The ‘Transcendent Tastelessness’ of MySpace

During the years when the social-media platform MySpace ruled the internet—roughly 2005 to 2008—it fueled a cultural phenomenon known as the “Scene.” The term encompassed young people who liked to flat iron and dye their hair until their bangs resembled sheafs of carbon fiber. They wore skinny jeans and vampiric eyeshadow; they listened to energetic rock possessed with strident vulnerability (signature bands: Fall Out Boy, Dashboard Confessional, Panic! at the Disco). This movement of disaffected youths was as recognizable, visually and sonically, as the flannel-clad grunge crews of 1990s Seattle, or the two-toned punks of 1970s Britain. But its social construction was unprecedented, a true 21st-century invention.

The Scene’s name, which suggests tight-knit cohesion, was a glorious oxymoron. The subculture had deep roots in the, an insightful read about a baffling era. “We’re talking small towns, Middle America, where you still have a bunch of outsiders, but they can’t get out.”