Emo rap at its limits

At the start of this century, as MySpace and LiveJournal were remaking the social hierarchies of youth culture, a crushing wave surged into mainstream view. The aesthetic movement that history would designate as emo's third wave stood out in a few ways from its predecessors: more brazenly commercial than the melodic post-hardcore that birthed the term in the 1980s, more flamboyant and feminized than the Midwest twinkle that carried the torch in the '90s. Emo as it existed in the early 2000s was an era of high contrast, the music and culture broadly maligned yet deeply felt in the hearts of teenagers everywhere, catalyzed by the new ways they were experiencing too much of everything as a shared world took shape online. "With the internet, teenagers have the ultimate emo tool," Andy Greenwald wrote in his 2003 emo history, Nothing Feels Good: "a private medium that their parents don't understand, one where they can easily trade, access, and share music, ideas, news, feelings, and support."

Years later, the SoundCloud rap of the late 2010s would experience