# EMO & NU-METAL
*The Mall, the Message Board, and the End of the Record Store, 1997–2007*

Volume 28 of **Origin Story**, a history of popular music, one genre at a time. Published by Greenlight Publishing. Paperback, from $11.49 a copy: https://www.origin-story.academy/volumes/28-emo-nu-metal.html

| | |
|---|---|
| Period covered | 1997–2007 |
| The machine | the mall, the message board |
| Chapters | 45 across five movements |
| Extent | about 120 pages |
| Song lyrics quoted | none |
| Playlist | ORIGIN STORY: Emo & Nu-Metal |
| Audiobook | 2h 50m |
| Ebook ISBN | 979-8-90623-923-5 |
| Audiobook ISBN | 979-8-90623-924-2 |
| Paperback ISBN | not yet issued |

## What the book is about

Every volume of this series has a machine in it. This one has two rooms, and the argument of the book is that they were one system.

The first room is the shopping mall: the chain record store selling a compact disc at seventeen ninety-eight, the clothing chain selling the band T-shirt three units down the concourse, and the ticket counter by the food court. The second room is the message board, where — for the first time in the history of popular music — an audience talked to itself in writing every day, with the bands in the thread, and could be counted.

This is the whole story of both genres in about three hours. The seven-string guitar tuned so low that harmony stops working and the riff becomes a drum part. The octave shape with no third in it, which is why these records never tell you whether to be happy. The engineered scream, which is a technique with a physiology and a cost. The summer tour with a ticket priced at what a CD cost. The free sampler disc that was the last discovery machine to put money in an artist’s direction. And the teenage promoter renting a veterans’ hall for two hundred dollars, which is where every band in here started.

It takes the money seriously, and the money is worse than the story admits. What a platinum album actually paid each member of a five-piece — the answer is roughly what a decent job would have. Why the video the label commissioned put the band two hundred thousand dollars further into debt. Why the merchandise tent, not the record, was the entire business. The thirty-second ringtone that cost three times what the whole song did, and the court case about who it belonged to. And the tax bill nobody warned anybody about.

It is honest about the harm. A scene built on unprecedented direct access between adult performers and teenage fans had no supervision of any kind, and this book states what is documented — who alleged what, and what came of it — without adjudicating and without leaving it out.

And it answers the question the joke never reaches. This genre did not die of embarrassment. In 2007 the building closed: the record shop liquidated, the mall’s music floor gone, the apparatus that connected these bands to their audience simply not there any more, while the records were still selling out arenas. They were the last generation broken by a building and the first broken by a metric — and the machine they accidentally built is the one every musician on earth now works inside.

Contains no song lyrics. Not one line. That is a deliberate rule, explained on the first page, and what replaces it is a description of what these records actually sound like.

## What this book does not do

This book will not quote a single lyric, which for this music is a real loss. Here is what it buys.

This book quotes no song lyrics. Not one line, not one phrase, not the famous bit. That is a deliberate rule and it is absolute: song lyrics are owned, licensing them is negotiated song by song and publisher by publisher, and there is no safe word count: the copyright office says so in as many words. So this book quotes none, and instead does the harder and more interesting thing, which is to tell you what a record actually sounds like and what its words are about. For the two genres in this volume that rule costs more than usual, because both were built on words their audiences copied into instant-message away statuses and profile pages by the million. The copying was the culture. The words stay with their owners; the culture is described.

It reproduces no album art and no photographs. There is nothing to look at here but words and one flat poster on the cover.

It cannot play you a record, which is the real limitation. What it can do is point. There is a playlist for this book, on the same app you may well be reading or listening on, sequenced to the order the records appear in these pages. It is called ORIGIN STORY: Emo & Nu-Metal. Search for it by name. Everything described in Movement Three is on it, in order, and the book is substantially better with it running.

One further thing, specific to this volume. Both of these genres are routinely mocked, including by many of the people who made them, and a certain kind of history handles that by joining in. This book does not. The records are taken seriously (the tunings, the production, the writing, the engineering of a scream) because they were made seriously, by working musicians, and because thirty million people were not all wrong at once. Where the commerce around the records was cynical, and it frequently was, the cynicism is described with the same precision. And where people from this period face serious allegations, the book states what is documented (who alleged what, and what came of it) and stops. It does not adjudicate, and it does not leave things out to keep the story tidy.

This is the volume where the rule costs the most in the back half of the series, because for a great many of the people who bought these records the words were the whole contract. What this book offers in their place is the machine that put the records in their hands, described in full, as the whole story, start to finish, in about three hours. Where both sounds came from, what machinery made them enormous, which records mattered and why, who got paid, who did not, and how it ended, which in this volume means the end of the record shop itself. Where the record is contested, this book says so. Where it does not know, it says that too. Sources are listed at the back.

## Introduction: The Two Rooms (opening)

Every volume in this series has a machine in it, the thing that made the music possible and would not have ten years earlier. Usually it is one thing: a pressing plant, a photocopier, a sampler, a drum machine, an A&R department with a chequebook. This volume’s machine is two rooms, and the whole argument of the book is that the two rooms were one system.

The first room is the mall. Between roughly 1997 and 2005, the American suburban shopping mall was the physical layer of the record business’s last great decade: the chain record store that sold the compact disc at seventeen dollars and ninety-eight cents, the ticket counter at the end of the concourse, the food court where an audience too young to drive arranged to meet, and (from 1996 a public company with a ticker symbol) a clothing chain that sold the band T-shirt to teenagers three paces from where they had just bought the album. A touring summer festival existed specifically to serve this audience: cheap, all-ages, in the car parks and amphitheatres of the same suburbs, run by a promoter whose stated business model was that the ticket should cost about what a CD did. The mall was not where the music was made. It was where the music was bought, and in this period, for this audience, the buying was most of the culture.

The second room is the message board. Before the social networks (and then, decisively, on the first big one) the audience for these two genres did something no popular-music audience had done before at scale: it talked to itself, in writing, every day, with the bands in the room. Mailing lists, band-run forums, fan boards, profile pages. A fifteen-year-old in a suburb with one mall could argue about a B-side at midnight with a fifteen-year-old in another state, could read the singer answering questions in the same thread, and could (this is the part that had never existed) be counted. Friend totals, plays, comments: an audience that had always been an estimate became a number, and the industry spent the second half of this book learning to read it. Alongside the boards, and inseparable from them, ran the file-sharing networks that were quietly dismantling the seventeen-dollar arithmetic of the first room while the second room grew.

That is the machine, and the two genres in this book were the first music built on it end to end.

## Contents

### Movement 1: The Room
1. The Word Nobody Wanted
2. The Other Word Nobody Wanted
3. The Basement, the VFW Hall and the Strip Mall
4. Bakersfield, Sacramento, Jacksonville
5. Seven Strings and a Drop
6. The Basements That Never Signed
7. Octaves, Open Strings and the Gang Vocal
8. Who Was Actually There

### Movement 2: The Machine
9. The Scene Had a Uniform
10. The Mall
11. The Kid Who Rented the Hall
12. The Ticket That Cost What a CD Cost
13. The Message Board and the Profile
14. The Free Disc
15. The Street Team
16. An Hour Every Afternoon, and a Format on the Radio
17. The List
18. What a Video Cost
19. Kerrang! and the British Version
20. The Signing Wave
21. The Twenty Songs You Heard a Hundred Times
22. The Producer Was the Gatekeeper

### Movement 3: The Records
23. 1997–1999. The Platinum Years
24. 2000–2001. The Peak
25. 2002–2004. The Second Room Takes Over
26. 2005–2007. The Last Peak
27. The Records the Story Leaves Out

### Movement 4: The Money
28. The Contract of the Period
29. The Label That Got Sued
30. What a Platinum Album Actually Paid
31. Two Hundred Shows a Year
32. The Merch Tent Was the Business
33. The Shirt in the Shop
34. Whose Song Is It
35. The Ringtone
36. The Tax Bill
37. What File-Sharing Actually Did
38. What These Records Earn Now

### Movement 5: The Ending
39. The Shop Closed
40. The Backlash, and What It Was Actually About
41. What Happened to the People
42. The Machine Did Not Need the Genre
43. What It Became
44. What the Story Leaves Out
45. What Outlived Them

## Timeline

Dated entries from the back of the book. Free to quote with attribution to *EMO & NU-METAL*, Origin Story volume 28.

**1985**
- In Washington DC, a season of shows by bands including Rites of Spring and Embrace introduces a personal emotional register into hardcore. Somebody coins a word as an insult.

**1990**
- A seven-string electric guitar with an added low B enters mass production.

**1992**
- Rage Against the Machine’s first album: a rock band with a rapper at the front and a guitarist producing turntable sounds by hand.

**1993**
- Korn form in Bakersfield, California.

**1994**
- Korn’s debut album is produced by Ross Robinson. Sunny Day Real Estate release Diary on Sub Pop. A Californian punk label begins its long-running cheap sampler series.

**1995**
- The Warped Tour runs for the first time: all ages, car parks, a ticket priced at roughly what a compact disc costs.

**1996**
- American telecommunications legislation relaxes radio ownership limits, and consolidation follows. Sepultura’s Roots, recorded with Ross Robinson, is released. A clothing chain built to sell alternative-music merchandise to suburban teenagers goes public.

**1997**
- Deftones’ Around the Fur. The Promise Ring’s Nothing Feels Good. American recorded-music revenue is near its peak.

**1998**
- Korn’s Follow the Leader enters at number one. An American music channel launches a daily afternoon request countdown.

**June 1999**
- A file-sharing program is released by a nineteen-year-old student.

**July 1999**
- Limp Bizkit’s Significant Other. Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity is released and largely ignored; the band are subsequently dropped.

**Summer 1999**
- A festival weekend at which serious assaults on women in the crowd are reported and later investigated, and at which the site is extensively damaged. The genre’s public reputation never recovers from it.

**1999**
- The Get Up Kids’ Something to Write Home About sells in numbers no independent emo record had reached, and every major-label A&R department sees it.

**2000**
- Deftones’ White Pony. Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory. At the Drive-In’s Relationship of Command. Metallica sue Napster, and the band’s drummer testifies before an American Senate committee. The Federal Trade Commission acts against the major labels over minimum advertised pricing.

**2001**
- Slipknot’s Iowa. Jimmy Eat World’s self-financed Bleed American. Dashboard Confessional’s The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most. Napster is enjoined. A British television channel dedicated to heavy music launches.

**2002**
- Taking Back Sunday’s Tell All Your Friends. Killswitch Engage’s Alive or Just Breathing. A multi-state settlement over minimum advertised pricing is reported at around a hundred and forty million dollars.

**2003**
- Brand New’s Deja Entendu. Fall Out Boy’s Take This to Your Grave. Cursive’s The Ugly Organ. A download store opens selling individual tracks at ninety-nine cents. Myspace launches. A dedicated British heavy-music festival is established. The recording industry begins suing individual users.

**2004**
- My Chemical Romance’s Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. Tower Records files for bankruptcy protection. The major-label signing wave through the scene is at its height.

**2005**
- Fall Out Boy’s From Under the Cork Tree. Thrice’s Vheissu. A major takes a majority stake in a Florida scene independent. A video-sharing site launches.

**2006**
- My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade. Hawthorne Heights sue Victory Records; the label counter-sues. Tower Records is liquidated; the operator of the mall record-store brands goes through bankruptcy. An unsigned British band sell out a two-thousand-capacity London venue.

**2007**
- Fall Out Boy’s Infinity on High enters at number one. Paramore’s Riot!. EMI is taken private by a firm with no music-industry background. The mall’s music floor is gone across most of America.

**2008**
- The recording industry ends its campaign of suits against individual users. A British tabloid runs a campaign connecting a teenager’s death to a band and its fans; the reporting is widely criticised and fans demonstrate outside the paper’s offices. A very loud metal album makes the loudness war a mainstream argument.

**2013**
- Ian Watkins pleads guilty in a British court to a series of extremely serious sexual offences against children and is sentenced to a lengthy custodial term.

**2017**
- Allegations of sexual misconduct involving minors are made publicly against Jesse Lacey of Brand New; he responds with a public statement and the band’s activity ends. Chester Bennington of Linkin Park dies.

**2022**
- A Las Vegas festival built entirely on this scene is announced, sells out at a speed that startles the industry, and requires additional dates.

## Sources

This series is written from published material and its byline claims method rather than credentials, so the sources are listed. They are given as books and categories of material rather than as page citations; where a claim in the text is contested, the text says so at the point of the claim.

On the emo lineage. Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo by Andy Greenwald, published in 2003, is the contemporaneous account, written while the third wave was happening, and is unusually good on the message board and the audience. Where Are Your Boys Tonight? by Chris Payne collects interviews with the scene’s participants from a much later vantage point. Both are journalists’ books built on access, and their emphases are their subjects’.

On the Washington origins. The events of 1985 and the bands that came out of them are documented in the DC scene’s own extensive contemporary and retrospective literature, and Ian MacKaye’s and Guy Picciotto’s objections to the term are on the record across four decades of interviews.

On the American underground the commercial scene came out of. Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad documents the 1980s network (the halls, the distros, the handshake labels) whose infrastructure and ethics both the underground chapter and the touring chapter describe being inherited.

On nu-metal. There is much less serious published writing on this half of the book than on the other, which is itself a finding. The most useful material is the contemporary heavy-music press of 1997 to 2003 and the extensive later interviews in which the genre’s musicians have discussed their own methods (the tunings, the seven-string instruments, the production approach) in technical detail. The description of instrument setup, tuning and string gauge in Movement One is standard guitar-technical material verifiable in any instrument reference.

On the vocal technique. The physiology of screamed and distorted singing is now a well-documented pedagogical field, and the description in the craft chapter follows the standard account. The vocal injuries and surgeries referred to are matters the individuals concerned have discussed publicly.

On retail and the price of a compact disc. The Federal Trade Commission’s action of 2000 concerning minimum advertised pricing, and the related multi-state settlement of 2002, are public records. Manufacturing, wholesale and retail figures in Movement Two are industry-standard ranges of the period rather than any particular label’s accounts.

On the contracts and the arithmetic. Recoupment, dealer-price basis, packaging and free-goods deductions, producer points paid from record one out of the artist’s share, option structures, multiple-rights clauses, merchandising royalties and the two copyrights are all standard practice, set out most clearly in All You Need to Know About the Music Business by Donald Passman. Every figure in Movement Four is an illustrative shape, not an audited number from any particular contract, and the text says so at each point. The actual agreements are private and this book has not seen them.

On the label dispute in Movement Four. The 2006 litigation between Hawthorne Heights and Victory Records is a matter of public court filing. It was resolved without a public adjudication of the claims and nothing was proved against anybody; this book describes it only to illustrate what became visible about independent-label practice while it ran.

On file-sharing and the revenue collapse. The industry’s figures are the RIAA’s and the IFPI’s published data. The economics literature is genuinely divided: Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf’s paper in the Journal of Political Economy in 2007 found no statistically significant negative effect; work by Stan Liebowitz, by Alejandro Zentner, and by Rafael Rob and Joel Waldfogel found measurable displacement. This book presents both and adjudicates neither, and readers who want to reach their own view should read the papers rather than summaries of them.

On the 1999 festival. The assaults, the property destruction and the subsequent investigations are documented in extensive contemporary reporting and in the official response of the time.

On the criminal matter and the allegations in Movement Five. The conviction of Ian Watkins in 2013 is a matter of British court record, as is his sentence and his death in custody in 2025. The allegations made publicly against other individuals in and around this scene from 2014 onward are reported as what they are: allegations, made publicly, in most cases by named people, with the individuals’ responses where responses were given, and with no criminal proceedings in most cases. This book does not adjudicate them and readers should go to the original reporting rather than to this summary of it.

On deaths. Where a person in this book has died, the fact is recorded and no circumstances are described, in line with the reporting standards that exist because detailed accounts cause further harm.

On chart positions, release dates and sales. The Billboard and Official Charts Company archives. Sales figures reported by labels are label claims and are treated as such throughout.

Where figures are disputed (what any particular band actually received, the terms of any settlement, the true weight of file-sharing in the collapse) the text says so rather than choosing. Those disagreements are not gaps in the record. They are the record.

## Related volumes

- Volume 17: the American hardcore scene in its second half is where the word in this book’s first chapter was coined, and where the touring circuit and the handshake label were built
- Volume 27: the same years, the same shopping centre, the same afternoon countdown, sold to the same teenagers on the opposite promise
- Volume 29: the same decade seen from the other side of the collapse, and the fullest account in this series of what free copies did to the money
- Volume 30: the free-file distribution culture that ran in parallel to this one, mostly unnoticed by it, and that inherited everything the second room built

## Questions

**What is Origin Story volume 28 about?**

The Mall, the Message Board, and the End of the Record Store, 1997–2007. Every volume of this series has a machine in it. This one has two rooms, and the argument of the book is that they were one system.

**What years does EMO & NU-METAL cover?**

1997–2007. The volume is numbered 28 because that is where the genre sits in the chronology of the music, not the order the books were written in — the first three written were volumes 17, 19 and 21.

**What made EMO & NU-METAL possible?**

The mall, the message board. Movement Two of every volume is about the technology that made the genre possible and would not have ten years earlier.

**Are there song lyrics in it?**

None. Not one line, in this volume or in any of the thirty-one. Lyrics are copyrighted expression, licensing is negotiated song by song and publisher by publisher, and there is no safe quantity — so the rule is zero, and a program checks the manuscript, the EPUB and the narration script against it before the volume ships. What replaces them is a description of what the record actually sounds like, what it cost, and who was paid.

**How long is it?**

About 28,500 words: 45 chapters across five movements, roughly 120 minutes’ reading, 120 pages in the paperback. The audiobook runs 2h 50m.

**What is in the back of the book?**

A dated timeline of 25 entries, a source list, and a note on what the volume does not do. All three are reproduced free on this page.

**Can I buy EMO & NU-METAL in print?**

Yes, here. It is a 5.5 × 8.5 in paperback, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, about 120 pages, and it never goes out of print.

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Origin Story volume 28. Buy the paperback direct: https://www.origin-story.academy/volumes/28-emo-nu-metal.html