It’s a question I found myself asking near-daily as I put this book together. On every level, women with agency are essentially absent from emo rap. To write and think critically about this genre and subculture is to contend with the truth that women in emo music are used as a resource—they are the faceless subjects of screeds, the nameless muses, the derided heartbreakers and liars of the scene—and not much else. In some ways, to answer “Where are the women?” all you need to do is press play on a popular emo rap song and count down the few seconds until the enigmatic or implied “she” appears. But does “she” really appear, or is “she” merely a vehicle for the unfettered fury that so consumes this genre?
It feels almost antithetical to try and imagine a fully developed woman speaker occupying space in the emo rap pantheon. Emo rap is a definitive boys’-club production. Still, women populate the genre in a sickening way, and it is important to interrogate the legacy of emo rap as it pertains to the songs’ main subjects. The writing in this music, across its twenty-plus years, is consistently disconcerting. From Atmosphere’s blistering anger on God Loves Ugly’s “Fuck You Lucy,” to the weaponization and violence baked into having complex emotions within Juice WRLD songs, the vengeful, possessive relationship towards women is potent.
To be a woman consuming and enjoying emo rap music is to be forced to compartmentalize parts of yourself. Should music force your hand, making you look away so you can tune in with relative ease? At times, I feel alienated from this music, despite being a champion of the form. At others, I feel incensed. In Jessica Hopper’s The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, she includes her 2003 essay on emo entitled “Where The Girls Aren’t” from Punk Planet. Hopper is scathing in her honesty about emo rock’s problem, writing: “As it stands, in 2003 I simply cannot conjure the effort it takes to give a flying fuck about bands of boys yoked to their own wounding, aka the genre known as emo.… Girls in emo songs today do not have names. Women are not identified beyond their absence, their shape is drawn by the pain they’ve caused.”1
Two decades on, the issue remains, poisoning new outgrowths of emo: women in emo rap do not exist beyond the crumbling imagination of young men who cannot bear to—or do not yet have the tools or capability to—stop centering themselves. At its worst, then, the culture of emo rap is the exact kind of myopic navel-gazing that even a lightly critical listener would rush to shut off when given the chance. It is easy to scan emo rap as dated in this way, challenging the conception of the melodic and ascendant music as being on the cutting edge of hip-hop in the 2010s. I am reminded of a conversation with another critic I had about emo rap’s timelessness being a pain point unto itself. Hip-hop, perhaps more than any other genre, is a perfect reflection of social ideals and ills. It is the clearest of mirrors, but it is also important to note how easily rap is consequently scapegoated by majority-white critics and right-wing pundits. Despite their insistence, rap will never be the disease plaguing American people. As a genre founded on overcoming, hip-hop is most reasonably understood as a lens through which to view the pitfalls and subsequent triumphs of every walk of life in our society. Emo rap, too, is an exercise of peering into a well, looking down into a larger ailing subject: the historic devaluing of women in America.
The music, the sonic enterprise and technical advancement necessary to make emo rap achieve Diamond certifications, is so forward-thinking, and yet the content is suspended in an adolescent stasis. Part of me wonders if that arrested development is simply baked too deeply into the genre and the subsequent flow of capital. Emo rap’s biggest commercial success, Lil Uzi Vert’s “XO Tour Llif3,” is one of its least challenging when it comes to how the woman is treated—it’s one of the few songs where the speaker is a more compelling subject than any tertiary woman. “On the real, you should’ve never lied” feels like a slap on the wrist in comparison to other songs in the canon. The woman-as-liar is only a portion of the force propelling the song’s speaker to “the edge.” When Uzi sings about suicide and drug addiction, the listener sees there is more to “XO Tour Llif3” than shadowy romantic betrayal, and yet the song cannot effectively function without it. Not everyone listening can sink into the uncanny summer anthem of “All my friends are dead,” but most anyone can listen to “XO Tour Llif3” and know the pain of a breakup.
There is also the unbecoming truth that the largely fictive displays of rage in emo rap have crossed over into material damage done unto women. The most visible case here is that of the late XXXTentacion, whose history of violence extends to his former girlfriend: “Discussing his ex-girlfriend, whom he believed had cheated on him, XXXTentacion can be heard saying, ‘I put my source of happiness in another person, which was a mistake initially, right? But she fell through on every occasion until now. Until I started fucking her up, bruh. I started fucking her up because she made one mistake. And from there, the whole cycle went down. Now she’s scared. That girl is scared for her life.’”2 I don’t mean to flatten the cycle of violence XXXTentacion was embroiled in, but even with that understanding, these recorded admissions in regards to his 2016 domestic abuse case are damning.
Naturally, I found myself wondering, “How are women even making emo rap? Are they allowed to? Do they want to?” A scan of this text would suggest they aren’t—at least, not in a format for mass consumption or wider acclaim—and have no interest in doing so. The economics of music skew masculine, even for a genre that rewards hysterics and, ironically, a level of coded femininity. When a young man gets on stage and pours his heart out, we rush to assign a higher level of value to the performance if only because men in hip-hop are quietly encouraged to veil their true emotions. So, if a woman finds herself unabashedly wailing on the mic overtop a production at just the right BPM, is that emo rap? Or is it, rather, a woman feeding into age-old tropes of what it means to present her socially assigned gender role? Hysterics for some, and heroism for others.
A close-but-not-quite analog to this discussion is Maryland punk rapper Rico Nasty, whose music is more rageful than emotionally pathetic. Her 2018 single “Smack a Bitch,” produced by frequent collaborator and craftsman Kenny Beats, achieved Platinum certification in December 2022. The song itself doesn’t have any of the hallmarks of emo rap in the 2010s—its aggression and fuck-off attitude were much too cool for the droning cries of emo—but Rico Nasty’s aesthetic flair seems to at least lightly summon some similarities. Her Sugar Trap series skews closer to emo rap thanks to an emphasis on Auto-Tune and drawling melodics, but still, the brimming confidence on this mixtape and the sequel has little to do with the whirring moans that made emo rap so instantly recognizable in the 2010s.
Rico Nasty is not an emo rapper in the traditional sense. She is, however, an evocative rapper taping into raw emotion. Rico’s intense deliveries and her emphasis on rage chart a new course for women in rap. This is best illustrated by her 2019 collaborative mixtape with Kenny Beats, Anger Management. A tape meant to traverse the immediacy of anger and the process of acceptance, here we find Rico Nasty upending the need for the new class of women in hip-hop to be blustery and powerful. She invites a nuanced read of her work and position in rap’s lineage. That is, Rico Nasty helps establish the presence of a woman on the mic as three-dimensional. In that same spirit, Anger Management imagines a future where the definition of emo rap is broadened to the point of dissolving into the North-Star truth touched on within this book’s introduction: all rap is emo rap.
Despite Rico’s success, there is still the question of the gentler, more immediately understood side of the genre. Where male artists in this space are rewarded for being sensitive and adopting lightly gender nonconforming fashion modes, are women granted the same opportunities to break boundaries for what it means to be emotional when there is no rage involved? The women who want to make this music are trapped in a double bind while their male counterparts can enjoy the fruits of performing a feminine affect. Even at its most sincere—there is plenty of emo rap that features artists coming to their convictions honestly—emo rap does not appear to be ready to reward a woman occupying space on her terms. The genre would have to be refashioned altogether.
As it stands, this essay is presumptuous in its own way. It assumes women want to be making emo rap as opposed to innovating their styles as artists in other, perhaps more inviting and exciting, genres. What is there to be gained from stepping into this genre? To bring women into the emo rap sphere on a mass-marketed level requires a complete reimagining of the texture and substance making up emo rap. This new world presents as exciting, with emo rap becoming brand new with the welcome addition of women molding the form.
Of course, I’m speaking in binaries here, but these thoughts also extend to nonbinary folks, trans folks, and queer folks. Does emo rap have the ability and resources to welcome a perspective outside of the largely cis male one? The commercial pull of the living and passed artists would wager no, but emo rap is relatively young. There is nothing foolish about holding out hope for the growing popularity of a new vision for the music. As with any other genre or subculture, I firmly believe the growing legacy of emo rap will only improve as the music becomes more inclusive. There are a series of untapped and ripe perspectives that would thrive within this mode. I have to believe it’s only a matter of time until this daring work rises up to the surface—and that is where the women will be.