How did you get into emo music when you were younger, and how or why did you revisit it as an adult? I feel like a lot of people have really funny stories about the moment they were like, oh my god- this music is scary, but I'm into it.
When I was emo as a kid I never wanted to call myself emo- I was goth. At the time, this was around 2002, nobody really wanted to be “emo”, I guess. Goths were tough and emos were whiny and angsty and stuff, and I was angsty. I lived in a small town in east Texas, and I think that if I were open about, you know, being emo, people would have just called me goth anyway, there wasn’t that much difference in subcultures there.
I did grow up in a home where my media was heavily censored, so I wasn’t really allowed to listen to my own music. If I wanted to listen to something, it had to be like, screened through my dad. One time, for example: Linkin Park was a somewhat safe band, for some reason, and one time my dad had printed out some of the lyrics, one of the lines was talking about “walking on eggshells” or something, and my dad sat me down and he was like, “Do you really feel like this?” and it sucked, it really sucked, because I wanted to listen to all of this stuff, and I couldn’t really do it. I was already this kid who, like, wasn’t allowed to watch pg-13 movies….it was very over-protective. I don’t really remember what got me started on the music, but I did have friends with more normal parents and a more normal access to music, and they would share things with me.
I do remember that in 5th grade I went to this science based summer camp, one of the counselors wore a Dead Kennedys shirt. I didn’t know what Dead Kennedys were, but I just remember thinking, “holy shit, this guy is so fucking cool.” After that summer camp I did start wanting to explore a little more, explore that side of myself. I do know that because everything I ingested was so censored and so limited I didn’t have as wide of a range of exposure as I do now. There is a little part of it that makes it more exciting, in a way.
You get a chance to do it over again!
Yeah, yeah! So, how I got back into it: Tara is my sister. We made the videos to make fun of ourselves for our own emo phases. The videos were my idea, I convinced her to play along. After my emo phase from 12-14 I started getting more into punk. After I got into AFI, I started going back and listening to their older [heavier] albums, but to go from Sing the Sorrow to like, the Casualties and Rancid, especially when you’re fifteen...it’s embarrassing. You start to become a little embarrassed at what you used to be like.
So, I wanted some sort of career in comedy, YouTube was new, I’d spent some time on 4Chan, I was familiar with trolling. I wanted to troll people, so I convinced Tara to create these characters that made fun of our former selves. At the time, even though we weren’t emo, we still had our fair share of mental health problems; I’ve been depressed and anxious for as long as I can remember.
After Tara and I stopped filming together, we went off to college, we started doing these rock-outs in the car. We only go to see each other once a year, and it started out as a joke, like, remember those videos we used to make, wanna scream along to Good Charlotte together? So that started out as a joke, and it became one of those things that I started doing on my own as a form of comfort, just putting on the music and listening to it.
I got started again through Good Charlotte’s first two albums. Those were like a security blanket for me, and I recognized that it was so weird that I was going back to something that I had once been so ashamed of. When I was 21, 22, I had this car that only had a cassette player, and I scoured Ebay until I found those Good Charlotte albums on cassette; I needed them SO badly. So I had my Good Charlotte cassettes mixed in with my Dead Kennedys, I had some Henry Rollins spoken word stuff...it was something I started listening to whenever I was anxious to calm myself down, and it was really comforting.
That gave way to me exploring other things I liked at the time, and it gradually progressed into an acceptance of “emo.” I started jokingly referring to myself as an adult emo around 2016, and it wasn’t until 2018 that I started to embrace it. I guess the simplest way to explain it would be that I went through an emo phase, was super embarrassed about it, made fun of it, returned to cheesy pop-punk, and slowly grew into an adult emo. I think a lot of that just came with personal growth, just this personal acceptance that I am a very emotional person, and this is the music that I relate to.
“Emo” used to be kind of an insult.
Oh, yeah!
It’s funny now, but we all took it super seriously back then! I was definitely emo in high school, but if anybody called me that, I’d get really offended. Kids used to get really hung up on social stereotyping, but you don’t really hear people using that language anymore.
Yeah.
I remember one time, this must have been 2007, my friend told me, “Robin, you’re skinny so you could be a prep, but you’re just too weird.” and I was like...what does that mean? I know you’ve said your emo phase was more when you were younger, did you notice or take part in any of that stuff, or were the rest of high school pretty normal for you socially?
Oh, no. I was always the weird one, hands down. To give some examples: In third grade I didn’t have any friends to hang out with during recess, so I just hung out and talked with the teachers….I wanted to be a Herpetologist when I was a kid, I had a glow in the dark Albert Einstein shirt, I was bringing snakes to show and tell. I was never cool, I was never the one that people wanted to hang out with. I’d come to school on Monday and realize that like, all of the girls in class had a sleepover that weekend except for me. I just wasn’t cool, ever. I think that my emo phase, my goth phase was sort of an attempt at protecting myself- but even then, I was the first mall goth at my middle school, so I got made fun of for that.
Even when I was out of my emo phase, I turned into a weird theater kid. I spent most of my time in high school just writing, writing sketches, writing stories, doing dumb funny shit with Tara, filming videos with my friends. I didn’t have a very normal teenage experience in that I didn’t date, I didn’t go to parties, I spent a lot of time just being creative and being weird and just enjoying all of it. There was a time in college where I fell into a group of nerdy friends, and they were all cooler than me, they dressed better than me, and I thought things would be different if I shopped at Express. So, I shopped at Express, and it didn’t change anything!
Do you think that you and your sister would have received a more positive response if you were making those videos today? TikTok is popular, we have more people, more young women doing front-facing camera comedy.
Without a doubt, for so many reasons. I think that culturally, things have changed considerably. This also ties into a point about emo: Culturally, a lot of things have changed. I think that younger people are a lot more empathetic, young people are a lot more progressive. They know that you can’t make fun of someone for being gay, they know that you can’t make fun of someone for, you know, being autistic. There’s just so much more basic human decency there.
Social media as a whole was still pretty new, and especially on YouTube, it was a lot easier to hide behind this separate account and you’d get away with it, but now, youtube is owned by Google, you use Google to sign into everything, it’s a lot harder to get away with that stuff, because your account is tied to so many things. With my generation anyway, we grew up with the internet but it wasn't always there, whereas younger generations grew up with the internet and social media always being there. They were all really new and really exciting when I was a teenager, but because they’ve grown up with these things, they’ve been taught that you don’t get to be a dick to people on the internet.
Something that I’ve noticed, for example: Azer, a brief costar in our videos, uses they/them pronouns. In the comments section of Instagram or wherever, someone will say something about Azer and use the wrong pronouns, but someone else will reply to that comment and go “hey, just an FYI, they use they/them pronouns!” and then the other person is gonna reply and go “Shit, I didn't know, I’m so sorry!” We would not have done that on youtube in 2007.
As a whole, mental health has become less taboo to talk about. If people aren’t comfortable talking to their friends in person about their anxiety or their depression or whatever, they can still talk about it online, and I think because people talk about it online more, it normalizes it; it’s okay to have feelings, it’s okay to be an emotional person. So, that brings me back to my point, about emo being cool again.
Did your online presence extend elsewhere during that time, or was there more of a safe distance between you and others? Did you ever become close with anyone that way when you were younger?
Yeah, totally. As a not very popular child, all of a sudden being able to meet people online, that was great. I made a friend on Xanga when I was fifteen, we’re still friends, we still talk to each other every now and then….I had multiple MySpaces, I was a pretty early Facebook user. “Raven” was my only real attempt at having a channel.
Youtube was a lot different back then; you had your flash animations going around like Salad Fingers, you had people uploading their own little skits. Did you have any favorites, as someone making your own content?
I remember YouTube in 2005, I discovered that there were old music videos there. I didn’t have cable growing up, my media was really censored. When I was fifteen or so I found music videos on there, and that was what really stuck out to me as being like, the most magical thing. There was a period of my life in 2005 where I would watch the music video for the Smashing Pumpkins song “Today,” every day before school.
That’s a good start, that’s a good one.
Yeah, yeah! I had like, the lyrics printed out and on my wall. I was talking to one of my friends about this, she was mentioning how YouTube was such a different place back then. The few sketches we could think of were all produced by men. A question she asked me was, “Who was the first woman you saw on youtube being genuinely funny?” We noticed that in those early days, if women were on youtube, they were being laughed at, not laughed with.
Videos that went viral at the time, they were reinforcing that stereotype that women are emotional, and this is why it’s so funny. An example that we thought of was the Cara Cunningham “leave Britney alone” video. We realized that it got so much traction because here was a person being emotional, and also queer, and not being straight was a bigger thing then, too. So we talked a lot about how homophobia and misogyny led to “leave britney alone.”
I was looking back through some of those comments, and I know you’ve probably talked about this a lot- but people were really concerned with you being “cringe”. It seems like most of the people who left nasty comments were also the ones who didn’t get the joke, and even then, they were weirdly angry about the idea of a couple of goth kids goofing off in front of the camera. What is so bad about being cringe? Is there anything else embarrassing you did as a teenager outside of youtube?
I don’t consider my youtube channel embarrassing. I was doing it as a joke, I was doing it to troll people. I think the cringe comments came a little bit later. The initial comments we got were a lot more aggressive. Do I think things would be different today? Yes, I do. I think that some people really didn’t...there were definitely some people who got the joke. We got a number of comments from people who were like, oh my god, you guys are hilarious, this is comedy...The comments that I remember, though, before that, there were a lot that were unnecessarily violent. There were a ton of comments telling us to kill ourselves, that we should have been aborted, Azer was subjected to so much homophobia. I think that because we were young people- and I looked considerably younger than I was- there was also ageism coming into play. Kids aren’t really given an opportunity to be funny unless they’re being funny for other kids.
I think a lot of that has changed, but back then, people saw those videos, I’ve got a natural intensity, so they assumed. I knew what to do and say to piss people off, and it worked! I was expecting comments more along the lines of, oh my god, ya’ll are posers, you call yourselves goth but you listen to Simple Plan. Instead, people saw young women...at the time, emo kids, alt kids, mall goths, they were everyone’s punchline. You combine all of these things, and it elicited something really vile and hateful from so many people. It was one of the reasons why Tara and I wanted to keep everything a secret for as long as possible.
There’s a difference between “your jokes aren’t funny” and “oh my god, you are everything that’s wrong with society, go kill yourself you fat, ugly bitch,” and we were getting those comments every single day. What started out as something funny at first, over the course of ten to twelve years, if you’re exposed to that, it starts to become more personal.
A large part of why we didn’t want to come forward was because we stopped reading the comments a long time ago. We didn’t pay attention because we didn’t want to see that shit again. I only came out in the first place because people had begun to link Raven to my dominatrix persona, Petra. Over the past few years, people would approach me and ask me if I was her, but because I made my character so much younger than I was, it was easy for me to deny it.
That’s got to be complicated, that makes sense.
Yeah, so for the past twelve years or so, I was under the impression that we had created something that I personally thought was hilarious, but nobody thought was funny at all. Because the comments were so negative, I just assumed that if anyone linked the two, it would be like 2008 youtube all over again, that my work accounts would be spammed with all of this shit. Why would I allow any of that to permeate this persona that I’ve crafted for work- a persona that’s supposed to be this, like, all-powerful woman?
I assumed that coming forward would be really bad for business. I was expecting to have to lock down social media until everything blew over. Towards the end of December 2020, there had been this sort of mystery surrounding Tara and Raven, this sort of internet manhunt trying to find out who we were. I was worried that if I didn’t out myself, that somebody would dox me in ways that were really damaging to me, but they wouldn’t have known what they were doing, because they were so caught up in that excitement and wanted to get that pat on the back. So, I came out as a preventative measure. I had no idea that I would be this well received, I had no idea that people liked the videos, that they thought I was funny.
For the past twelve years I thought I’d created something that I thought was really funny, but nobody else thought was funny, and they hated it so much that they thought I should kill myself because of it! To be met with all of this positivity and interest and be told that people have liked my videos for years and they’ve thought I was funny for years, that’s such a weird mindfuck.
I think what’s so endearing- I hadn’t seen the other videos before, what always got me about the New Years’ video- you almost can’t tell if it’s a joke or not, and I’ve always enjoyed it because we were like that. We were all like that at one point, and then we started to get embarrassed. I’m glad they’re still up, they’re nice to look back on.
That’s really good to hear, I never thought that people found them so relatable. It’s been really cool to hear stuff about this, and to hear that people really related to my characters who were based on me, and who I used to be. It’s comforting.
In a lot of those videos you two address those people in character when you refer to “the haters.” Did it help the two of you navigate it, was it helpful to laugh at it, or was it just part of the script?
Truthfully, we were doing it because I was trying to incite some sort of flame war. I was trying to troll these people back! I wanted the videos to go viral, I even put them on 4Chan and I was like, “Hey, get a load of these guys, how embarrassing! Look at these nerds, trying to pretend that they’re goth!” The people who we addressed [in the videos] were real people. This was before the comments started to leave the damage that they did, I’d see them and I’d go “Tara, we gotta reply, we gotta make them even more mad, this is what we gotta say…”
One of my favorites is the rickroll video, you really can’t get more 2008 than that. Whose idea was it to make that video?
4Chan was very upset about the Ashley Tisdale cover. 4Chan was super pissed about the Ashley Tisdale cover. I went to Tara and I said, “Look, this is a big deal on the internet right now, we gotta do it, just trust me,” and so we did. I definitely don’t understand how people saw that and still thought our videos were real.
What’s a trend from the 2000s that you love and would want to come back?
This is what I want: I want the original hot topic back. I want Hot Topic to be scary again, I want the old font, I want it to look like a cave when you enter, the old Hot Topic smell. I want parents to still be afraid of Hot Topic. Did you ever write on your jeans in Sharpie, or was that just me?
I wrote on my shoes in Sharpie a lot.
I wrote on my shoes and my jeans in sharpie, but- truthfully, I want the old Hot Topic back.
True or false: Have you ever written fan fiction?
No, I have never written fan fiction.
Damn.
That was something that I just...I never did.
You know, that’s probably...that’s good. Good for you.
You can keep this one PG-13, but: What’s the funniest or strangest thing someone has said to you within the context of work?
I’m so desensitized to my job that I forget that a lot of things are shocking to people. With the video I made at the beginning of the month, I just ended it with “Yeah, I’m a professional dominatrix” because they’d flooded my work accounts already, it was old news. I forgot that it’s a very exciting thing to a lot of people. I got so many comments after releasing that like, “What the fuck did she just say in the last second of the video?!” I thought they were excited about the old footage I was going to release, but they were really excited about my work….I forget that things that are funny to me are super shocking to other people.
Someone I have an arrangement with, he’s this punk dude, and I know that punks and people who are really into music are very proud of their tastes in music, they’re very proud of the fact that they have a good taste in music, and I know these things because I am one of those people. I once wrote in candle wax, “I <3 KID ROCK” on his back. It took up his whole back, and I took a bunch of pictures, and he died, it was so fucking funny. He was like, “How could you?!”
See, that’s funny! That sort of leads into my next question: Do you think there’s any connection between who you were as a young person making those videos and the work you do now, in terms of creativity and being able to laugh at yourself?
Yes and no. There are similarities, that mostly stem from having a psychological understanding of people, and being able to improvise. The New Years’ Eve video was probably the one that was the least improvised. For the most part, things were improvised, and we knew we could do really ridiculous shit and not break character.
Because of the trolling, there was the psychology of knowing how to get under people’s skin. With being a dominatrix, for example: everything is so individualized, you have to be good at honing in on those things really quickly, you have to get inside their head. Like with trolling people, you have to pick up really quickly on where they’re coming from, and even if you think you know, you might not actually know. You just have to have that awareness of other people and where other people’s thoughts come from. There’s definitely some crossover between the two personas. I definitely love laughing at people and cracking dumb jokes. Using comedy to mindfuck people is great.
You mentioned on Instagram that you want to do more comedy writing. What are some of your ideas? Do you want to make more videos, or try something different? Do you even know?
I really don’t know at this point, because again, this whole reception has been so unexpected. I came out two weeks ago, and I really wasn’t expecting any of this at all! I was going into it with the expectation of things going poorly, I would retreat into my online hermit cave and wait for it to blow over. For so long, I’ve subconsciously not given myself permission to explore these interests. The YouTube comments definitely had a lot to do with it, but as I got older, the stigma that came with being a sex worker got in the way.
I signed up for improv classes in 2016 and dropped out because all of these questions came up. what happens if someone recognizes me....it raised all of these weird questions that I didn’t have an answer for. People still lose their jobs for this stuff, you know? “It doesn’t matter how funny I am because I’m not presentable.” I never gave myself permission, but now I’m realizing that maybe I can make this work.
All of that has been very liberating, and I’m very privileged that I can say that, because most of the time, that is not the case for sex workers. People would ask me what I would do instead, and now all of a sudden I’m getting permission from all of these people that I can do that now. I want to try everything! I’ve got so many things that I want to explore now.
I feel like nowadays people are more receptive to the weird. Eric Andre gets naked every single time he performs. He gets naked, and that’s his thing, that’s what he does.
Yeah! Yeah, and that’s really exciting.
Do you think that, between navigating youtube and your work, is there sort of a spot for girls to be weird online? Are there any positives at all?
Yeah, and like I said earlier, there will always be people who are going to be dicks. I’m very protective of young people, it does bother me that young women, young people period can still be subjected to so much cruelty. I think that things are changing- even if there is still that cruelty, women and nonbinary, queer folks, people who aren’t straight, white cis males, will be subjected to much more scrutiny online, but I think that things have changed a lot since 2007, and that there is more of a place for people to be weird.
