The original emo band. Guy Picciotto, who later joined Fugazi, sings on their self-titled album and the EP All Through A Life (You can get their full discography on a CD, it's called End on End, from dischord.com). Only together for about a year and a half. Absolutely bloody brilliant band.

A truely talented punk rock band formed in 1984 in Washington DC. They are credited with defining "emo".

By this I mean the true and original emo. Not the emo we all know of now days as Hawthorne Heights and Dashboard Confessional, where cutting wrists and wearing eyeliner is the main theme.

When Rites Of Spring banded, the main music at the time was punk rock. But Rites Of Spring took punk music a step further by integrating love into their lyrics. They wrote love songs that still had the punk flare if the '80s in them. Along with highly emotional performances that were more emotional than most bands at the time. And that is what emo really is. A musical genre. Not wearing girl pants and thinking you're life is so miserable.

The word emo supposedly came from the word emocore, which was short for the genre that the Rites Of Spring fit into: Emotional Hardcore. Throughout the '80s and early '90s, that is all the word emo was. But then came the 2000s, and the word emo was slowly becoming a new word with a completely different definition. Modern mainstream bands were inspired by the past emo musical genre. They played it in their own way while changing it. Then came the emo kids. The emo kids usually followed and listened to the newer bands that took after and raped the old emo. A general emo kid consisted of the follow...