EMO Girl

Independent label Vagrant Records was behind several successful emo acts of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Get Up Kids had sold over 15,000 copies of their debut album Four Minute Mile (1997) before signing to Vagrant, who promoted the band aggressively and put them on tours opening for big-name acts like Green Day and Weezer. Their 1999 album Something to Write Home About was an independent success, reaching #31 on Billboard's Top Heatseekers chart. Vagrant signed and released albums by a number of other emo and emo-related acts over the next two years, including The Anniversary, Reggie and the Full Effect, The New Amsterdams, Alkaline Trio, Saves the Day, Dashboard Confessional, Hey Mercedes, and Hot Rod Circuit. Saves the Day had built a large following on the east coast and sold almost 50,000 copies of their second album Through Being Cool (1999) before signing to Vagrant and releasing Stay What You Are (2001), which sold 15,000 copies in its first week, reached #100 on the Billboard 200, and went on to sell over 200,000 copies. In the summer of 2001 Vagrant organized a national tour featuring every band on the label, sponsored by corporations such as Microsoft and Coca-Cola. This populist approach and the use of the internet as a marketing tool helped Vagrant become one of the country's most successful independent labels and also helped to popularize the term "emo". According Greenwald, "More than any other event, it was Vagrant America that defined emo to masses—mainly because it had the gumption to hit the road and bring it to them."
• Mainstream popularity: 2000s
Emo broke into the mainstream media in the summer of 2002 with a number of notable events: Jimmy Eat World's Bleed American album went platinum on the strength of "The Middle", which reached #1 on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart. Dashboard Confessional reached #22 on the same chart with "Screaming Infidelities" from their Vagrant Records debut The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most, which was #5 on Independent Albums, and became the first non-platinum-selling artist to record an episode of MTV Unplugged (the resultant live album itself was a #1 Independent Album in 2003 and quickly went platinum). New Found Glory's album Sticks and Stones debuted at #4 on the Billboard 200. Saves the Day toured with Green Day, Blink-182, and Weezer, playing large arenas such as Madison Square Garden, and by the end of the year had performed on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, appeared on the cover of Alternative Press, and had music videos for "At Your Funeral" and "Freakish" in heavy rotation on MTV2. Articles on Vagrant Records were published in Time and Newsweek, while the word "emo" began appearing on numerous magazine covers and became a catchall term for any music outside of mainstream pop. Andy Greenwald attributes emo's sudden explosion into the mainstream to media outlets looking for the "next big thing" in the wake of the September 11 attacks:
The media business, so desperate for its self-obsessed, post-9/11 predictions of a return to austerity and the death of irony to come true, had found its next big thing. But it was barely a "thing," because no one had heard of it, and those who had couldn't define it. Despite the fact that the hedonistic, materialistic hip-hop of Nelly was still dominating the charts, magazine readers in the summer of '02 were informed that the nation was deep in an introverted healing process, and the way it was healing was by wearing thick black glasses and vintage striped shirts. Emo, we were told, would heal us all through fashion.