wheres ur mallo(ut bo)y tonight?

I don't think my dad understands the implications when he says "I used to listen to this before you were born." when I play Fall Out Boy in the car, because quite frankly, he is the reason why I got into them in the first place. When I was young he would play two very important songs: Thunder by Boys Like Girls and It Ends Tonight by the All-American Rejects, and around the time I started getting into music he introduced me to Swing, Swing (also by the latter band). Those two bands? Peak pop punk, literally what you hear in your head when you imagine pop punk music. I also really into C'mon by fun. and Panic! Naturally, Spotify recommended more essential pop punk—importantly, three: Welcome to the Black Parade MCR, But It's Better If You Do Panic, and, crucially, Dance, Dance FOB.

It's crazy how I remember so much of the first few moments of discovery afterwards. I listened to Dance, Dance and Sugar We're Goin Down, and in my quest to delve deeper I think I saw someone saying that their favourite Fall Out Boy song was "From Now On We Are Enemies", so I ended up listening to it. (I didn't like it very much, but very recently actually I've gotten really, really into it and it's become one of my favs now. Funny how that works. "The songs you grow to like never stick at first...") The Genius page for "From Now On We Are Enemies" mentions another song: What A Catch, Donnie, and that is where the story really begins.

What A Catch stunned 14-year-old me. I was a lucky kid whose own mental health never reached the point of needing a song like What A Catch, but regardless I felt every single word and note. I combed through the Genius page, looking through each other song from their discography it references and listening to them. I liked Thnks Fr Th Mmrs and This Ain't A Scene just fine, but the one that really caught my ear was Headfirst Slide Into Cooperstown On A Bad Bet, another song off Folie à Deux. I traced everything to the America's Suitehearts music video, whose characters were taken from the lyrics of those two songs plus two others, and eventually it all led to me listening to the entire album. Somewhere in the mix, I also listened to GINASFS, a bonus track from Infinity on High, which I became thoroughly obsessed with. At the time, I was deeply deeply unwell about the character Detective Llewellyn Watts from Murdoch Mysteries, and I saw (heard) him in every song. (My pop punk/adjacent playlist is literally named after him.) This was all during January of 2022: a winter break that would soon lead to a third stretch of remote learning; every morning I'd get up to go on Google Meets for my ninth grade classes and whenever I didn't need to listen to the teacher, I'd go on mute and blast Folie à Deux and GINASFS on my Bluetooth Speakers.

I can't even pick out what it is exactly about Fall Out Boy that makes me love them so much; their discography is so varied. Maybe it's Pete Wentz's lyricism that is almost always so consistently brilliant, yet even then I like songs whose lyrics aren't necessarily my favourite part. Perhaps Patrick Stump and the rest of the band are just very talented and capable of making good music no matter the genre—and they are—but even if music is objectively good, I'm not guaranteed to like it. In fact, I'm usually pretty picky with my music—there's no artist whose discography I enjoy the entirety of, but Fall Out Boy is one of the few artists where I truly can find so much to love in almost every era. I don't know. They've somehow just been consistently made banger tunes for over twenty years. How epic of them. How epic for me ! I love Fall Out Boy !!!

Malloy's genre rant

One thing that I am sure of, though, is that what I don't love Fall Out Boy for is the pop punk. As I've said, I love pop punk: it was the first genre I dove into, the one that really got me into music, and I'm always so charmed by its sounds and its themes of adolescence and heartbreak and needing to get the fuck out of here, and it was the genre that led me to Fall Out Boy, but the truth of the matter is that the my first FOB album (Folie) was not a pop punk album; in fact, Fall Out Boy hasn't been emo/pop punk since their second album. Fall Out Boy has put out eight official studio albums in their careers. I really don't get people who are so vehemently against artists changing their sound ! Seriously, when you think of it in the way that these guys have been music for 20 years, it starts feeling illogical to expect people to stay in a box for their whole lives. Sure, some other artists like Green Day (who've been going way longer than Fall Out Boy) are more consistent in their genres, but why should that be the only accepted path when there is so much possibility to be found elsewhere ? To be completely honest, Take This to Your Grave, the band at their most pop punk, and an incredibly important album to the scene during the 2000s, is my least favourite of the eight; I have a few favourites from it, but as a whole, it's not really my thing.

And I can understand being a kid in the scene in the 2000s falling in love with the band, feeling some sort of betrayal when they no longer sound the way you loved them for. One specific thing I've heard of is the very specific betrayal in hearing the radio pop sounds of post-hiatus (Save Rock and Roll, American Beauty/American Psycho, Mania) that people in the mainstream listen to. "They sold out", or so these old emos have said. Fall Out Boy were made icons, faces of the scene, and now they've turned their backs on it all. The funny part of it all is that Fall Out Boy themselves didn't even choose the emo label; in fact, most figures labelled as such during the 2000s outwardly stated they didn't want that label. Paramore's another similar case, a band that was really important in the pop punk era but has since evolved beyond that, now often described as not bound by genre, or genreless, even. There's a lyric in Save Rock and Roll's title track that is often misinterpreted: "You are what you love, not who loves you". It's a statement about not being defined by your audience, asserting that your worth and identity are rooted in your own self-determination. Fall Out Boy owes a lot to the fans who supported them, but those fans are not entitled to them making the same kind of music forever, especially since the music they made in the past still exists today.

Another hilarious thing is that they've been talking about this very subject since May 2007 with "The Take Over, the Breaks Over". Like. Wow. This conversation is older than me.

I have major beef with Anthony Fantano despite my enjoyment of some of his other content for the fact that whenever you google Mania (my favourite album) one of the very first results is the thumbnail to his video review where it says in big red text "NOT GOOD". It's his opinion, sure, but it's reflective of a loud portion of people who really hate post-hiatus Fall Out Boy. I always have to tread carefully when I find white music YouTubers—it's happened multiple times where the topic of Centuries (my FAVOURITE of the big singles) comes up and they always make fun of it :( It does piss me off a little, but it's also just really interesting as a young person who got into the band relatively recently, someone who's entered the fanbase after everything. When I became a fan, seven whole albums plus a handful of EPs and Greatest Hits records were already available at my fingertips. I listened to everything out of order. As someone with such a flimsy grasp on the exact kinds of music I enjoy, especially back then, I never listened for specific genres or other identifiable aspects of sound. And I like Fall Out Boy so much. It's a fascinating perspective.

One more funny thing. I used to hate contemporary radio pop. I'd hear songs on the radio and think so lowly of it. You know what started the change ? June 2022, I listened to Mania for the first time.