In Defense Of...Fall Out Boy - Infinity on High

Okay, let's get this out right off the bat. I can't stand Pete Wentz. Wentz is the embodiment of everything that's wrong with celebrity culture today. He's exploitative, overly demanding, and has almost megalomaniacal control over his band despite the fact that he's in the position that (theoretically) holds the least effect on their sound in that he's the band's bassist. Of course, he's also the band's key songwriter but this is besides the point. The point is that I really just don't like Mr. Wentz.

And yet I thoroughly enjoy his band, including the one that's earned them the most heat for its alleged "sellout" nature, 2007's Infinity on High. Infinity on High is essentially FOB's catchy melodies plastered onto a refined soulful sound with more emphasis on producer Babyface's sense of rhythm than the traditional pop-punk sound. But for pop-punk fans, that serves to be a problem. They don't want any remote change to their sound, thus why a band like Paramore, which arguably sounds like a coughed up copy of FOB (who in themselves were a coughed up version of Take Off Your Pants and Jacket-era blink-182 and Lifetime) replaced with an attractive redhead vocalist as opposed to a man with a funny hat, suddenly becomes huge with the same audiences that embraced 2005's From Under The Cork Tree.

Video for "The Take Over, The Break's Over".

Of course, it's not entirely the change in tone and altering of sound that fans hate, but it seems to harbor the most dislike for the record. And ultimately the record is a perfectly fine pop record that hits the right notes on all cylinders. Especially on singles like "The Take Over, The Break's Over" and "This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race", there is a nice containment of commentary on the modern music industry and Wentz *gasp* gets in a few clever well-written jabs.

Wentz gets the idea of the pop hook, something that nearly every song on Infinity on High has, and yet finds a way to change Fall Out Boy's trajectory. This isn't a sellout move, in all honesty. Well...technically, it is. But none of the tracks on Infinity are nearly as annoying as most of Cork Tree. And it's not like this band never had ridiculous pop tendencies to begin with. "Grand Theft Autumn" is amazingly poppy, almost moreso than any of their famous tracks like "Sugar, We're Going Down" or "Dance, Dance".

Video for "Grand Theft Autumn".


This isn't to say that Infinity on High is the best record ever, though. Just the best of Fall Out Boy's catalog so far. I still can't really like "Hum Hallelujah" as it's related to that coughing up part I brought up from later. (As in, it's reusing a line from "Hallelujah" due to Pete being inspired by Jeff Buckley who covered Leonard Cohen.) And that it seems kind of silly to write about how depressive and suicidal you are in the confines of a pleasant song, even if it's been brought up before as a cool ironic archetype from the 90s.

Still, I like FOB for their simplicity at the end of the day. People shouldn't apologize for making pop, and at the very least, Wentz and his group aren't full-on teases with zero sense for how to write like most pop artists of their time(that's meant in a musical sense, not in the "showing your privates" sense). They're not anything legendary, but neither is a group like the Foo Fighters, who do the same poppy hook formula and people like them all the same.