Hardcore Nostalgia at Furnace Fest

Music and Entertainment Industry Educators Association

MEIEA, Atlanta, Georgia, March 21, 2024.

Co-authored with Nathan Myrick.

Abstract

Nostalgia has long been used to market popular music, largely by directing listeners’ attention to a romanticized past, both individual and shared. Well into the 21st century, the music industries continue to exploit listeners’ attachments to their musical pasts through expanded reissues, “final” tours, and booking legacy artists to headline major music festivals. This isn’t so much a trend as it is a stark reminder that back catalog music (counted by industry metrics as anything released over 18 months ago) has been—and remains—a key component of pop music commerce since at least the mid-20th century.

Whether nostalgia is employed as a lyrical or stylistic device, a strategic marketing narrative, or somewhere in between these two, it sells the fondly remembered experiences of youth to listeners. Our musical tastes, research into listening habits has shown, tend not to deviate much after our teenage years, eventually stagnating in our 30s and later in life. A recent moment of nostalgia for hardcore and emo music of the late 90s and 2000s shows no signs of slowing down.

The nostalgia for hardcore and emo manifests in much the same way that it does for mainstream pop artists, combining marketing savvy, fan service, and sincerity. Bands reunite, tour, and play through beloved albums for audiences made up of both long-time fans and newer/younger listeners who only discovered them after they broke up. Record labels repress anniversary editions of albums on vinyl in multiple color variants. Long-running punk/hardcore/emo festivals, such as The Fest (in Gainesville, FL) and Riot Fest (in Chicago, IL), book legacy acts in part to increase the age range of their target audiences (as do mainstream festivals such as Bonnaroo, Coachella, and Lollapalooza). New events, such as When We Were Young (in Las Vegas, NV) and the Emo’s Not Dead Cruise, highlight the late-90s/early-aughts commercial end of these genres. And Furnace Fest (in Birmingham, AL), which ran for four years at the turn of the century, returned in 2021 with a lineup of emo, hardcore, metal, and punk bands both nostalgic and contemporary whose knowing acknowledgement of their 20-year hiatus quickly became a key selling point.

What distinguishes nostalgia for hardcore and emo? Instead of exploiting listeners’ rose-colored pasts, hardcore nostalgia recalls sweaty basement shows, dangerous mosh pits, shredded vocal cords, and violent iconography—romanticizing the trappings of music communities seemingly designed to intimidate and exclude but that nonetheless welcomed misfits who felt welcome nowhere else. What, then, is the nature of hardcore, and how does hardcore nostalgia reflect its values and meet its needs? More than merely a marketing ploy, is hardcore nostalgia also an invitation to revisit and romanticize the anxieties of our youth; an attempt at a do-over; or perhaps even an act of emotional and mental self-care? In this presentation, we trace these trends in hardcore and emo to ask: what do we do with nostalgia that asks us to remember when we were young and angry and sad? Drawing on ongoing field research at Furnace Fest, funded by MEIEA in 2021, we describe a framework for evaluating hardcore nostalgia.