Goths are more real than emos. One thing I do when I'm getting food at the local mall is I people watch and the difference between emos and goths is that emos are people that don't have the psychological scars or angst needed to be goth. The goths have a reason to be depressed, the emos are just overdramatic.
Agreed, at least to a point. One doesn't necessarily need to be psychologically scarred to be Goth, but that's a minor issue.
The bigger difference is that Goths are introspective and intellectual in their outlook on things, whereas 'Emo' kids are pretty much doing it for the attention. Which is why they come off as so annoying.
However, there is a lot of misinformation out there regarding 'Emo' stuff. Mainly because the term means nothing anymore. It's a misappropriated term. The music of that subculture is not Emo. The fashion look is not Emo. In other words, it's so completely divorced from its origins in such a way it would be like me looking at a fish fillet and calling it a hamburger.
I will now fully explain what I mean here. Lots of genre stuff ahead. I feel it's easier to describe these things as an outcome of the music side, as that is the primary instigator in all this (much as it is with media perceptions of Goths).
'Emo' as a music style and as a subculture originated way way back in the 1980s [secret government employees had nothing to do with it, though...heh heh, nevermind], as a short-shorthand for Emotive Hardcore (which was shortened to Emocore and finally to Emo), a subgenre of Punk that itself had close ties to the Post-Hardcore scene - I mean
real Post-Hardcore here; that term has undergone the same media raping as Emo has. Bands like Rites of Spring and Fugazi are often credited as being the earliest to have that label applied to them, and likewise, most of the earliest 'Emo' bands are also generally Post-Hardcore acts as well (although the reverse isn't true at all - Hüsker Dü is not even remotely Emo, although it would be fairly accurate to call them Post-Hardcore). And like I mentioned, they are genuinely part of the Punk family of genres, so they actually
sound like it. In the early 90s a more aggressive form emerged where most of the lyrics were screamed over the music, hence the term Screamo (again, this is not related to bands nowadays that are called that).
In the 90s, a division came between the early group and a newer one that had sprung up. This newer group was popular among the college-age hipster crowd, and consisted of bands like Sunny Day Real Estate and Jimmy Eat World (still in their early days here). These acts were inspired by the original Emotive Hardcore stuff, but as they were also Post-Grunge-ish acts and involved in the larger Indie scene, the proper term is actually Post-Emo Indie Rock or some derivative therein*. And that's where this gets hairy.
*this is what I'll be referring to the 90s scene as; I'm guessing it's more of a term used in retrospect, and that back then it was also just simply referred to as 'Emo' by those involved, with those dissenting being the ones from the early crowd, which were eventually far less numerous.
The subculture that grew up around that new mutation was still introspective and intellectualized about this, but their appearance was still pretty much in line with your standard Grunge fan - flannel, jeans, although this is where the obsession with black horn-rimmed glasses and hackeysacks probably came from. This form of the music and subculture never reached mainstream popularity, and while it
does still exist, it's not very visible anymore. At one time it was semi-notable, but that time was gone by about 1999.
In the early 00s, as Post-Grunge was starting to become a genre on life support, the rise of Pop-Punk and the continuing dominance of Nü-Metal created a hole that needed to be filled. In comes Jimmy Eat World with
Bleed American (the album that was renamed to a self-titled in the wake of 9/11 but had its original title restored on the reissue put out this past April or May) - which is nothing like their previous material AT ALL. With that album they gained a lot of mainstream success, but the sound was pretty much standard AOR-esque alternative rock. However, because of the fact that they were previously associated with the Post-Emo scene in the 90s, the 'Emo' tag stuck with them. This caused the music media to incorrectly start labeling bands that sounded like or toured simultaneously with post-
Bleed American Jimmy Eat World as Emo, a misappropriation like the one they had pulled with the perception of Goth being construed of Marilyn Manson and Korn fans that shop at Hot Topic (the proper term for them being mallgoth or faux goth depending on who you ask - that's giving it too much credit, IMO; as far as I'm concerned, they shouldn't be called anything with 'goth' in it because they aren't in the slightest). Over time, this gradually included bands that mixed in the 'I hate my life, I hate my parents, I hate my friends, and I even hate my cat' mentality that a lot of Nü-Metal had forced into the mainstream with the aforementioned AOR-like rock. Kind of like saying - it sounds like Pop-Punk mixed with some Nickelback with the lyrical themes of any freakin' band that plays at Ozzfest. Somewhere in here you could also point to when Dashboard Confessional and Something Corporate got popular, since their lyrics were more emotionally-charged than the typical Pop-Punk at the time (and they at least are partially responsible for the music with nasally vocals associated with O.C.-spawned poor-little-rich-white-trash melodrama found in the mainstream now; and yes, I mean that with as much snarkiness as I can muster).
Due to the 80s retro revival look that was gaining popularity in the Pop-Punk crowd, this merged with it and went way overboard, creating the current 'Emo' fashion style of bright neon colors against black, overtight jeans, etc. At this point I don't even acknowledge the look or music as Emo at all. And partially due to the themes gleaned from Nü-Metal, which by 2004 was pretty much dying in the mainstream, and partially due to the superficial anti-conformity of the Pop-Punk scene, you get the whiny, cutting-prone, attention-starved 'Emo kid' mentality as it exists today.
The apathy toward it, however, and the usage of the term 'Emo' as a slur toward anything remotely expressive is again a semi-product of the Nü-Metal scene, although this time it's the über-macho side of it, which seems like it practically exchanged the term 'gay' for 'emo' in putting something down. Pretty soon it spread to the mainstream MySpace teenybopper crowd, which is why you get people totally missing the mark on upteen million bands and people - because said teenyboppers don't know what the heck they're even talking about anymore when they use the term. This is why you can see traditional Goths getting called emo (in much the same way you see Nightwish and Within Temptation incorrectly being called Goth Rock bands), or things as ridiculous as seeing Green Day being called emo, or people being called emo for showing the least bit of emotional upset, with or without the attention-whoring, even when that upset is legitimate. In a way, it's a stark reaction to the whole 'getting in touch with your inner self' touchy-feely crap when people are all therapied out (and I'm talking from the position of someone who did have to take anti-depressants and go to therapy at a couple different times during High School - this was because of issues arising from suffering severe panic attacks in the middle of class on multiple occasions).
