Fall Out Boy
Nobody likes emo. It’s okay to say that; we’ll leave emo to those who have angst, to those who have more teenage girl problems than driving hours behind the wheel.
That being said, Fall Out Boy marks the evolution of emo into something stomachable and quite artistic. What shall we call this? Perhaps I should first outline the structure of what I hope will be a new movement in rock music (perhaps we shall say the rebirth of rock music): driving, forward-leaning beats.
The best way I can describe forward-leaning beats is by contrast. Jazz syncopation (in my verbiage) is backward leaning, think bossa nova. It makes you want to sit down and smoke a stogie. However, we do not deal with simple dichotemy here. Most rock beats are at a 90-degree angle with the beat. This could be thought of as a thump, like dropping a dumbbell. In artistic-energetic rock (the intersection of the two attributes), we see a more evolved beat construction, one that drives the music forward.
I wish I knew exactly what did this. I think it’s about a 64th beat preemption of the beat by the drums and lead guitar. It also heavy 16th note work on snare and symbols.
Many of us refer to this as “workout music” or in my case “debugging music.” Either way, it’s auditory cocaine. It makes you want to move.
3 Doors Down (the non-girlie stuff), Better than Ezra (the non-girlie stuff), and Kanye West (typecasting, as I feel his beats have some degree of rock fusion in them) come to mind. This is important for the future; this is the “swing” of rock. If this takes hold to some extent in a big way, we’re finally looking at our next movement.
I can see headbangers rising up out of the woodwork for this music. I’m not talking about little TRL boppers jumping around. I’m talking about serious musical passion, something that got an escalatingly-bad case of pneumonia during the years following Kurt Kobain’s death.
May 23, 2000, may actually be the date I give for the death of alternative, as this was the day the breakup of the Smashing Pumpkins was announced. I’m no fanboi, so this should give me credibility. I feel like Billy Corgan was prophetic and diagnostic in the announcement. It marked the official announcement of the commercial unviability of traditional alternative.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say Fall Out Boy will be the standard-bearer in a new movement. I think they will be a voice in the wilderness. I think we can take emo and reshape it into something useful, something that isn’t worried about hairstyles. In fact, we might be able to find some parallels between 80’s glam rock and emo.
I need a band to come forward with evolutionary styling and a visionary leader. We need iconoclasts, and we might need a new record label.
I’m talking past my bounds. Time to close it up.