For One Song and One Song Only, You Too Can Be a Rockstar
All it takes is enough courage (liquid or otherwise), and you too can be the lead singer of a raging rock band. At least, that was the case on Friday at Cambridge’s own Middle East Club in Central Square. Just down the stairs off Brookline Street, beyond the crowd of Uber arrivals and doe-eyed smokers, a determined group of ticketed patrons waited in line to add their names to the lineup. With a 75-song setlist of the 2000s’ best punk hits, this was not your mother’s karaoke night.
This is Emo Night Karaoke, the traveling concert that supplies live instrumentals for a “total nightlife experience” in cities throughout the East Coast. The core concept is one shared by karaoke bars everywhere: for each song, a new vocalist is pulled from the crowd and given three minutes of fame on stage. But somewhere between the professional musicians and the 450-person audience, Boston’s ENK felt far more like a collaborative tribute concert than another session of sitting through every millennial’s rendition of “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers.
For the uninitiated, emo rock is something of a living artifact of the 1980s. The genre is often traced back to music’s Revolution Summer in Washington, D.C. In this heat of 1985, the band Rites Of Spring deviated from the aggressive themes that were central to the hardcore punk scene. They left behind the political messaging of punk lyrics to get into the personal, creating music as rich in feeling as it was in sound. It was all about love and loss, heartbreak and angst.
As other groups followed suit, the name “emo” emerged to describe the phenomenon. It’s thought to come from the longhand “emocore,” a marriage of emotional and hardcore, to differentiate the subgenre from mainstream rock. But this idea of emocore wasn’t loved by all. In Rites of Spring producer Ian Mackaye’s own words, emocore was “the stupidest fucking thing I’ve heard in my entire life.” From there began a long history of mystery and scorn around the emo name.
But ENK doesn’t seem to have any stake in the debate of what is or isn’t emo. In fact, their setlist is far more interested in tracks that people want to sing than the limits of any genre.
The karaoke project began in 2018 when drummer John J. Damiano called up old bandmate and guitarist Chris D. Pennings. The two were brainstorming the next steps for Damiano’s pop-punk tribute band, “Tickle Me Emo,” trying to figure out where he could find a new lead singer.
It was Pennings who first imagined the unconventional solution. He had just come off a family cruise, the highlight of which was performing a blink-182 song for the ship’s karaoke night. To emulate that rush, Pennings and Damiano thought that the audience itself could be the lead singer for their band. Thus, ENK was born.
It took a few months for Pennings and Damiano to figure out how to pull it off — they needed a venue, a sign-up system, and a way to display lyrics to the singer. Despite each logistical challenge, by 2019 it became clear that the ENK project might just stick.
Once you enter the sea of Truly and Bud Light cans in the basement of The Middle East, the appeal of ENK becomes clear. Drawn from the 2000s hits of My Chemical Romance, Paramore, and blink-182, the ENK setlist perfectly reflects what its mesh-clad patrons want. As soon as each song was announced, screams of excitement interrupted the nondescript pop that played between acts.
The whole night reflected the nostalgic intensity of emo rock, from the neon glow off of the old black band tees to the impassioned cries of drunken millennials.
In the hangover after the Cambridge show, the ENK band packed up their gear to head down to Philadelphia for another sold-out crowd. Come Monday, the guys will return to their professional jobs for a week of work. They’ll rest and rinse out the angst of the past weekend’s show before repeating the cycle all over again on Friday.
— Magazine writer Francesca J. Barr can be reached at francesca.barr@thecrimson.com