not explained by focusing on either, only the whole. Put simply, it is the difference between plains and lakes that define both.

From Great Plains to Great Lakes

Making this difference real and discernable is their parallel tumultuous history. The Great Lakes region dominated manufacturing and industry, using the lakes as highways of trade. The Great Plains served as the beginning of the Western frontier, and then as the nation’s all important breadbasket with cities like Kansas City as centers of politics and business. By the 1980s, however, people were moving south to the rising Sun Belt and leaving the old north to rust away. Many cities hit hard times such as Detroit and St. Louis which continue today. Planes began soaring over the Great Plains en masse. By the 90s the Midwest was deep in obscurity, with many focusing on the glamorous Eastern and Western seaboard, setting the stage for the typical, quiet, Middle American suburbia. A group of teens and young adults, condemned to a quiet life with a STEM degree and “successful” job, decide to embody the honest nature of the Midwestern working class in a different way—through sound. In a way, the warblings of Midwest Emo can be seen as the past revealed in the present. Yes, it is far from the blue-collared factories of yore. To this day, the Midwest personage can be viewed as smart and openly honest.  

It is not all bad news though. In recent times the Midwest has been on a comeback. Chicago taking on many large information sector companies remains its jewel, and, of course, the Midwest’s staple universities continue accepting students in the tens of thousands. Newly rising cities like Columbus, which is set to house Intel’s newest chip factories, show other states are getting with the times. It is of little coincidence then that the Midwest Emo bands are also seeing a resurgence, such as American Football re-releasing a deluxe version of their groundbreaking eponymous first album in 2014 and continuing to release into 2019. 

If these musings of the Midwest strike some as mischaracterized or outright false, one need only look to contemporary memes to confirm the thought. Consider all the memes concerning Ohio. “Things to do in Ohio: leave” capture the simple fact that, to an outsider looking in, there is nothing here. There's also the short-lived clips depicting a globe dominated by Ohio, or perhaps always having been that way, which are the exceptions which prove the rule because it is a subversion of the expectation that Ohio is an unimportant, uninteresting patch of land filled with crops. Without getting too into memetics, these all give insight into popular perception of the Midwest, shown further by political discussions of them, such as Indiana and Missouri’s reputation as conservative and religious. Almost too perfect is the memeification of “Never Meant” coinciding with its aforementioned re-release, poetically turning its heart-felt riffs and arpeggios into a byte to be laughed at and yet simultaneously invoking those memories of summers past.

Beyond the Midwest

Similarly contentious is the name “Midwestern Emo” itself, which can be a bit misleading because the scene extended past the Midwest states to the broader U.S. and abroad. Elements of Midwest Emo can be found in subsequent indie and math-rock sounds and their popularity is held today on campuses and basements and road trips alike. Some may even argue that Midwest Emo was a contingency based on luck and circumstance, a convenient name for an otherwise impossible-to-pindown sound. There is some evidence supporting this considering bands such as Sunny Day Real Estate and Mineral, being from Washington and Texas, respectively, helped to popularize the genre. Surely, one may think, this sound would have developed eventually elsewhere. Yet, this is simply ahistorical. The fact remains that the most popular, genre-defining bands came from the Midwest, and to disregard their geographical placement and its impact on the sound is to ignore a basic fact of cybernetics, i.e. feedback loops. Sure, the sound appeared elsewhere than the Midwest, and yes some of those bands helped propagate it further beyond, but the Midwest with all of its charm was the epicenter. Their sound carried over the fields on college radio stations and into the ears of fellow desperate musicians, who then in turn synthesized their own take on the existential void immanent to the Midwest, thus completing the loop by spreading itself even further beyond and propagating itself into a genre of its own in a way that other regions simply did not. These bands raged and wept, attempting to surpass their own temporal and material limitations to create something which would last beyond themselves as a testament to their experiences.

And it worked. These groups of college kids through their dedication created a sound which lasts to this day and moves past the confinement of the Midwest to the rest of the States and even an international audience. It is hard not to fall in love with the naive vocals and matching lyrics, the bittersweetness of it all filling your ears all the way down to your stomach. Even if you’re not from the Midwest you can relate to these hearts proudly on display. Danish philosopher Søren Kirekegaard, the father of existentialism, wrote, “The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have.” This truth is not one proven, but felt, and it is felt in one of its rawest states through the sound emanating out of our humble Midwestern states. Almost as a response to this, the penultimate verse of “Never Meant” goes, “I just think it's best/'Cause you can't miss what you forget.”