This may be a niche topic that some won’t understand depending on your generation

My husband and I are having a discussion while watching old music videos tonight. Would you explain the scene culture as more of a fashion culture or music culture. If music which bands do you believe were inherently “scene” and why?

Additionally, it would be interesting to know which part of the US or world you grew up in and what years you associated with the peak of this culture

Scene was a fashion style that started with Screamo (like, very heavy Emo mixed with thrash/powerviolence) in the 90s and got progressively more outrageous over the 2000s, first it spilled over to post-hardcore, then into the pop-punk version of post-hardcore, then somehow into like EDM culture.

In what ways do you think it spilled into EDM? Ive never noticed that transition before! I know some were very electro pop / synth pop like owl city, is that kind of what you mean?

they were called style tribes because it's a whole subculture with music, fashion, language, and visual aesthetic.

i mean it’s almost exclusively a style of dressing over music, i’d say music is barely a secondary concern

in nashville we had a band called wolverines with a popular song and the chorus was a whole thing about “passion before fashion” all the guys in the hardcore scene 15-20 years ago where im from liked you more if you were “just a guy” who was into the scene/lifestyle as opposed to someone who is clearly in a costume just trying to meet girls or fit in to the trends

To me it’s a fashion. You can see the style on musicians from like Jerome’s Dream in the late 90’s to like Attack! Attack! and really all they have in common in my eyes from music to ethos and subculture is the hair and cloths. It will always strike me as ironic that it’s become known as “scene” but it became centered around Hot Topics in the mall and completely divorced from the original DIY punk scenes that it evolved out of. But my negative view of it is heavily informed by my experience as a middle school kid in 2007 with swoopy hair who hated being associated with hot topic bands so I am clearly coming in with a bias.

Oh there’s like later “scene” fashion (late 00s) that kind of mixes that whole candy raver EDM festival aesthetic (rainbow everything) with the earlier glam-ish/pop-punk style.

Also a fellow 07 kid but I strived to have the swoop bangs, tight jeans, and colorful vans. I never really questioned where it all came from I just rolled with it at the time. Looking back at the start of punk it’s really easy to pinpoint where some of the fashion originated with the music scene but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen the scene culture dissected the same way.

Ah yes I get what you mean now!

Off the top of my head Crunkcore is an example, probably growing off some sort of Dance-punk connection.

Yeah, that was definitely another bridge.

Antioch Arrow (early 90s) were the first to start mixing in that scene-ish stuff into the fashion/aesthetic.

If you look at early 90s screamo shows, most people are just dressed in baggy clothes, but there’s a subsection doing the whole tight clothing/swoopy hair shit.

So it was not necessarily “the fashion of screamo”, but it was a sub trend within it/linked to that music.