It’s not a matter of “when” emo rap goes pop, but rather, how it does so. Following the boom of “XO Tour Llif3,” most charting emo rap had a bit of an overcorrection. With the majors firmly involved, the hits had to be less suicidal. The transition from “XO Tour Llif3” to the placid 2020 number one hit “Mood” by 24kGoldn and iann dior revealed a more docile, toyish side of emo. Many of the breakout hits following “XO Tour Llif3,” those produced in the wake of the meteoric rise of Juice WRLD and XXXTentacion, were largely dulled in comparison to their predecessors. The edge of emo rap was sanded down into something you could bop your head to at a coffee shop. While certain practitioners of the form endured—BONES is still releasing like a madman; Dro Kenji, DC The Don, and others are raging emo rap perfectionists—the big-time hits transitioned into something less and less distinguishable from serviceable pop music.
Maybe it’s not all the labels’ fault. Following “XO Tour Llif3,” emo rap became a genre so ravaged by loss, it became a question of whether this music would continue to be made following the tragic deaths of Lil Peep, XXXTentacion, and Juice WRLD. In some ways, it’s easy to point at that streak of suffering and understand why the new class of emo rap hits sounds nothing like the originals. And yet, these songs still borrow heavily from their frameworks. Iann dior’s 2019 breakout single “emotions” takes quite a few visual and written notes from Juice WRLD’s star-making hit, “All Girls Are the Same.” They even share a producer. The single appears on dior’s debut mixtape, nothings ever good enough. The titling here, and across the project (“crash my whip,” “who cares,” “don’t want to fall”) have all the hallmarks of emo rap. Still, these songs lack the urgency of their predecessors. They feel stripped of the charisma of Juice WRLD, or the hyper-specific writing of Lil Peep, or the cutting adrenaline of XXXTentacion. They work, but not much else.
The game is given away from the title of iann dior’s late 2019 debut album, Industry Plant. Litigating whether dior himself is a plant—that is, an artist with major-label backing who is manufactured to appear DIY and rake in fans while getting the major boost—is not interesting. The commodification of emo rap, which is what the album title implies, is far more compelling. Industry Plant tells a tale of selling out and fitting in, released on the same label that snatched up Trippie Redd following his breakout success. Dior’s album doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the forefathers of emo rap, with gross Atmosphere joints or gothic underground hits from TeamSESH. With a flattened world, thanks to the digital streaming age, the new emo rappers’ sights are set on the charts, and by popping off online, they’ll hit them.
The streaming model is just one of the faculties at work popifying emo rap. The streaming economy and the latent trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic work in tandem to increase a particular type of loneliness. While it may fuel creativity—Kid Cudi’s breakout hit “Day ‘N’ Nite” was all about isolation, and it stuck the landing—COVID continues to shrink opportunities for artists to cut their teeth in the same way the emo rappers of yore once did on touring circuits. Moreover, the pandemic reshaped the ways in which kids socialized and spent their time, largely exacerbating the isolation of being a teenager. Online communities were forged and forced to replace the more tangible communities kids had access to, and consequently, the music was made for the internet—not the stage, or the basement, or any other performance arena. As with the SoundCloud era, young artists were just an upload away from changing their lives. Careers could be launched without the artist ever reaching out and touching a fan as a performer, for better or worse.
As emo rap trends closer and closer to being a dressing for the pop canon, I look to the involvement of Travis Barker as a signal that even the lightest of emo rap signatures have broad appeal. Coupled with his prior history within hip-hop, blink-182’s drummer began popping up on a bevy of emo rap songs, and even worked on a complete album (NEON SHARK) with Trippie Redd.1 “We had a lot of the same things in common, as far as influences, from what he was inspired by like Nirvana or Deftones, blink or Green Day,” Barker had said about Trippie. “He had influences within the genre which I guess I’m best known for. And, I had seen Trippie before, I had witnessed him basically cut all the music and singing acapella for an entire set, so I knew I was going to be able to make something awesome with him in a different genre because he could sing, he had great melody, great pitch, he was a star.”2
Barker, one of the defining musicians of the commercial pop-punk movement and its subsequent nostalgia-fueled 2020s revival, finding a common thread with one of the faces of emo rap, Trippie Redd, is significant. Barker was also a fan of the late Lil Peep, whose insistence on guitar-heavy productions and tender whine—and reciprocal love for blink-182—made him an easy bridge between emo rap and the pop-punk outgrowth that followed it. His investment in emo rap acts can be seen as an attempt to legitimize the genre outside of its own orbit. It appears as though there is an idealized value to having his voice attached to a record, despite my confidence that Travis Barker is not single-handedly bringing emo rap back to his rock peers.
More interestingly still is the question of who among the remaining emo rappers is allowed to perform a pop exercise. The popification of the genre is as much a function of economics as it is a look into the racial dynamics shaping which emotions are coded acceptable for what people. It’s the age-old question of genre as a segregationist practice. The wonder of, “Is this pop because of the mode of the music, or because of the appearance of the artist?” Within emo rap, the sweeping pop attempts, the connections with Travis Barker, are linked to a class of artist deemed more palatable by the powers that be. Whoever is easiest to sell to the American audience, that is who we can count on to be nudged or shoved into taking emo rap to pop radio. Proximity to whiteness and class status are just as much at play as the tones of the music being made.
Of course, this line of thinking arrives at the Machine Gun Kelly dilemma. The Ohio rapper-turned-pop-punk-revivalist has caught a frenzy of fans and drawn disdain as he shifted from his breakneck “Wild Boy” days in the early 2010s, to feuding with Eminem across a series of diss tracks, to ultimately employing the same guitar fetishization Lil Wayne did with Kelly’s Tickets to My Downfall and Mainstream Sellout albums, released in 2020 and 2022 respectively.
With Travis Barker as his go-to producer, with a history of living through the height of blink-182 and performing pop punk and emo touchpoint covers, the question of Kelly’s sincerity is second to what his pivot and the audience’s reception of it represents. These records are hugely popular. Kelly himself, born Colson Baker, seems unfazed by the consistent critical takedowns of his work, touting Platinum plaques instead of licking any sore wounds.3 Tickets to My Downfall debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Immediately, critics and skeptics began asking what it means for a white practitioner of hip-hop to so easily transition into rock music. “[Rock] needed a defibrillator,” Machine Gun Kelly told Billboard in his 2022 cover story.4
Whether Machine Gun Kelly revived rock or inspired a revival of mallcore-era music has little to do with the value of his shifting presence. Colson Baker is a perfect example of the fluidity of genre, the acceptance of rapt personal experimentation, as long as the final product will sell to a majority white audience. Baker’s makeover into a pink-guitar-touting rock star is less about music and more about the way whiteness expands genre definitions and limits them at once. Clearly inspired by the visual language of the late Lil Peep and the screeds of Juice WRLD, when Baker declares himself an artist by switching genre descriptors, it draws a collective sigh. The music, much like iann dior’s, is fine. It’s clear Baker cares. It’s clear he’s having fun with this new character. “Baker has had an uphill battle for credibility,” Meaghan Garvey wrote for Billboard.
When Baker’s team nods to his sincerity, I like to take a step back and remember as a listener and writer that I will never have access to Baker’s interior life. His love of rock music, his emotional outpouring on social media and in interviews, appears genuine. Who are we to say otherwise? And yet, when he declares, “The 2010s was great for singers and rappers, and I was part of that. But I think we needed something else: we needed an instrument,” such intense revisionist history feels cataclysmic to the preservation of emo rap and music altogether.
Maybe it isn’t all bad. Perhaps the popification of emo rap will allow the genre to expand beyond its wildest dreams, and a nostalgia for the meatier material will come around to the mainstream. “XO Tour Llif3,” the Machine Gun Kelly remix, wouldn’t be the worst thing.