EMO Girl

• 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.
In the wake of this success, many emo bands were signed to major record labels and the style became a marketable product. Dreamworks Records senior A&R representative Luke Wood remarked that "The industry really does look at emo as the new raprock, or the new grunge. I don't think that anyone is listening to the music that's being made—they're thinking of how they're going to take advantage of the sound's popularity at retail." The depoliticized nature of emo, coupled with its catchy music and accessible themes, gave it a broad appeal to young mainstream audiences.