Day 39: Pop-Punk as Pop-Fuck
I don’t hate the band Fallout Boy. I think I’m supposed to, though.
Here’s the thing, as a band, they are not bad. As a pop-punk band, they are actually quite good, and I don’t see any difference between them and the pop-punk I tried to pass off as punk in high school. Many of their songs are catchy, my brother, who is a classically trained musician of some 13 years standing, says that in terms of musical stuff that I don’t understand, they show flashes of being quite adept.
A lot of their songs have excellent burn lines. “I’m just a notch in your bedpost/but you’re just a line a song,” “I know this hurts/it was meant to/your secrets out/and best part is/it wasn’t even a good one,” “I only want sympathy in the form of you crawling into bed with me,” “douse yourself in cheap perfume/ so fitting of the way you are/ and you can't cover it up,” are all excellent ways to tell a former significant other to fuck off.
I don’t know anything about the lead singer, but he seems like an all right guy, and I think he has a good voice for the music he makes. The guitarist seems like a decent guy. One of the rooms in his house is filled with nothing but guitars and Star Wars memorabilia, and not rich person merchandise; rather, it’s filled with the same crappy figures we can all get from Target and flea markets. The drummer is a huge comic book dork and is actually starting his own comic company.
I just sort of hate their bassist. The guy’s goddamn everywhere, and he seems dead-set being the face of youth culture, despite being twice the age of all the fifteen years olds that worship Fallout Boy. You can buy the clothes he wears, because his fashion line designs them. You can drink his drinks at his clubs, which he’s opening as a national chain, complete with merchandise.
Isn’t that the exact opposite of what he’s supposedly about?
For someone who is supposedly a free spirit, marching to the beat of his own drummer, and, wait for it, punk as fuck, he seems pretty goddamn set on getting everyone to think, look, and act just like him.
Just because the people you hate don’t wear the same clothes you do, it still doesn’t make the shit you’re wearing not main stream, nor that you’re making a point. The skulls on the wall at Hot Topic don’t make it any different from Hollister or Forever 21. They’re the same species of monster eating a different demographic.
Oh, and it’s not a dive bar if there’s more than one and each one is designed to be a dive bar. Dive bars just kind of happen, and having a mission statement, or designing everything to exacting punk rock specifications, is just like building a fucking Fazoli’s and then trying to convince everyone it’s authentic Italian.
According to a quick Google search, the guy is dating Ashlee Simpson. Think about that, and now add the brothers from Good Charlotte who are dating Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton.
Now take away the money, the fame, and influence from all six of them, and put them in high school. What you have is a drastically changed social circle. These guys are dating the chicks that wouldn’t take a second look at them during their awkward teen years, but now they’re rich and famous, so bring it on, baby.
I’m pretty sure that’s one of the definitions you’d find under the encyclopedia entry for “hate-fucking.”
For all the posturing and the “I-don’t-give-a-fuck” attitude they’re all guys who wanted to be cool in high school, and now, at long last, they can make that happen. They’re adored by all the underclassmen, everyone wants to dress like them, they’re driving nice cars, and dating the most popular girl in high school.
I’m not begrudging them.
I would have liked to have been cool in high school, but I got dealt a bad hand; I love fried food, comic books, and the A/V club, so I had no chance, fine, whatever. But I’m not trying to manufacture the high-school-loner-I’m-off-beat-cool-and-unconventionally-hip-a-true-diamond-in-the-rough persona. And I don’t meant “manufacture” in the sense of the kid who just painted his nails black and is trying way too hard; I mean literally manufacture: clothes, jewelry, and music. They are creating a culture that is supposedly defined by the fact that it cannot be created. It can only happen.
When they put on their tight black t-shirts, black fedoras, hoodies with pictures of skulls, guns, bombs, and roses on them, and brass knuckle jewelry, do you think they giggle to themselves? When they’re putting the exact same picture of Johnny Rotten* in the exact same position in their numerous clubs in numerous cities, do they hear their album playing the background or the cash registers going off in their heads?
*also a manufactured punk
Goddamn, what a racket. I think that’s the ‘why’ in the “‘why’ do they bother you?” They’re the same person I was trying so hard to be when I was sixteen and trying to impress people, except they’re making millions for it, and I had to grow up and throw away all my t-shirts with the ‘anarchy’ symbol printed on them.
Matt