I was going to go emo

[Ryth]

To be emo you must accept yourself as part of the culture. If you happen to listen to emo music and wear clothes normally associated with the subculture, you're not emo, you're just that way. Whatever.

Emo music is always keeping in the theme of an unhappy or melancholy attitude or being in a situation that would make one so. Emo also has it's own sound (not all music is emo for it doesn't keep some of this sound) influenced by hardcore punk (emo I believe has influenced genres such as screamo, pop-punk, and post-hardcore, as well as others). Emo is melodramatic and overly emotional and the misconception is that it is associated with self-harm. This idea is used a lot, but is not a required theme of emo music.

Bands such as Sunny Day Real Estate and Texas Is The Reason had put forth an indie rock style to Emo music, that's why they're occasionally confused (Death Cab For Cutie is not emo).

Emo has apparently made the effect that any emotion means you're emo. That's sad because not only is it is trivializing a condition, depression, but it makes everything else have to heartless or shallow or be deemed emo. Emo is sad (edit: xD).

I'm sure I'm making no sense. Regardless, some emo bands are as follows:

Taking Back Sunday
Rites Of Spring
Embrace
One Last Wish
Beefeater
Gray Matter
Fire Party
Moss Icon
Hawthorne Heights
Jimmy Eat World
AFI
Panic! At The Disco

And My Chemical Romance as an emo band I believe is heavily disputed, but I think it is post-hardcore. So emo influences are certainly not invisible.

Also, I consider Gothica to be dead. Most Goths I know can't even tell me what Romanticism or neo-romanticism is.

Anyway, social stereotypes suck, up with the Individual. Eventually the kids will grow out of this style, like all kids do.