Sean “Slug” Daley (rapper, Atmosphere): I invented the term “emo rap” in, like, 1998 in an interview for URB. It was an interview about Deep Puddle Dynamics, and someone paid a publicist and we got a piece in URB, written by Dave Thompkins, and he was asking the four of us random questions and made the piece a collage of our answers. He asked me to describe what our style of rap sounds like, and I said: “Cynical, minimalistic, emo rap.” That’s what I do, and that’s what I bring to the table.
Then, I started using the phrase a lot. I worked in record stores and all the emo, we were just putting it in punk. Sunny Day Real Estate would go into punk. So, to me, “emo rap” was funny. It ended up sticking! I lived to regret it, because it became a way to disparage us. People started using it as a way to belittle us—almost like, “That’s not real hip-hop, that’s emo rap.”
Tom Breihan (author, senior editor, Stereogum): I honestly don’t know what emo rap is. I’m not sure it can be counted as a genre, necessarily. It’s a term I’ve shied away from using—all rap music is emotional, even if it’s the most cold, calculating music. There is emotion behind that. As far as I know, the thing that came to be known as emo rap is part of an outgrowth of late ’90s, early 2000s, where just as straight-up emo, none of the people wanted that genre to be applied to them.
Cat Zhang (music critic): For me, it’s associated with a kind of pessimistic worldview—Juice WRLD comes to mind.
Taz Taylor (Internet Money founder and producer): It’s the content. If it’s really emotional and people are talking about their problems—I don’t know how to explain it. It’s that 2000s pop-punk shit. The beats and music get updated. We combine rap with pop-punk and that’s what it is. Same content they was talking about [in the 2000s]. It comes down to lyrics, ultimately. If I give someone a guitar, it doesn’t mean they’re making an emo song.
Ivie Ani (journalist, cultural critic, and on-air correspondent): I look at emo rap as this subgenre of hip-hop that is fused with rock music. Millennials are more familiar with that emo rock music era of the early 2000s, and emo rap came about in the mid-2010s and the proliferation of SoundCloud. As far as content, emo rap is about young people expressing themselves and talking about heavy themes: depression, drug use, loneliness, nihilism, even suicide. But, I would venture that there’s always been some semblance of that type of rap, since the beginning of hip-hop. These elements existed in hip-hop before the emo genre existed.
Matthew Strauss (music critic): Singing about self-deprecation and worse at times: self-harm. Auto-Tuned, melodic singing, in rap parlance, with a rap beat—although that’s not so necessary.
A-Trak (DJ, president of Fool’s Gold Records): Emo rap mainly has melodies that were inspired by a certain era of emo rock. There were certainly other attributes: a certain vulnerability and subject matter. But for me, it’s the melodies first. I was never really into the emo rock groups that inspired this, so these sensibilities aren’t really my thing in the first place, but I got used to that coming into the language of hip-hop.
Colin Joyce (music critic): There are a couple different definitions. One is: there’s no such thing as emo rap. The other is: all rap is emo rap. I’m not sure which I believe more! The genre the term refers to is a SoundCloud development in the mid-2010s, but I see it as a pretty linear development of a lot of stuff that is built into rap from inception. A lot of rap is about pain and bringing out that emotional expression in ways that feel fresh and new. People talk about the use of samples and mall-goth guitars. In a broad sense, I think of the term as a continuation of what’s always happened in rap, and more specifically: rappers on SoundCloud in the 2010s.
Emma Garland (music critic): Emo always seems to be attached to genres that are more traditionally masculine. It originally came as a descriptor on the back of hardcore, and then there were bands articulating themselves in a more “feminine” way: higher pitched vocals, sensitive lyrics, and the delivery was sort of “hysterical.” I think it’s the same with emo rap as well. The stylistic choices and the way people articulate themselves feels feminine, in a traditional sense, to the mass audience. On a more blatant level, it’s rappers who have been raised on noughties emo, and then mashed those sensibilities together.
Paul Thompson (music critic): It has to either be first-person, or be the kind of writing that is nominally a third-person thing, but everyone knows you’re writing about a girl or something. It has to feel diaristic. You have to feel, as the listener, as if you are entering into some sort of intimate exchange with the artist, where they are revealing something and hoping to connect with you. Of course, this is a type of posturing, but it scans differently from the type of posturing of, “I’m the better MC than you.”
Hanif Abdurraqib (author, A Little Devil in America ): So often, emo as a genre or aesthetic, is something that hinges on emotional sensitivity that is usually expressed through straight men. It had less to do with a sound, and more to do with the impulse to define or put emotions in a box. For me, there’s been emotional sensitivity in rap for as long as I’ve listened to rap. I don’t know if there are folks who are specialists. LL Cool J, at one point, was perhaps an early adopter of the benefits reaped by exuberant expression of emotions.
midwxst (rapper): Emo rap is a subgenre of hip-hop where a lot of the topics are very, very personal. You listen to it if you want to relate to what somebody’s going through. You could throw on a song by an emo rapper, and that song would hit different for you—if you’re going through something, it could be a comfort. You can relate to what you’re listening to! Not a lot of artists can explain the feeling of being alone. It’s very vulnerable.
Pranav Trewn (music critic): There’s the strict literalism of emotional rap, which plenty of rap is emotional. Geto Boys, Biggie. There’s plenty of emotion and talk of mental health. Then, on the flip side, there’s the stereotype of emo rap, that’s the Juice WRLDs of the world. Something closer to pop punk, and in the most negative light, the immature outburst of emotion. I would include both of those pillars in my definition, and Kid Cudi is the clearest embodiment of the, “You’ll know it when you hear it” in emo rap. The definition really comes down to personal struggle as the guiding light of their work. There’s rap that seeks to empower, and emo rap is about meeting you where you are a little more closely.