Angst in the context of "The Scream"

Existentialism is a family of philosophical views and inquiry that explore the human individual's struggle to lead an authentic life despite the apparent absurdity or incomprehensibility of existence. In examining meaning, purpose, and value, existentialist thought often includes concepts such as existential crises, angst, courage, and freedom.

Existentialism is associated with several 19th- and 20th-century European philosophers who shared an emphasis on the human subject, despite often profound differences in thought. Among the 19th-century figures now associated with existentialism are philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, all of whom critiqued rationalism and concerned themselves with the problem of meaning. The word existentialism, however, was not coined until the mid 20th century, during which it became most associated with contemporaneous philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Paul Tillich, and more controversially Albert Camus.

Emo (/ˈiːmoʊ/ EE-moh) is a genre of rock music that combines musical characteristics of hardcore punk with emotional, often confessional lyrics. It emerged as a style of hardcore punk and post-hardcore from the mid-1980s Washington, D.C., hardcore scene, where it was known as emotional hardcore or emocore. The bands Rites of Spring and Embrace, among others, pioneered the genre. In the early-to-mid 1990s, emo was adopted and reinvented by alternative rock, indie rock, punk rock, and pop-punk bands, including Sunny Day Real Estate, Jawbreaker, Cap'n Jazz, Mineral, and Jimmy Eat World. By the mid-1990s, Braid, the Promise Ring, American Football, and the Get Up Kids emerged from Midwest emo, and several independent record labels began to specialize in the genre. Meanwhile, screamo, a more aggressive style of emo using screamed vocals, also emerged, pioneered by the San Diego bands Heroin and Antioch Arrow. Screamo achieved mainstream success in the 2000s with bands like Hawthorne Heights, Silverstein, Story of the Year, Thursday, the Used, and Underoath.

The emo subculture signifies a specific relationship between fans and artists and certain aspects of fashion, culture, and behavior. Emo fashion includes skinny jeans, black eyeliner, tight t-shirts with band names, studded belts, and flat, straight, jet-black hair with long bangs. Since the early-to-mid 2000s, fans of emo music who dress like this are referred to as "emo kids" or "emos". The emo subculture was stereotypically associated with social alienation, sensitivity, misanthropy, introversion, and angst. Purported links to depression, self-harm, and suicide, combined with its rise in popularity in the early 2000s, inspired a backlash against emo, with some bands, including My Chemical Romance and Panic! at the Disco, rejecting the emo label because of the social stigma and controversy surrounding it. There has long been controversy over which bands are labeled "emo", especially for bands that started outside traditional emo scenes; a viral website, Is This Band Emo?, was created to address one fan's opinion on this question. Emo and its subgenre emo pop entered mainstream culture in the early 2000s with the success of Jimmy Eat World and Dashboard Confessional, and many artists signed contracts with major record labels. Bands such as My Chemical Romance, AFI, Fall Out Boy, and the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus continued the genre's popularity during the rest of the decade.

In medicine, malaise is a feeling of general discomfort, uneasiness or lack of wellbeing and often the first sign of an infection or other disease. It is considered a vague term – describing the state of simply not feeling well. The word has existed in French since at least the 12th century.

The term is often used figuratively in other contexts, in addition to its meaning as a general state of angst or melancholia.

Anguish (from the Latin angustia "distress") is "extreme unhappiness caused by physical or mental suffering." The feeling of anguish is typically preceded by a tragedy or event that has a profound meaning to the being in question. Anguish can be felt physically or mentally (often referred to as emotional distress).

Anguish is also a term used in philosophy, often as a synonym for angst. It is a paramount feature of existentialist philosophy, in which anguish is often understood as the experience of an utterly free being in a world with zero absolutes (existential despair). In the theology of Søren Kierkegaard, it refers to a being with total free will who is in a constant state of spiritual fear in the face of their unlimited freedom.

Marshall Bruce Mathers III (born October 17, 1972), known professionally as Eminem, is an American rapper, songwriter, and record producer. Widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential rappers of all time, he is often credited with popularizing hip-hop in Middle America and breaking down racial barriers for the acceptance of white rappers in popular music. While much of his transgressive work during the late 1990s and early 2000s made him a controversial figure, Eminem has become a representation of popular angst of lower income America and is noted for his conscious lyrics, with political criticism and social commentary, and skilled rap flow.

After the release of his debut album Infinite (1996) and the extended play Slim Shady EP (1997), Eminem signed with Dr. Dre's Aftermath Entertainment and subsequently achieved mainstream popularity in 1999 with The Slim Shady LP. His next two releases, The Marshall Mathers LP (2000) and The Eminem Show (2002), became worldwide successes. Each sold over one million copies in a single week, with the latter being the best-selling album worldwide of 2002 and the best selling hip-hop album of all time. Following the release of Encore (2004), Eminem took a hiatus due in part to struggles with prescription drug addiction. He later returned to the music industry with the releases of Relapse (2009) and Recovery (2010), the latter becoming the best-selling album worldwide of 2010. Each of his subsequent releases—The Marshall Mathers LP 2 (2013), Revival (2017), Kamikaze (2018), Music to Be Murdered By (2020), and The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce) (2024)—have debuted atop the US Billboard 200 chart.

"The Last Messiah" (Norwegian: "Den sidste Messias") is a 1933 essay by the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe. One of his most significant works, this approximately 10-page-long essay would later be expanded upon in Zapffe's book On the Tragic, and, as a theory, describes a reinterpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche's Übermensch. Zapffe believed that existential crisis or angst in humanity was the result of an overly evolved intellect, and that people overcome this by "artificially limiting the content of consciousness".