Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

Take This to Your Grave

7) Fall Out Boy, Take This to Your Grave (2003)

So Fall Out Boy is a pretty big band nowadays. So much so that they have a greatest hits album.(?) I mean, I’ll buy it. (The idea, not the actual album. I have all those songs already.) It’s just weird to have a band that you’ve been following for a while to not only put out a greatest hits album, but for said album to include tracks from an album that came out just six years ago.

Oh well. All of this is inconsequential. What does matter is that before Pete Wentz was opening bars that played host to Real World casts, Fall Out Boy put out a lil album called Take This to Your Grave, a venomous, spite-filled, heartfelt emo punk tour de force that, quite frankly, the band has yet to replicate. The band’s second studio album, it has more polish than their debut, Fall Out Boy’s Evening Out with Your Girlfriend, and more fire in the belly than their subsequent records.

There’s an urgency of genuine emotion on this album, and you know how I feel about that sort of thing. To this day, I still re-use the chorus to “Dead on Arrival” in everyday conversation: “This is Side One. / Flip me over. / I know I’m not your favorite record. / The songs you grow to like never stick at first.” (To say nothing of the delightful wordplay in the first verse: “This conversation’s been dead on a / Rivalry goes so deep / Between me and this loss of sleep over you.”) Ditto for “Homesick at Spacecamp”: “My smile’s an open wound without you / And my hands are tied to pages inked to bring you back.”

Why I like Fall Out Boy, and this album in particular, is they manage to get away with saying things that I could never bring myself to say as a songwriter. (And I’ve tried my hand at the songwriting thing. What, you’ve never heard of Wait for Summer? North Jersey Emocore since 2005?) I wrote a story a few years ago about Craig Finn, the lead singer for the band the Hold Steady. Finn said, w/r/t songwriting, that he oftentimes invents characters and scenarios to write songs about. “No one thinks Quentin Tarantino kills people. The characters are a way for me to remove myself from [the songs] in some way, to tell a story that has a cinematic quality or a good story arc without people saying, ‘He’s crazy.’ Especially my mom.” This sounds brilliant on paper, but in practice it’s extremely difficult to pull off. The reason I’ve only written like, two and three-quarters songs is that there’s only so much compelling stuff that I can cull from my autobiography. I’m just a crummy inventor, as it were. And even when there is good stuff to write about, I’m often too timid to commit it to paper, let alone song.

All of this is to say, I’m not sure if the guys in Fall Out Boy practice Craig Finn’s technique, or if they’ve all just been fucked over really bad and don’t give a shit who knows, but hoo boy, are there some potent lines on this album. Just look at the track listing. You’ve got “Sending Postcards from a Plane Crash (Wish You Were Here).” You’ve got “Reinventing the Wheel to Run Myself Over.” And then you’ve got our signature track.

Signature track: “Tell that Mick He Just Made My List of Things to Do Today”

Hopefully my Irish American readers can get over the title of this one (it apparently comes from the movie Rushmore.) This particular video includes lyrics, which should drive the point home that this is an intense song. Like, the chorus: “Let’s play this game called ‘When You Catch Fire.’ / I wouldn’t piss to put you out.” Or, hell, the opening line: “Light that smoke, that one for giving up on me. / One just ’cause they’ll kill you sooner than my expectations.” There’s a strain of pop punk that’s moroseful and whiny, there’s a strain of pop punk that’s mushy, and there’s a strain of pop punk that’s just downright nasty. “Tell That Mick” is the archetypal example of that final strain.

Now, I wouldn’t say that I condone lighting people on fire, or wishing them to be in a horrible car accident, or anything like that. Maybe Pete Wentz does. Or maybe he’s just capable of imagining a situation where he feels that way. Either way, I’ve always been impressed with the courage it takes to write songs that really let loose with intense emotion, whether it be sorrow or longing or rage. I know for a fact that I’m not capable of opening up that much, or even making up a persona capable of opening up that much.