EMO Girl

As the ideals of the Washington, D.C. emo movement spread across the United States, many bands in numerous local scenes began to emulate the sound as a way to marry the intensity of hardcore with the complex emotions associated with growing older. The style combined the fatalism, theatricality, and outsiderness of The Smiths with the uncompromising and dramatic worldview of hardcore. Although the bands were numerous and the locales varied, the aesthetics of emocore in the late 1980s remained more or less the same: "over-the-top lyrics about feelings wedded to dramatic but decidedly punk music." However, in the early 1990s, several new bands reinvented the emo style and carried its core characteristic, the intimacy between bands and fans, into the new decade. Chief among these were Jawbreaker and Sunny Day Real Estate, both of whom fostered cult followings, recontextualized the word "emo", and brought it a step closer to the mainstream. According to Andy Greenwald:
Sunny Day Real Estate was emo's head and Jawbreaker its busted gut—the two overlapped in the heart, then broke up before they made it big. Each had a lasting impact on the world of independent music. The bands shared little else but fans, and yet somehow the combination of the two lays down a fairly effective blueprint for everything that was labeled emo for the next decade.
In the wake of the 1991 success of Nirvana's Nevermind, underground music and subcultures in the United States became big business. New distribution networks emerged, touring routes were codified, and regional and independent acts were able to access the national stage. Teenagers across the country declared themselves fans of independent music, and being punk became mainstream. In this new musical climate, the aesthetics of emo expanded into the mainstream and altered the way the music was perceived: "Punk rock no-nos like the cult of personality and artistic abstraction suddenly become de rigueur", says Greenwald. "If one definition of emo has always been music that felt like a secret, Jawbreaker and Sunny Day Real Estate were cast in the rolls of the biggest gossips of all, reigning as the largest influences on every emo band that came after them."
Jawbreaker has been referred to as "the Rosetta Stone of contemporary emo". Emerging from the San Francisco punk rock scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s, their songwriting combined the heft of hardcore with pop punk sensibilities and the tortured artistry of mid-1980s emocore. Singer/guitarist Blake Schwarzenbach focused his lyrics on topics that were personal, immediate, and lived, often lifting them directly from his journal. Though they were often obscure and cloaked in metaphors, their specificity to Schwarzenbach's own concerns gave the words a bitterness and frustration that made them universal and magnetic to audiences. Schwarzenbach became emo's first idol as listeners related to the singer more than the songs themselves. Jawbreaker's 1994 album 24 Hour Revenge Therapy became their most-loved amongst fans and is a touchstone of mid-1990s emo. The band signed to major label Geffen Records and toured with Nirvana and Green Day, but their 1995 album Dear You sold poorly and they broke up soon after, with Schwarzenbach later forming Jets to Brazil. Their influence lived on, however, through later successful emo and pop punk bands openly indebted to Jawbreaker's sound.