Culture
VICE Grants Three Emo Bands a Second Life While Quietly Needing One Itself
By Bruno Von Falken, . BSN Network. Satire.
VICE Media, a publication that has spent the better part of a decade being purchased, dissolved, rebranded, purchased again at a significant discount, and eventually restructured into something that technically still publishes things on the internet, has issued a formal cultural recommendation this week: three emo bands from the early 2000s deserve a second life with Gen Z.
The bands in question were not consulted. Two of them, according to public records and a brief investigation of LinkedIn, have members who now work in mortgage lending.
The article, published under the genre heading that VICE once helped invent and then abandoned the moment it became associated with suburban teenagers, arrives with the breezy authority of a man recommending a restaurant he has not visited since it changed ownership, the chef, the menu, and the name.
The three bands selected are Armor For Sleep, Bayside, and Emery, three acts that put in genuine, committed, eyeliner-adjacent work across a combined discography of approximately forty albums, none of which VICE covered with particular enthusiasm at the time, because at the time VICE was busy explaining to readers why heroin tourism was a form of journalism.
Armor For Sleep, whose 2005 record What To Do When You Are Dead was described by one fan in the article's comment section as the reason she did not become a dentist, is cited for quote, a sound that feels built for the emotional vocabulary of a generation raised on climate anxiety and late-stage capitalism. This is correct. It is also the emotional vocabulary of every generation since approximately 1997, but the sentence scans beautifully and nobody is going to push back on it.
Bayside, a band that has been touring continuously since 2000 without pausing long enough for anyone to declare them relevant or irrelevant, is recommended for their raw authenticity. Bayside's lead singer Anthony Raneri responded to the news the way a man responds to being told his neighbourhood has become trendy: with the specific exhaustion of someone who never left.
"We've just been here," Raneri said, in a quote that does not exist but is spiritually accurate to every interview he has ever given.
Emery, a Christian post-hardcore band from South Carolina whose members have always been slightly too cheerful to be properly emo, round out the list. Their inclusion suggests that whoever wrote the piece was working from a Spotify algorithm and a deadline rather than a record collection.
The article was written in a register that implies discovery. It uses the phrase second life without apparent awareness that the concept of a second life implies a first death, and that if the death happened, someone was there. Someone made a choice. The piece does not identify that person.
Gen Z, for its part, has been listening to Armor For Sleep and Bayside without anyone's permission since approximately 2019. The TikTok videos have existed. The vinyl reissues have sold. The Hot Topic collaborations have come and gone. The second life was already underway before VICE located a slow news week and a writer with a Letterboxd account that lists The Perks of Being a Wallflower in their top four.
What VICE has actually produced is a listicle of bands that are already popular, written as though they are undiscovered, published by an outlet that needed to appear as though it still knows what is happening.
This is called content.
Armor For Sleep has not commented. Emery released a new album last year. VICE's parent company is still sorting out the cap table.
Everybody deserves a second life. Some people just have better timing about asking for it.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.vice.com/en/article/3-emo-bands-of-the-2000s-that-deserve-a-second-life-with-gen-z/