EMO Girl

• Reinvention: early 1990s
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."