The Untold Truthiness of Fall Out Boy
truth·i·ness /ˈtro͞oTHēnis/ noun INFORMAL
the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true.
Sometimes it makes sense to reach for the next best thing when the truth feels too heavy. Fall Out Boy is an astonishingly early subscriber to this philosophy (arriving to it at nearly the same time as Stephen Colbert, who coined the term), and they believed in it, or something like it, long before it was cool. Many of the capital-e Emo kids became consciously unimpressed with them through the 2010's when their moniker turned into a punching bag for a number of subcultures in the scene, those whose acolytes perennially teetered on the brink of constituting a silent majority. Despite that, their legend of being ahead of the truth curve only grew, to the point where it is a genuinely legitimate opinion to give the band their due credit for being fashionable forefathers in a genre that seems to be ever shedding its skin.
The Chicago outfit's embrace of truthiness really begins with Under the Cork Tree. After the just-a-touch-too-earnest thought diagramming put forth on their first LP, Take This To Your Grave, they seemed to realize that profound sentiments were great and all, but that the path to real success lay in creating a product. The product would succeed even more if it were purveyed by sensitive band-geek beefcakes who had some provable street cred, and thus were born "Stadium Voice Patrick" Stump and Pete "The Hot One" Wentz. Rounding out the crew were the anything-but-silent partners Joe Trohman and Andy Hurley who gave the band blistering lead lines and blast-off drums respectively. Trohman and Hurley provided the side benefit of solidifying the group's ties to the Windy City hardcore scene, and this would become necessary later. Without those bona fides, audiences may have forgotten about FOB Inc. if their sum total had simply been the undeniably sick pipes and sadboy lyrics offered by Stump and Wentz.
Under the Cork Tree's very first chorus declares, "We're only liars, but we're the best." Here, on track numero uno, the band writes the story of their own success to that point with the ink of disillusionment using a fountain pen made of irony. They know that audiences don't always want "truth" in its most elementary sense. Sometimes they want artists who emulate something like realness, only better. The prettiness of the chosen words can take the edge off the darkness of what some people experience as their actual inner life. On "I've Got a Dark Alley and a Bad Idea That Says You Should Shut Your Mouth (Summer Song)" we get another glimpse of a band working out their mixed feelings about what an outsized audience reach means. "We can fake it for the airwaves" is a line that drips with self-aware cynicism and the savviness of laughing at one's own impostor syndrome. But from the audience's point of view on the outside, it just feels like a truth that would be experienced by a band who's achieved specifically this stature at this point in their young career: it's a characterization of the uncertainty about whether their IP is being used in the best ways, and it feels like how we would feel if we were in the same predicament.
If Cork Tree was the boys’ Mad Max, then its follow up Infinity On High proceeded directly to Mad Max: Fury Road in the way it doubled down on everything first espoused in its forebear. Guitars were more gravelly and the album's low end was accentuated throughout, teasing danger but never removing the safety net. On "This Ain't a Scene It's an Arms Race" Stump belts "I'm a leading man and the lies I weave are oh so intricate" - again, the band wants you to know that this is staged, a package of beatitudes triple-washed and ready-to-eat. Yeah, they mean it…mostly. What they're offering here is better than the truth of conflicted success, it's an epic poem where you can read forever about being bored with the bullshit of VIP life if you want to. On "Golden," the lines blur a bit more into the shadows and for maybe the first time since Cork Tree's midwestern power strutting, it feels like a mask may be lifting on something underneath. Lyrics including "the lives we live are only golden-plated" and "mothers raise their babies to stay away from me" allude to a doubt that might actually be authentic. In the end, even these gems end up undercut by Stump's most deliciously syrupy vocal of the entire record - how could anything this glossy be real?
The years went on from there and the on-again off-again poster boys made more albums together of varying quality. Some will tell you that they progressively decreased in quality/relevance with each successive LP, and some will say that they are a band that has become mercurial but interestingly so and that makes them worth following in spite of some clunkiness here and there. The real story is that Fall Out Boy has always been a band that is conscious of their image almost to a fault, that they’re fully aware of the space they occupy in commercial music. Each album is a new chance to offer another version of the truth, to come at it from a different angle, all the while never quite making contact with the thing itself.
But after all the history books have been written about FOB, and in this funhouse reality where we see the macro-level stops and starts of emo (as a formal construct) in real time, what seems clear is that while truth probably is worth chasing, maybe sometimes just being truthy is plenty. Perhaps we don't want to always be reliving the harshness of reality in five-minute bursts, it could be that we just want some slick words that feel like they could be true. And if we can dance to it, all the better.
