The curious economic reason that made emo grow in Brazil, according to Lucas Silveira

The emo movement lived its peak in Brazil in the 2000s. There seemed to be a perfect combination of factors for the subgenre to explode here: bands willing to embrace such sound, record companies excited enough to invest, media vehicles interested in giving space… but there is still something outside the music scene that may have offered a “push”.

In an interview with wolsplashin the year 2021, the vocalist and guitarist of fresno, Lucas Silveira, pointed out that the growth of the emo movement in Brazil was due to the good economic moment experienced by the country in the period. The musician came to this conclusion after reflecting on a comment made by an internet user.

The fan declared: “emo was the last big movement where young people were concerned with what was going on in their hearts and not with having food on their plate”. That way, Lucas reached the following conclusion.

“We were living a macroeconomic moment here in Brazil […] and the young man began to worry about relationship issues. With this collapse, today we see young people desperate with the bills they cannot pay.”

To corroborate the point highlighted by Silveira, the report by wow pointed out that Brazil’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the 2000s grew at a rate of 3.39% per year. In the following years, the trend was of deceleration.

Emo and the rock revolution

Also in view of Lucas Silveira, the emo movement provided a “revolution within rock” in terms of behavior. The frontman of fresno pointed out that the young man naturally started to opt for lesser-known artists, as the songs that were played on traditional radios and TVs in that period did not generate a connection with this segment of the public.

“Kids no longer identified with what they heard on the radio and saw on television, so they searched the internet for small, garage bands that wrote lyrics with which they identified. It got big and the movement got attention not because the directors wanted it, but because they had to give in.”

MTV Brasil and the “Restart factor”

A point of view complementary to the observation made by Lucas Silveira about the media was offered by Zico Goes, former vice president of programming and content at MTV Brazilin a lecture in 2014. The executive pointed out that the broadcaster, one of the great promoters of emo, gave too much space to the restarta band associated with the movement – albeit in the style dubbed “happy rock” -, which mischaracterized the vehicle of communication.

“It was a boy band, nothing wrong with that, but it’s not about music, it’s about behavior. The audience for ‘Disk MTV’, our most pop show, was 80% female. The others were male. Then there was the inside joke: ‘boys like music, girls like musician’.”

Then he completed:

“This band had so much marketing that it took over MTV as a whole, across all programming, not just the shows but the commercials as well. O restart appeared all the time, so MTV came to be perceived as a very teenage channel. It is not good to be a teen channel for the advertising market, as a teenager does not consume as much as someone a little older.”