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Music

Fall Out Boy, This Is Your Life

A series of Deep Ass Questions about Fall Out Boy and why they exist.

One of the more robust challenges of modernity is trying to justify one’s own existence, let alone the existence of Fall Out Boy. However, the foursome who released Save Rock and Roll last Tuesday share but a vestigial husk with the group of scrappy John Hughes characters come to life that they once were. The Fall Out Boy of yore is about thirty thousand hundred million degrees removed from the Fall Out Boy that Pete Wentz once described as a group of hardcore kids playing pop music, a role they ultimately proved ill-suited for, especially when you consider them in relativity to, say, Maroon 5. The true point of Fall Out Boy—and that of Save Rock and Roll—is simply to exist.

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Like, why are both Elton John and Big Sean on this album? What's up with the dubstep drop? Can music rock but not be Rock? Does Rock and Roll even need saving, or are Fall Out Boy just projecting? Are Fall Out Boy Nas? How many times has Rock and Roll died already? Is Rock and Roll a cat?

Which leads me to my first Deep Ass Question: Is it possible to put on for the unstuntables if the process of getting onto the Jumbotron requires you to be subsumed by all which you were taught to hate? In other words, at what point does a single-minded focus upon carrying out an act undermine the philosophies and values behind it?

I answer this by presenting you with a video of Fall Out Boy covering “Beat It” with John Mayer playing the Eddie Van Halen part.

Yeah, man. Ativan is a hell of a drug.

Thou shalt speak no ill of early Fall Out Boy. Take this to Your Grave and From Under the Cork Tree knock to fuck and back and showcase a taut, witty pop-punk band that has absolutely no idea that they will one day record a song with the Prince of Doucheness himself. More than that, they showcase an ambitious pair of songwriters in Patrick Stump and Pete Wentz, bursting at the seams with ideas that very obviously couldn’t operate solely in the punk/indie idiom. When they did it up, they did it big, with levels of effort and dramatic flair usually reserved for a Diddy Party. Stump never met a lyric he couldn’t oversing, and Wentz never met a line he couldn’t overwrite. The best part was that Stump sang with an earnestness that suggested he had absolutely no idea that he was spouting off Wentz’s ridiculous bullshit, and it was perfect—those dudes made songs like they had kids to feed.

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What’s more, those dudes lived in Chicago, and if you recall the Wild West Days of Indie, things weren’t really happening there like they were in New York. Fall Out Boy had no cool contemporaries—if the band had been bumming around in Williamsburg at the dawn of the millennium, Wentz would have dated Karen O for four months and gotten in a fight with Carlos D at Cokeys, Dave Sitek would have produced Fall Out Boy’s Evening with Your Girlfriend, and From Under the Cork Tree would have had The Rapture singing backing vocals on a track but sold half as many copies as it actually did. Fall Out Boy was damned by convention and geography to swing for the fences. Such is life.

And with that, it’s time for Deep Ass Question Number Two: Why does no one ever talk about how “Sugar We’re Goin’ Down” and Creed’s “Higher” are the same fucking song?

Anyways, with that expertly executed Creed riffjack, Fall Out Boy became FALL OUT BOY, the biggest band on the entire planet. We found out all about Pete Wentz’s proclivity for wearing girls’ hoodies and mascara, let him get away with lying and saying his biggest influence was Lil Wayne, and the dude ended up surprisingly ahead of the curve when it came to celebrity dick picks (leaked off a T-Mobile sidekick, no less!) going public. We found out that one of the less famous ones smoked pot. The band made a mixtape for no apparent reason. They worked with Kanye West, and Jay-Z showed up on their album intro. Rap has never had particularly cool taste in rock.

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The problem with Fall Out Boy in the latter half of last decade basically boils down to Pete Wentz sucking a lot. In retrospect, he kind of seemed like that smarmy kid in your AP English class who read too much Kurt Vonnegut and thought he was getting away with “stuff” in the vaguest sense of that statement. The biggest example of this was probably “This Ain’t a Scene, it’s an Arms Race,” which was basically their version of “Forgot about Dre,” except terrible. Still, I admire Wentz’s chutzpah: might as well make go ahead and make the song as shitty as the scene. Much of the criticism of the era was concerned with how much Pete Wentz sucked while his band continued to be amazing, desperately trying to parody and destroy pop-punk from the inside before someone else could, finally succeeding with the borderline incredible, lugubrious clusterfuck that was Folie a Deux.

Which leads me to my third Deep Ass Question: What is a guitar solo, anyway?

I will answer with a video of Fall Out Boy covering Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” this time live without John Mayer doing the Eddie Van Halen part.

So now, Save Rock & Roll. It’s good. Not great. Better than Infinity on High, maybe on par with Folie a Deux though markedly less insane, but still can’t hold a lavendar-scented candle to Cork Tree and Grave. It’s probably got four or five incredible songs, along with a few for the ol’ MacBook trash bin. Our final Deep Ass Question is one that Fall Out Boy almost begs us to ask: Does Save Rock & Roll actually, y’know, like, save Rock and Roll?

I will answer this with a video of Fall Out Boy and 2 Chainz at Coachella in which 2 Chainz and his DJ refer to the band as “The Fall Out Mothafuckin’ Boys.”

The underlying conundrum ofSave Rock and Roll is that it isn’t really a “Rock and Roll album” per se. It rocks, sure, but it’s not Rock—Big Sean does not show up on your album to reference Simple Plan if you are legitimately concerned about Rock and Roll’s well being. So obviously, Fall Out Boy’s collective tongue is planted firmly in cheek here (Big Sean’s tongue is in a stripper’s ass cheek, but the point is his tongue is in someone’s cheek). While the overly-long and hard-to-match-with-the-actual-song song titles might be gone, Patrick Stump is still singing like the world’s surliest musical theatre student, the songs still feel like they’re trying to go in eleventy different directions at once and there’s a dubstep drop on “Death Valley” for no apparent reason other than to definitively prove that Pete Wentz is old. Simply put, Fall Out Boy still seem way concerned with proving that they don’t give a fuck, to the point where they lose sight of the fact that they could circumvent a lot of headaches by just copping to the fact that they’ve got a lot of fucks to give. This band didn’t need to put an album out, and yet they did. It’s way better than it needs to be, but it’s still not as good as the Paramore album that also just came out. But that’s fine. Fall Out Boy could have put out a piece of shit and it wouldn’t really matter.

This is because Fall Out Boy’s return comes at the best possible time. “Taste” as a concrete hierarchy of things it’s okay to like is by and large eroding in favor of people just liking the things they like and finding value in their own personal enjoyment of those things rather than being “correct” about anything. There’s a sense of genre parity spreading throughout music fandom, where everything is being re-evaluated and music you might have once wrote off is suddenly revealing itself to be pretty fucking awesome. Fall Out Boy understands this. They have returned to in order to tell you that your favorite records aren’t shit compared to their records. They have returned because not enough people understand that you can be serious and not serious at the same damn time. They have returned because we didn’t have enough reasons to find Big Sean annoying. They have returned because Patrick Stump is finally fine with people liking him better fat. They have returned because in the process of killing pop-punk with Folie a Dieux, they accidentally opened things up for music immeasurably more terrible, close-minded, and boring. They have returned because they have to fix things. Fall Out Boy is back not to save rock and roll, but instead to alert us to the fact that they been saving the damn thing for years, and it’s high time we took notice.

Drew Millard's lawyer made him change the name of this blog post so he wouldn't get sued. He's on Twitter - @drewmillard