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The emocore label quickly spread around the Washington, D.C. punk scene and became attached to many of the bands associated with MacKaye's Dischord Records label.[9] Although many of these bands simultaneously rejected the term, it stuck nonetheless. Scene veteran Jenny Toomey has recalled that The only people who used it at first were the ones that were jealous over how big and fanatical a scene it was. [Rites of Spring] existed well before the term did and they hated it. But there was this weird moment, like when people started calling music 'grunge,' where you were using the term even though you hated it. [13]

The Washington, D.C. emo scene lasted only a few years. By 1986 most of the major bands of the movement—including Rites of Spring, Embrace, Gray Matter, and Beefeater—had broken up.[14] Even so, the ideas and aesthetics originating from the scene spread quickly across the country via a network of homemade zines, vinyl records, and hearsay.[15] According to Greenwald, the Washington, D.C. scene laid the groundwork for all subsequent incarnations of emo:

What had happened in D.C. in the mid-eighties—the shift from anger to action, from extroverted rage to internal turmoil, from an individualized mass to a mass of individuals—was in many ways a test case for the transformation of the national punk scene over the next two decades. The imagery, the power of the music, the way people responded to it, and the way the bands burned out instead of fading away—all have their origins in those first few performances by Rites of Spring. The roots of emo were laid, however unintentionally, by fifty or so people in the nation's capital. And in some ways, it was never as good and surely never as pure again. Certainly, the Washington scene was the only time emocore had any consensus definition as a genre.[16]

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.[18] The style combined the fatalism, theatricality, and outsiderness of The Smiths with the uncompromising and dramatic worldview of hardcore.[18] 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. [18] 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.[19] 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.[19] According to Andy Greenwald: