tomorrow is our permanent address

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.

Everything about this is gorgeous. No, I mean it: The Phoenix is everything I have ever wanted aesthetically, musically, and lyrically. From the musicality to the way we can take the world back from a heart attack is delivered, soft like a promise, to Pete being the one kidnappers send severed body parts to, to Patrick's vocal acrobatics, to the back beat and how the song sounds exactly like a logical progression of Fall Out Boy, if you listened to everything chronologically, to Patrick snapping the fingers of his bloody hand at the end, to how it sounds like something restless twitching in your chest, waiting to start revolutions. I am biased, but it is brilliant. Now if they changed their album cover everything would be perfect.

Warnings for blood, violence, and torture scenes.

Half of the time I feel like I'm walking around speaking Entish. Not really speaking Entish, of course- I can't, for one, and I think I'd notice if I woke up one day speaking in Tolkien's tongues- and this is not a metaphor that would come to me organically, only my dreams last night involved, among other things, reading a song in The Two Towers I'm not sure actually exists, and that I don't remember enough of to be able to check whether or not it does without going through the book. Moral of the story is never to leave your copies of The Lord of the Rings anywhere you aren't, because you never know when you will have to verify the existence of a passage.

Point is, half of the time I feel like I'm speaking Entish, taking ages and ages to say something that is comprehensible to almost no one, if that, but that I couldn't translate even if I wanted to. If I were reading anything new I'd quote from it, but I haven't been reading anything new in a long time, I haven't been reading anything lately except Fellowship and a whole stack of Madeleine L'Engles I know by heart, and I don't know how to talk about anything.

The brother is out to prom and Arsenal play Blackburn later. The parents are out because they accompanied the brother to the talk and dinner Ateneo gives its Merit scholars (they got the Director's Listers' equivalent three years ago with me, so that's six meals total they've robbed the Ateneo of) and they decided to eat out at Eastwood. This time last year the brother was out to prom and Arsenal were due to play someone- you know, it might have been the horrific 4-4 Newcastle game, but I can't be sure- and I meant to watch but didn't wake up in time for and I'd just found A Severed Wasp in Book Sale, so maybe it's a seasonal absolute-nothing-and-attempts-to-fill-it-in-with-Madeleine-L'Engle thing? Anyway, since I don't feel like having my arms pulled out of their sockets by an overenthusiastic pit bull, I'm letting Ribbons out in front, and giving you all music while waiting for her to calm down.


This was originally meant for me and the general audience, and that's still whom the commentary was written for, but it is now dedicated to Guia. Just say the word, and so on. I feel like that's the only thing I ever say in times like these, but this time it's because you will always be much more of a reasonable adult that I am, and so I have to make the immature comments. Not, of course, that it is any less meant.


( Track list and commentary. )

I don't have words for the last semester. I went into it wanting nothing more than to get out and thinking that there wasn't anyone there I didn't already know who was worth my time. The jury's still out on the leaving part, but all the people- the dissecting sessions and the late-night conversations and the singing and the evacuating to Allen's place when the floods struck and my kitchen disasters and all the amazing people- it was a bit of a trainwreck of a semester, academically, but I have no words for my gratitude for all the amazing people.

In place of trying to explain, here is my soundtrack for the first semester of med proper with UPCM 2016. There is, hopefully, more than enough rhyme to make up for the lack of reason.

For old friends and new.

( Track list here. )