‘I’m Not Okay’ exhibition celebrating emo culture launches in London

A new exhibition celebrating emo culture has launched at the Barbican Music Library in London.

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The exhibition, called ‘I’m Not Okay (An Emo Retrospective)’ after the My Chemical Romance hit ‘I’m Not Okay (I Promise)’, is a collaboration between the Museum of Youth Culture and the library, which is owned by the City of London Corporation.

Taking a look back at when youth culture was “cute, raw, vulnerable, and unapologetically different”, it’s set to run until January 15 next year. It features personal photos retrieved from old hard drives and Photobucket accounts and taken on digital cameras and mobile phones from the 2000s.

Twenty years after the release of seminal emo albums like My Chemical Romance’s ‘Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge’, Taking Back Sunday’s ‘Where You Want To Be’ and The Used’s ‘In Love And Death’, it focuses on the emo scene of the era and explores how emo became a positive force for acceptance, addressing issues of sexuality, mental health, gender, identity and belonging.

The Barbican said, “The ethos of emo resonated deeply with a generation, channeling collective teenage melancholy into a transatlantic subculture that thrived in cyberspace just as well as in the basement venues of grotty pubs.

“With one foot IRL and the other in MySpace, emo wasn’t just a scene – it was the only way of living, the only way we could envision our futures.”

Meanwhile, the Museum of Youth Culture’s Creative Director Jamie Brett said, “The Emo scene resonated deeply with teens who wanted to express their angst, doubts, insecurity, and sense of feeling and being different.

“As well as the content that we unearthed digitally, we are very grateful to everyone who remembered how Emo culture helped shape their lives and answered our shout-outs for visual material for the exhibition, essentially, giving them a degree of ownership of it.

“We are all hugely proud of ‘I’m Not Okay (An Emo Retrospective)’ and over the course of its four-month run at Barbican Music Library, the Museum’s team is looking forward to hearing how it evokes vivid memories of this pivotal time in people’s lives.”

You can find out more about the exhibition on the Barbican website.

And for fans of the Midwest emo scene that preceded the 2000s explosion of emo into the mainstream, the iconic ‘American Football house’ from the band of the same name’s 1999 debut album is now available to rent on Airbnb.

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