Fall Out Boy Showdown: Jordan
Lacking pretension, 12-year-olds are the best judges ever.
Published Feb. 6, 2007
Fall Out Boy's ascent to the most hated band in America still boggles my mind. This is a band that worked its way up the ladder of its scene by virtue of a solid work ethic. The band eventually wrote a few great songs that suddenly propelled it to the tops of the charts and into the hearts of middle schoolers everywhere. Sounds like Eminem to me.
Why people waste brain cells on hating Pete Wentz when Danity Kane is raking in enough money for Diddy to buy Zaire or when Oasis is slagging bands worlds better than itself while they still live off 1994 money, is beyond me. Is it that itchy emo tag? Well, let's hope Bright Eyes never hits the big time.
What the Fall Out Boy saga should tell us is that sometimes, seventh-graders — who like bands regardless of pretension for dress, hairstyle, politics, etc. — are the best music fans around.
The band's fourth album, Infinity on High, is classic Fall Out Boy: metaphors flaunted like a prostitute does her double Ds and personal, highly referential lyrics that'll burn up message boards with massive-ass hooks that again prove these guys are the premiere popular rock band in America (save My Chemical Romance). Not to mention, they're still the kings of whatever emo-pop-punk genre you want to call this type of music.
This album is full of songs about deceit, abandonment, fame, romance (duh) and the emo "scene" that Fall Out Boy has brought to the forefront of popular rock. This is the album that Fall Out Boy needed to make — its way too famous to not sing about fame and way too hated not to sing about its haters.
With that in mind, the first three tracks here are absolute monsters. "Thriller" sets the stage for the album with an opening salvo deriding the band's place as the king of emo ("Make us poster boys in your scene/ We're not making an acceptance speech). "The Take Over, the Break's Over" kisses-off a star-crossed lover, but the album's lead single "This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race," which features the albums most telling line, "Bandwagon full/ Please find another." With every song it sounds less like a call to arms and more like a weary plea.
Those three songs have something else in common besides lyrical content: huge, soaring choruses that singer Patrick Stumps, in typical fashion, rides to the moon. They are the type of anthems that only a handful of bands could pull off with a straight face.
What keeps Infinity on High from being a truly great album is its mushy second fourth. "I'm Like a Lawyer with the Way I'm Always Trying to Get You Off (Me + You)" and "Hum Hallelujah" flail on generic soft-rock choruses and piano ballad "Golden" is an absolute disaster.
Things immediately pick up again on "Thnks fr th Mmrs" and highlight "Don't You Know Who I Think I Am," which nails emo to the wall in three lines: "The say quitters never win/ We walked the plank on a sinking ship/ There's a world outside my front door that gets off on being down."
In the end, Infinity on High, to paraphrase the ex-coach of our sports editor's favorite football team (Dennis Green), is what we thought it would be: brash, thrashing, enormous, stuffed to the brim with towering hooks and honest music from an honest band.
If you can't get down with that, that's cool with me. You're just fucking yourself over.