But still there is somthing that makes these bands emo...
If it was Emo in the 80' so is it emo in the 21 century..
The thing that still makes them 'Emo' is the music industry trying to cash in on a natural outcropping of the teeny-bopper pop-punk craze of the last 6 or 7 years.
To be completely anally-retentive about this, what was originally called Emo - short for 'Emotive Hardcore', later shortened to 'Emocore' and then finally to 'Emo' - didn't actually try to distinguish themselves from the larger Post-Hardcore genre (a term which is now unfortunately used to describe any bland rock band with dubious punk lineage that isn't hard enough to be nü-metal but too hard to be lumped into either pop-punk or modern 'emo'), but the fans did, which is why there isn't much in the way of stylistic differences between the way the two are played, at least musically. At this stage (and when it crossbred backwards with the continuing Hardcore scene - or was it Thrash, I can't remember - to produce the original 'screamo' genre around the early 90s) it was still completely a Punk family member.
Sometime in the mid 90s, bands that were influenced by that original wave started getting mainstream exposure. However, overall their roots laid firmly in the Alternative Pop/Rock groundwork that Grunge and much of the 'Indie' scene at the time came from - the influence from the older Emo bands was not as evident as from the other sources. Lyrically, though, it also displayed a bit more angsty-ness (after all, in the early-to-mid 90s Grunge and Post-Grunge were king and angst was almost a sure bet to get recognition). Generally this mid-90s wave could be called Post-Emo Indie Rock. They do tend to have a more overt similarity to stuff that Rites Of Spring or whatnot did (even if they did soften it up a lot), but their success is almost completely responsible for the crap we have to shovel through now (actually, it was the fact that this is what Jimmy Eat World
was - key word here - in the 90s, but they stripped 99% of that out for
Bleed American, which ended up propelling them into the pop charts and people didn't stop calling them Emo despite the almost complete absence of the style there at all - that is actually how people justify calling a lot of modern bands 'emo' when they really aren't).
It was also that mid 90s wave that appealed to hipsters, and ended up producing the 'Emo kid' image, even if the style and fashion didn't catch into mainstream sensibility for another long while.
