from now on this blog will be exclusively about the riddling pathos of dick powell
Why would I even bother writing about Fall Out Boy? Funny week, last week. Well, Fall Out Boy are kinda ghastly, really; behold! spaghetti in the bathtub; or, like a kid with poop, I surrender, disgusted and bug-eyed curious. And never have I so felt the strange vice of adulthood—me, 24—until I caught myself at home frying eggs with Fall Out Boy, a band I’d’ve never given a passing ear to when I was target-audience age but now find “compelling” in my own aimless, chinstroking, misguided way.
No. Bad. But I did it. So.
Fall Out Boy don’t want a scene, which is its own kind of beef, and nothing makes a scene like beef. Nice try, Fall Out Boy. The organic growth of social movements is many, many steps ahead of you. Fall Out Boy know their audience: self-important teenagers who warp their hysterical and absolutely normal libidos into a new, guarded forms of bad poetry. They Like Long One-Liners with Capital Letters because they always seem important on paper and sound dramatic if you say them and then part your lips just a little bit while turning your head to the side quite slowly.
Hair-metal bands and more muscly new wavers—Anthony wonders when FOB will stop foofing around and record “Jessie’s Girl”—were both big fun. While FOB are more or less their musical equivalent—well-funded landfills for monster hooks and monster choruses and slightly less than monstrous but nevertheless able to connote some acceptable level of rebellion guitar crunch—the content and context is different. Dom says that Infinity on High is their New York hip-hop record in all but sound. I see what he means. FOB like to boast. But they also like to employ contrived glosses on misery as a guiding force for their cocks. This new, pitiable angst is kind of boring, actually. In some bad light, Kurt’s suicide is a tattoo to FOB’s magic-marker moustache.
Anyway, Dom posits emo as the only real organic rock scene going right now, which I find terrifying and weird, but somehow plausible. I’m reminded of reading Our Band Could Be Your Life and feeling like I missed the days where it was neato and progressive to align yourself with a scene—like Calvin Johnson and Ian MacKaye—whereas now, bands are running from it like cats from water. Sad, really, but this is what I meant about the Klaxons: all the scene-forming feels out of control, more of a journalist’s opportunity than a movement, more an arms race (in the words of FOB). I give up, I promise.
Welcome to PBW’s hot night, Fall Out Boy; welcome to black tea and Arkansan snowfall and television documentaries about seal pups and the teats they suckle—welcome to all of Terry Riley’s tape loops playing in a room without a television. Here is a day at home with the paper, here’s a peeler for those potatoes, here’s an unironic conversation, and here is a game of Scrabble where, no, neither “cunt” nor its more point-winning variant “kunt” are allowed.
If I could possibly ignore all the things in the world that hurt my heart instead of feeling doomed to notice and devour them, I think I would be a complete person.
subquestions not addressed in text but pondered in hard darkness: do i miss being a teenager? if yes, is what i miss really just sleeping with teenage girls? do i still lust after teenage girls? do i identify with fall out boy? why does insecurity so often cause people to hurt one another? should i distance myself from my mom?