Fall Out Boy - From Under The Cork Tree

wishing to be the friction in your jeans

One of the best to ever do it. From Under The Cork Tree remains one of the defining releases of the 00s. Accessible, poetic, poppy, and witty. Respected by the underground and saturated in the mainstream. Fall Out Boy cresting on their successful ambitions. Rounding off the sharper edges of the post-hardcore scene, blending it with pop-punk and mixing in their introverted and influential suburban Wes Anderson aesthetic. FUCT is my pick for the album that synthesised the entire era. It’s the fulcrum at the centre of 00s Emo. Some element of it, a word, a riff, a wink, a nudge, touching everything.

Of note to true emo-hearts is the curio of Fall Out Boy’s Night Out With Your Girlfriend. The “album” was all but disowned by the band and demoted to demo status after its dreadful 2002 release. Scrappy and flailing, but with plenty of angst and certainly showing promise. There’s an almost certain chance you’ve never even heard of it, so seek out zoomy opener Honourable Mention for a treat. The band’s first proper album Take This To Your Grave might be my favourite release of theirs—with FUCT claiming the essay spot simply for how culturally important it is. But the songs on Grave are immortal, with the perfect biting point between underground energy and crisp pop songwriting. Contemporary hooks like Dead on Arrival, Grand Theft Autumn, and Saturday finally hooked in a fanbase; the band hit the road and built a name. Gaining scene popularity and online respect, laying the road for their eventual mainstream takeover.

The album, in appropriate fashion, starts with the earnest suburban ring of a telephone dial. Tell That Mick He Just Made My List of Things To Do Today.

Their next album would start with the camera shutters of the paparazzi.

I need to talk about this album through Pete Wentz. Just as Fall Out Boy became the central link of 00s Emo, Wentz was the centre of Fall Out Boy. A truly singular and slightly curveball figure: not being the band’s frontman but their combined bassist and lyricist. He was their creative director, and by all accounts had an absolute crystal-clear vision for the band. Yes, it was Patrick Stump whose gigantic voice and songwriting chops would form the chassis of their success—and as the years have gone by, Stump has been given his belated but richly deserved kudos. But during their breakthrough, Stump was shy, chubby, retiring; Wentz was the star. He was the looker, the face on the magazine and the billboard. I’ve credited Tom DeLonge with being the first to introduce the emo swoopy-floopy-fringe haircut to pop culture, but in mainstream media to this day Wentz is the figure most associated with it. Literally millions of boys and girls tried to cut their hair like this man—and haircuts are important to music scenes. Haircuts and trousers.

The swoop, the eyeliner, the chiselled looks combined with wilting personality and ambiguous sexuality. Wentz is the one.

Wentz was, on a technical and structural level, a quality lyricist. His sharp lines gave Stump’s music the punch it needed. A bit of wit and shine to help the songs turn ears even more. Wentz was a genuine man of letters—he lived his words. His blog archive, yes his blog archive. To be studied as we would the letters of a 17th-century writer. The contemporary window into his soul, is a must to understand where this music was coming from.

“I’ve got a lot of ‘friends’ but only two or three friends. You wouldn’t like me if you saw the inside of my head but you might love me anyway.”

“Running away from a city because of one single heartbeat. It doesn’t make sense.

It’s not that I don’t trust you, actually it is. And I don’t trust myself when I think of you. I sell myself out.

I wish you were awake right now. I just want to let myself be happy.”

“Rushmore

They say any port in a storm, right? I’ll keep the light on and pray for the wind to pick up.”

This angsty haiku prose was poetry to a generation. Lost to the march of internet history now, the shuttering of websites and migrating of users. The flame kept alive by an archive of the most dedicated FOB fans. This style of cryptic, this kind of lyrical blog-posting just doesn’t exist anymore. No one reads blogs. There’s no need to when you can open a video camera and start screaming your thoughts to the world instantly. No space or gap to be filled with words in the way there was with MySpace and LiveJournal. Statuses and bios, MSN Messenger and PureVolume. This was the language of the 00s, and Wentz was an icon for his words and the way he spilled them forth so freely to his devoted fans. With his uniquely avoidant droll style in his lyrics and blogs, he confronted whimsical love, lust, and boredom alongside genuine trouble, including his own harrowing suicide attempt in February of 2005. He really was the person he presented in his lyrics: confused, horny, depressed, and often at odds with his own existence.

Am I more than you bargained for yet? I’ve been dying to tell you Anything you wanna hear ‘Cause that’s just who I am this week

Lie in the grass next to the mausoleum I’m just a notch in your bedpost, but you’re just a line in a song (Notch in your bedpost, but you’re just a line in a song)

Yet despite his troubles, Wentz also had a deeply Apollonian aspect to him. He had to become popular and famous under his own steam. To spread his thoughts and feelings to the entire world. It was he who seems to have conceptualised the development deal offered to Fall Out Boy in 2003, whereby they’d sign to major music label Island for their second album (FUCT), but their debut album Take This To Your Grave would be released by the much more respectable Fueled By Ramen. This arrangement allowed the band to build up momentum naturally around the release of their first record, as peers in the scene, not parachuted-in interlopers. Earning their spurs, developing an organic, loyal fanbase, and giving FUCT a feeling of earned victory. In a scene comfortable with, but not enthusiastic about, the major label industry, Wentz became something of a scene-kingpin. Alongside his own band’s success, he got busy signing young up-and-coming bands like Panic! at the Disco, The Hush Sound, and Gym Class Heroes to his own Fueled By Ramen imprint: Decaydance. He hit the social scene with aplomb, hanging out with Interpol, DJing parties, a forward-facing celebrity. He dated Ashlee Simpson, became a regular in America’s magazines and even suffered a nasty incident of having his nudes leaked. But he achieved everything; he became one of the most famous musicians in the world.

When we talk about bands who define the scene in all its successes and contradictions, it’s impossible to pick one. When it comes to picking a person—mind and body—that person is Pete Wentz.

As with the most popular albums of the era, From Under The Cork Tree hinges on its singles. Two of them so big they seem almost like pop music truisms at this point. Dance Dance is purist pop with guitars, with its enormous success foreshadowing the band’s eventual evolution into becoming just pure pop. Sugar, We’re Going Down is where the kaleidoscope really hits, surprisingly massive walls of guitars, sweet verses and a giant bawling chorus. Lip-biting bi-curious glances and nervous friction in jeans (men’s or women’s? who knows). Topped off with a Wes Anderson-tribute music video, the song is undeniable. Album tracks are of high and consistent quality. A little more muscular than the rest of the album, my personal favourite is the showbiz goose-step of opener Our Lawyer Made Us Change The Name Of This Song So We Wouldn’t Get Sued, which used to be called the masterful My Name Is David Ruffin And These Are The Temptations. The underrated skate-park belter Sophomore Slump or Comeback of the Year. Arms fold and eyes water with I’ve Got a Dark Alley and a Bad Idea That Says You Should Shut Your Mouth (Summer Song). Of All The Gin Joints In The World probably should have been the third single.

The Story of Ferdinand

I don’t gel with Infinity on High. I get what the band were doing, embracing the mainstream, collaborating with Jay Z and Babyface, taking every opportunity open to them. I did like it at the time; it was cool seeing them retain the championship belt, but it just doesn’t hit like their previous three releases do. A bit too plastic—a little bit limp. Folie à Deux is the opposite. Sophisticated balancing of their emo past and pop future. Songs of maturity and fatherhood, dependency, and regret. I was ambivalent about the record when it released, but now it’s a bittersweet, titillating whisky sour. It meant the band, artistically at least, broke up on a high. Wonderful.

I regret nothing of what FOB have done since reforming and moving into a pure-pop direction. Some tracks stand out, some I don’t care for. But overall, I salute their ambition, drive, and competency. It would be far worse to stare back, chained by nostalgia, and in that sense, I think we ageing emos can all learn something from the band. Fall Out Boy are for today’s children.

I love Pete Wentz the bassist, I love Pete Wentz the lyricist who gave teenagers a voice and taught them they could be poets. My generation’s Morrissey. I love that Fall Out Boy remain beloved to this day, one of the scene survivors living to tell the tale and write new stories. I love that I can remember first opening the CD of FUCT in my friend’s dad’s car and putting it into my CD player and pressing play.

What a memory

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