I’m not emo
The rise and fall of MySpace coincided with the rise and fall of the scene kids. Layouts, 1000s of friends and picture comments gave scene kids an outlet for all their teenage angst. Often including correcting the ‘mainstream’ on the difference between emos and scene kids. “Um emos are losers im scene cant u tell?” Jeffree Star was Queen-Scene with pink hair to dye for (sorry), bringing on an onslaught of copycats and people professing that Jeffree stole THEIR look. How could she???
And we can’t forget the pre-skrillex Sonny Moore adorning the school books and walls of teenagers world-wide. We all knew Skrillex before he was ‘mainstream’.
That MySpace pose
The selfie before it even knew it was a selfie. Ridiculously over edited pictures and quite frankly just odd poses. Here’s a MySpace pose how-to:
Learn forward in an unnatural position, hold your camera at an awkward height and make a quirky expression. You have the choice of taking said photo from a height, or using the reflection of a mirror to capture you in all your glory.
T3AlK!!NG LIK3 ThiS
Nothing makes you stand out more than switching out letters with numbers, using asterisks to indicate actions and cute faces out of symbols, because you’re so edgy.
E.g.: “OMG u look so cut3333 *hugs* :3”
“this song is Br0000000TAL!!!”
MySpace names
Onces you had the photo and everything else down, for some reason within the MySpace scene community, using your own name was just not interesting enough. Instead adding a word which made you sound deep or something was what it was all about. For example adding a word such as “gore”, “slaughter”, “suicide”, “murder” and so forth were always a good choice.
PC 4 PC? W4W?
MySpace was all about the picture comments. The more you had, the more popular you were. This meant a lot to many many people (including myself), but didn’t translate to real life quite as well. Which of course was a benefit, because you could whine about how no one understands you (cue Simple Plan – Welcome to my life).
The aptly named W4W or Whore 4 Whore, for those not in the know, was a big deal too. Essentially you would ‘whore’ someones blog out (promote it) and the favour would be returned, spreading your empire one whore at a time. This also involved spamming people incessantly via the bulletin board.
“Urgh, go away mum they are my real friends!!”
In order to gain more of those all important picture comments, MySpace trains were there to help you build your base of friends you’ll probably never meet. Everyone wanted to have more friends than MySpace Tom which for some came at a price. We can’t forget the cautionary tale of Kiki Kannibal.
“I <3 my Top Friends”
Top friends could make or break a friendship group in a split second. Deciding who to display on your profile was a tense decision. Browsing through your 100s of ‘friends’ to pick the ones nearest and dearest to you. That’s when problems started.”Erm y am I only no.2 on ur top friends?” “have u just deleted me from it now” “do u hate me?”
“Br00tal profile song bro”
Bands pages on MySpace made it easy to access your favourite bands of the moment. Careful scrolling through to choose the most alternative, loudest song to pick to have as your profile song. It was also handy to include random song quotes such as “slit my wrists and black my eyes.”
“Love your layout!! SO random!!! >.<?”
The holy grail of your past MySpace persona. Everything I know about HTML was learnt from coding layouts for myself and friends. Glitter graphics, DIV layouts, over-the-top backgrounds, anything to make people comment on how jealous they are of your profile.