"I'm like Pete Wentz with the Way I'm Always Trying to Piss You Off "

Let me go on record by saying that I hate Fall Out Boy. So much. They are the boy band for the new millenium. The N'SYNC for 2008. I know they've been around for the past few years and had major success last year but they're the closest thing we've seen since 1998 to a boy band. If you think they aren't, you are wrong. Here are some correlations:
1.) Pete Wentz: He's the Justin Timberlake of the group. The Nick Carter. The Nick Lachey. The...whoever was in charge of O-town. He's the bands face; the thing you immediately think of when you think "Fall Out Boy."
2.) Patrick Stump: He's the sidekick. The J.C. Chasez to Pete's Justin Timberlake. The soft-spoken "other guy" who has a very limited fan-base and would probably not do too well if he were on his own.
3.) The other two guys: The drummer and other guitarist are the faceless backdrop on which Fall Out Boy was assembled. The guys who just look normal and who don't have a persona. While Pete might be the "bad-boy" and Stump might be the "soft-spoken" one, the other two are just "there." They're the kinds of guys who can only be famous by name-dropping the band's name or by coming out of the closet. These guys thank God everyday for VH1's celeb-reality.
4.) The way they dress: You might think that these guys just wear "whatever" on stage but its a carefully thought out strategy which is designed to get you to buy colorful hooded sweatshirts, girl's jeans and eye-liner. Hot Topic has FOB to thank for all of their success and fan-base.
5.) Fan-base: This is most telling sign of a band's boy band status. I recently visited FOB's blog on MySpace and literally 70% of people who comment on the blog are girls, ages 17 and under (There were a few who were listed as being 99 years old, so its probably more like 100%). Who has this many teenage girl fans? Boy bands. And other shitty pop-punk acts like Green Day and Blink-182, et al. Other fans are those who listen because the music brings them back to the "good ole' days" when life was easy and trying to impress some girl in high school was all they knew. No self-respecting young adult can seriously consider Fall Out Boy one of their favorite bands. Plain and simple.
6.) Lack of Talent: Let's just get it out in the open, FOB are terrible live. Yeah their studio albums might sound fine but that's what a 7 figure budget and a vocal processor the size of a Volkswagen will get you. Matt Kic summed it up nicely when he said, "At least boy bands can sing." While wikipedia-ing the band I ran across an interesting factoid: Would-be drummer Patrick Stump was "promoted" ? to lead singer once his "vocal range was discovered." I'm speechless.

Talk to any Fall Out Boy fan and one of the first things they will argue is that the band "makes a lot of money." Is this supposed to make them good by default? By that logic cigarettes should be the second coming of Christ. Just because something makes someone else money doesn't mean its necessarily a good thing. Its not the bands' wealth that pisses me off, though. I could understand if they made most of their money from selling albums but the sad fact is they don't. Their name was stamped on the hood of a Honda Civic and they were chosen (read, paid handsomely) to headline the Honda Civic Tour. If I'm going to get my musical tastes from anywhere, its going to be from a Japanese car company. Also, Pete Wentz plays a Fender Squier bass. The guy can't even play bass well enough to have an actual Fender signature bass. If you don't think FOB is the worst band around right now, let me give you some hard, factual evidence, as provided by YouTube. The singing in the chorus is probably some of the worst singing I've heard.



How can people still think these guys are in any way talented. For comparison, here's a video of My Morning Jacket; a band with indescribable amounts of talent and a huge, full sound.



So there it is; my step-by-step look at the re-pussificiation of pop music as we know it. All ushered in by a group of talentless pretty "boys" whose main goal in life is to see how many paparazzi photos of Ashlee Simpson they can find their way into.

Testing 1-2-3

Given the sub-par quality of MySpace's blog function and a general need to be self-involved, I thought I'd give this blog thing a try. This page will probably be a collection of various rants and raves (mostly rants) of all the things which surround my daily life.

Matt Greff recently added the "Stumble" feature to my Firefox toolbar. Its is the most addictive thing I've ever seen. If you don't know, "Stumble" asks you to list your interests and then, after you save them, it sends you to randomly selected webpages which are related to those interests. Since we were drunk when he added it, some of the interests I selected were things I would not normally be interested in. Linguistics and conspiracies, for example. Most of the webpages are amateur pages dedicated to 9/11 conspiracy theories and the Kennedy assassination. Useful information, obviously. If you're looking for something new to waste your time, other than my blog, of course, add "Stumble" to your Firefox browser. If you don't have Firefox , quit being a woman and download it.

Bought an iPhone Saturday. It's seriously the coolest electronic device, maybe even the coolest consumer product, of our generation. Yeah, the touch screen is cool and the interface is really stunning, but its the little things that make it so special. For instance, we were driving around last night and talking about that new movie Strange Wilderness and how funny that scene from the previews is where Steve Zahn is making fun of the shark. Well I pulled it out and got on You Tube and found it and we all watched it in the car a couple of times. Could I have done that with a normal phone? Maybe a few but none would have done it so effortlessly and quickly. Anyone who dislikes the iPhone is a pussy. Plain and simple. " I can instant message with my phone! Can your iPhone do that? Didn't think so." Yeah it can, but it doesn't need to sponsor AOL instant messaging to do so. Its called text messaging. And your conversation is laid out just like an instant message, there's no needless back-pedaling to see what your last message said. Just embrace the technology and get off your hipster-hating bandwangon (I'm not implying I'm a hipster; rather, I think most people have a view of Apple customers that's very incorrect.).

Jeremy Clarkson has the best job in the world. If you're not familiar with Clarkson, he's a British TV personality who hosts a show dedicated to cars called Top Gear. He also writes columns for various British publications. What makes his job so cool is simple: He gets paid to test drive really, really cool cars and talk about it. This is my dream job. Here's a video of Clarkson test driving the Areil Atom:





Pretty cool, huh?

Okay, I guess this concludes my first blog. I'll probably "regularly" update this thing so check back if the mood strikes you.