Are you nostalgic for white studded belts? Thinking wistfully of crabcore? Then you’d be right at home on TikTok.
I knew it would happen but it’s still a shock: the 2000s are in the middle of a revival among people too young to have meaningfully experienced them. While in some cases that means teenagers thrifting for “ugly” 2000s clothing, on TikTok this also means that full grown adults are taking a look back at their youth and appreciating the scant few good parts of being a scene kid. “Scene” was a youth culture from the 2000s typified mostly by listening to emo and hardcore, ruining your hair by backcombing it every day, and being obsessed with MySpace. When I look back on that period in my life, I don’t usually think about the music, which was bad, or Warped Tour, which should never come back, or stealing earrings from Hot Topic, which I am sorry for. Mainly, I’m talking about white studded belts:
Videos by VICE
When I was a scene kid in high school that belt was part of my typical, everyday outfit. And ItsKeyonn is right: even if scene culture had a huge problem with racism and sexism, if someone was wearing a white studded belt, I always took that as a signal that I could hang. ItsKeyonn is probably too young to have experienced the highest highs of emo music as a cultural force, given that he’s just in college now. But if you check out the tag “sceneiorcitizen,” you’ll see recovering scene kids looking back on their youth.
The moment I started moving away from being a scene kid was when a friend of mine called me my MySpace name in real life. It was “Gita Von Grimm.” But you know what? That’s actually kind of a sick nickname. Meet me on TikTok with the other sceneiorcitizens to reminisce about it.
