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At first, I tried to fit into the mold laid out for me. I was the popular girl, a cheerleader on the sidelines. But secretly, I envied the kids who wore the Against Me! T-shirts and didn't give a fuck about what anybody thought. At that point, I was too scared to step outside the box, even though I spent hours on MySpace admiring emo scene queens and looking for music that sounded different than the popular Eminem and Justin Timberlake tunes I was surrounded by.I would camouflage myself in Hollister polos and Abercrombie graphic tees, while covertly burning mix CDs with Panic! at the Disco, Every Time I Die, and Brand New. Before Warped Tour, the only legitimate concert I had been to was N'Sync's in 1999. So when I heard there was a thing called Warped Tour that had all the music I'd been digging on the low, I knew I had to go. It was my time.My first pilgrimage to Warped Tour may have been a little more than a decade ago, but I certainly wasn't the first teen to attend. Kids all over the US have been going to the traveling festival since 1995, when it was first launched by Kevin Lyman and Vans as a way to showcase punk and alternative bands. The debut tour attracted 25,000 attendees, with acts like Sublime, No Doubt, and Deftones.My Warped Tour, however, looked different than that inaugural lineup. Acts like Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, and Underoath brought poppy emotional ballads and the guttural howls of screamo to the festival that had previously been defined by punk and ska. I came to the festival when it was in the midst of a changing of the guard of youth culture, one that would happen time and time again.
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Once we got in, we stood in front of a list of the time slots for each act, and strategically planned which bands we would see since it seemed like everyone we loved was playing at exactly the same time. Finally, we joined the crowd and weaved our way around each of the stages.Fall Out Boy was one band we made sure to get to the front for. We pushed through the throngs to get as close to Pete Wentz as possible, and sang along to every word of "Where is your boy tonight…" from Take This to Your Grave, an album we had listened to countless times.Noisey: Fall Out Boy, This Is Your Life
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