A Look Back At When Fall Out Boy Was My Favorite Band
When I was in college, for awhile at least, my favorite band was Fall Out Boy. I wouldn’t have admitted it to you then, because they were too mainstream, or poseurish, or something, for any twenty-something self-respecting forward-thinking rabble-rousing (why not?) college student to love. But I loved their music. Girls and the way they treated me or I treated them seemed like the most important thing in the world at the time. I wasn’t perfect, but I at that point in relationships, I was always really nice to the point of often being a pushover. Fall Out Boy talked about being mean. Not evil, but having that sense of self before eternal perfect love that other bands I listened to at the time—like The Ataris or Yellowcard (cringe)—were not singing about. I thought Pete Wentz’s lyrics were incredibly clever and intelligent. Now I see that they are more reference-y and self aware than incredibly clever and intelligent—but still so much more substantial than most of the other bands I listened to.
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The lyrics weren’t the problem though. Fall Out Boy was a pop band that somehow got slotted in as the Nirvana of Emo. While their music was way too much fun to be taken too seriously by the college radio set, young America (teenagers) found a very very listenable band, with a nonthreatening-and-very-appealing rocker aesthetic and grabbed on tight.
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Until they were too popular, I pledged my Fall Out Boy allegiance pretty hard. If you put all of my AIM away messages together you probably could have recreated their lyric liner notes. I saw them live one Halloween and had a wonderful time. At some point though, for the image I was trying to convey, it was not cool for me to like Fall Out Boy. So as more albums came out (and generally improved) I listened in my car and in my headphones. As far as the world knew, I had moved on to newer, cooler music. Hello, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!
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But now, seven years later, Fall Out Boy has stuck with me. By no means do I love them or consider them a favorite band anymore, or I would really consider to like. I go through long periods of time where I don’t listen to them. But every, say six months or so, I’ll be picking music while I’m stretching to go for a run. I’ll choose a Fall Out Boy album, generally Infinity on High or Folie A Deux—their poppiest and last two albums.
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Trying to block out muscle fatigue and stinging lungs while I run up and down Portland’s west hills, I focus on Fall Out Boy. And where almost every other band I listened to during the same time period in my life is almost insufferable at this point, Fall Out Boy holds up wonderfully well every time! As I said, the lyrics don’t seem as clever anymore, but they also don’t seem overwrought—like they probably should. They just kind of come off as tongue in cheek—a sort of sense that they are singing the words you know you shouldn’t say, but it’s ok because they know how to present them in a way that’s veiled and not too self-serious.
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And the music is just good pop music. The hooks are huge—at their worst, aren’t all of these Fall Out Boy songs at least as good as anything Bon Jovi or Journey did? At their best, Fall Out Boy just gives in to their stupid dance music sensibilities. You forget that this is supposed to be rock and realize that, instruments aside, the songs are more like a Lady Gaga or Rihanna hit.
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Fall Out Boy looks like a rock band. Guitars, bass, drums. Long hair, fitted jeans, faded t-shirts. Swap one of those guitars for a synth and aren’t they lumped in more appropriately with Chromeo and LCD Soundsystem? Fall Out Boy’s been unfairly derided. Culture has them as a less-substantial Blink 182, but we should be looking at them, musically, more as peers to the the previously mentioned pop queens.
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I think history will be kind to Fall Out Boy. Someday they’ll be the B-52s of the early to mid 2000s. Someday at the karaoke bar we’ll sing Hum Hallelujah just as excitedly as we sing Rock Lobster today.
