About

Midwest Emo Intro Parodies refers to a series of videos in which people overdub video of people emotionally yelling about their heartbreak with gentle melodic guitars typical of midwestern emo music.

Origin

A common trope in midwestern emo music is an introductory section where the singer screams emotionally while the guitars play gentle melodic passages ("Postlapsaria" by Saetia shown below as an example).

In September of 2020, a video of an argument between a man on a scooter and a woman began spreading online due to the impassioned pleas of the man, who some noted sounded like the singer of the band La Dispute (shown below, left). On December 24th, 2020, YouTuber Ayyylmao dubbed over the video with an original guitar passage, titling the video "Midwest emo scooter kid meme." The video gained over 946,000 views in less than a year (shown below, right).

Spread

On the same day Ayyylmao uploaded the scooter argument video, they posted the first of their duets with TikTokers screaming about their pain and emotions, adding midwestern emo riffs over the audio (first video shown below, left). Over the following months, they posted five more such duets, with the latest example posted May 21st, 2021 (shown below, right).

TikToker justin_jen_ has also worked in spreading the trend online. He often duets other TikTok videos with midwestern emo riffs, and occasionally pairs it with videos of people screaming. On March 3rd, 2021, he posted a duet with user theycravebraden_ which gained over 970 likes (shown below, left). On September 23rd, 2021, they began going viral with a duet they posted with leo_the_lion24 which featured a teen girl presumably leaving an angry voice message for a boy. The video gained over 20,000 likes in one day on TikTok (shown below, right). It was reposted to Twitter^[1] by user @andrewonhere, who gained over 16,000 retweets and 90,000 likes as the video gained over 1.1 million views.

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References