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Notes -
I'm aware of the connection between pop punk and emo in the '00s – I didn't mean to make it sound like I considered them wholly distinct genres. In the context of the '00s I would say most emo bands were pop punk, but not all pop punk bands were emo. Bands like Blink-182 are a great example of how ambiguous it can get. There was also some overlap between indie rock and emo, to make things even more difficult.
This is actually a little hard to quantify – I looked at Billboard charts from this era, but most of these acts never charted that high. Journalists certainly commented on the decline of nu metal in the early '00s. My perception at the time (I was a teenager in those years) was that there was a sharp decline in the number of white boy dreadlocks post-2001, and a marked rise in skinny jeans and guys wearing eye liner. My Chemical Romance, AFI, Fallout Boy... also the rise of metalcore took place during that period. None of this is to say that pop punk doesn't predate that period (it absolutely does), just that when nu metal collapsed, a specific kind of pop punk moved in to fill the "edgy teen rock" space in radio programming.
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