one more off-key anthem

I figured I had the time to do one more Fall Out Boy music post before disappearing for unofficial social medicine week. I figured it was going to be about Where Did the Party Go , which is at the same time How Punk is Like Sushi and Also the Catholic Church Part One, 100% Pete Wentz, and Fall Out Boy does Guilty Pleasure .

But then my darling boys did this interview, in which they were everything I loved about them ever, so Rat a Tat and How Punk is Like Sushi and Also the Catholic Church Part Two it is.

I'll let the boys speak for themselves:

Speaking exclusively to Gigwise, Pete Wentz said, "I think that it was important, in making an album that's got such an ambitious title about rock and roll, that girls know they have a place in rock and roll besides being coathangers for the dudes or groupies, or whatever. 

"So we wanted to get someone who had a seminal rock and roll voice and who was female, and Courtney literally has that voice. But also, she wrote those lyrics, she's all there."

When asked if he felt Love's talents as a musician had been overshadowed by her erratic behaviour in recent years, he agreed and said that at times Fall Out Boy's personal lives had overshadowed their creative output.

"It's unfortunate and I can totally understand and relate to her, because there's lots of times that things that we do get talked about more than the music."

He added, "There's a really savvy, interesting, creative person there and hopefully there'll be a new Hole song, or new Hole record, or a new Courtney Love record."

The band also spoke about their collaboration with up and comer Louisa Rose Allen, known as Foxes.

Fall Out Boy vocalist Patrick Stump said, "We just thought she had an awesome voice, and I think at the end of the day we really wanted to make a balanced record.

"You have somebody like Big Sean on, you have Elton, you have Courtney, and then I think we wanted somebody who was progressive and younger and had a great voice, but just maybe people hadn't heard of. She just sang beautifully, it was just a pleasure to hear her sing."

 

Save Rock and Roll as a whole sounds like a logical chronological progression of Fall Out Boy, and Rat a Tat is probably the closest-sounding to old school Fall Out Boy you're going to get from it. It fits with the sound of the whole album, and at the same time it's furious quick-paced teenage riotousness; it's almost staccato beats and a glittering blend of vocals, Patrick Stump's bouncy aural acrobatics (I kept wishing she had blonde ambition and she let it go to my head) and Courtney Love's ragged desperation (he says "I've seen bigger" she says "I've lit better" and they throw the matches down into the glitter). I'd love it even if it existed in a vacuum.

It doesn't. It exists explicitly because Fall Out Boy decided that if they were going to have an album called Save Rock and Roll it had to have female presence. They screw up a lot but I will always love them so much.

Because way back when it became okay to be so sick in the head the absence of suicidal ideation was the exception, because Pete Wentz once took a handful of Ativan in a Best Buy parking lot and he's still a pretty great human being. Because they did their best to drive home the point that gay is not a synonym for shitty, up to and including making it the title of a song. Because they know that the whole reason the 1970s were there was so that we didn't have to live them anymore; because rock has kind of ossified (don't make the joke), because rock and punk are in love with the institution, the capital R rock and roll, to the point that deviating from the set sound gets slapped with Not Rock and Roll Enough without taking ten seconds to consider that not following the authority was kind of the original point. Because as good as the music the institution made was it's mostly white dude music judged by white dude standards, its black roots shunted to the side, and the way to succeed to do well by white dude standards. And even if you're making great music if you're not a white dude there will be people drawing more attention to your life outside the music precisely because you're not a white dude, because you're the oddity.

And then these four guys made an album that basically said, look, we're making the music we want to make, that's the spirit if not the letter of rock and roll. And they wrote an angry pulsing teenage declaration-of-intent anthem and thought, if it's spirit of rock and roll. And they got Courtney in, which is !!!!! on our side but I suppose on the outside it's what reporters would call polarizing just because it's Courtney Love.

And. Well.