The All-Timers #9 - Fall Out Boy's "Thnks fr th Mmrs"
"Playing with house money" means gambling with chips you've already won. I had to Google that, though I use the expression all the time. I've only been to a casino once—in high school, some friends and I took advantage of a weird loophole that allowed us to play bingo at age 18 in a dingy room cordoned off from the 21+ areas. My familiarity with the phrase comes from cultural criticism. When an artist is working on their follow-up to a commercial smash and they take advantage of unlimited goodwill from their financial overlords, that's playing with house money.
You only really use the term when said artist is taking a swing. Staying in the poker game where you won all the money doesn't cut it—this is heading to the craps or roulette tables where you'd never be caught dead ponying up your pocket cash. Coldplay were not playing with house money on A Rush of Blood to the Head. Nor was Ridley Scott on Blade Runner—weird enough movie, sure, but my dude was coming off of Alien. It's not even Nirvana taking a hard left turn with In Utero. To embody the gambling metaphor, you have to use the newly available funds in a devil-may-care pursuit of bloated absurdism. I'm talking MGMT reacting against Oracular Spectacular with Congratulations, or James Cameron getting so high off Titanic fumes that he's spent the ensuing 28 years chasing the unicorn that is the Avatar franchise.
Four years ago, veteran punk critic Dan Ozzi put out a great book called Sellout (subtitle: The Major-Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore (1994–2007)). It follows 11 bands from eclectic subcultures who were snatched up by behemoth corporations drunk on visions of replicating the rags-to-riches success of Nirvana's Nevermind. They were all granted bottomless budgets, but those came saddled with draconian oversight that more often than not sapped the bands of their creative spark and spat them out after they failed to produce their own "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Only a few recouped their major labels' investments—Green Day, Blink-182, and to a lesser degree, My Chemical Romance—and only then were they given carte blanche to follow their creative impulses.
Fall Out Boy were not featured in Sellout, but they followed the same trajectory. Born out of Chicagoland hardcore scenes, they signed to a major in 2003, around the same time that MCR did. Their debut dropped that year, but it came out on an indie label. Their first legit Atlantic release, 2005's From Under the Cork Tree, hung out on the Billboard 200 for 78 weeks, 14 of those inside the Top 20, and it spawned two Top 10 singles, "Sugar, We're Goin' Down" and "Dance, Dance." Although more theatrical and more unabashedly poppy than anything from the debut, those two singles didn't stray that far from the band's established pop-punk/emo roots. But after that, the house money kicked in.
The signs were there over a year before the public got their first taste of Fall Out Boy's next album. In November 2005, frontman Patrick Stump told MTV that he wanted to work with Babyface, one of modern R&B's most decorated singer/songwriter/producers. At such a premature stage in an album rollout, this is the type of pie-in-the-sky vision-boarding that often doesn't pan out. Remember when Rage Against The Machine's Zack De La Rocha said he was putting out a solo album produced by DJ Shadow and Trent Reznor? Or when Lil Wayne and Juelz Santana spent years teasing a joint mixtape?
When Infinity On High arrived in February 2007, Babyface was indeed a credited producer, albeit for just two songs. The less successful of these, "I'm Like a Lawyer with the Way I'm Always Trying to Get You Off (Me & You)," is the tame end-result you might expect: Stump's affinity for R&B is sated by slightly groovier instrumentation and a tad-more-sugary-than-usual chorus, and not much else. But Babyface's other contribution, the song I'm highlighting today, features a downright batshit combination of elements. There's a straightforward Fall Out Boy song underneath it all, but "Thnks fr th Mmrs" strays wildly from both of its creators' wheelhouses. It is an unholy Frankenstein's monster of pop extremism.
I usually hate getting granular and dispassionately dissecting a song by its individual elements, but I feel like it's warranted here. The bells and whistles deployed by FOB and Babyface shift drastically from section to section, with the exception of the chorus, which unceremoniously scrubs each preceding idiosyncrasy to deliver clean-cut pop-punk. Here's what happens in the nooks and crannies:
Intro/First Verse
Gothic as fuck. And not in the '80s new wave way explored by Warped Tour contemporaries like AFI. No other emo band had these staccato strings and menacing brass stabs. Considering the time period, it's impossible not to draw connections to early trap music—I hear Young Buck's "Get Buck," Three 6 Mafia's "Who Run It," T.I.'s "24's"—but the live instrumentation sounds so much fuller than those hip hop synth presets. It wasn't until the early 2010s that Lex Luger would render street rap so baroque. This shit literally sounds like a predecessor to Waka Flocka Flame's Flockaveli and Rick Ross' Teflon Don.
Are these Babyface's fingerprints? Perhaps, but it's worth noting that Infinity On High courted hip hop elsewhere, tapping Jay-Z for the intro track and Kanye West for a remix of "This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race."
Once Stump and Pete Wentz start singing, the horns fade out and the strings get more intricate. The arrangement lasts less than a minute, but it's incredible—ornate without noodling, climactic with very little runway. The guitar, bass, and drums hang back but build to the chorus so it doesn't come out of nowhere.
Second Verse
The strings are still the guiding light, but they've moved on from the Renaissance. Now we get vaguely "Eastern" (I know, dumb and outdated terminology) melodies augmented by synths. There's a more equal balance with the rock instruments, but the strings are still doing the heavy lifting and driving the song forward.
Bridge
No more strings? That's okay, because for some reason there's flamenco-style acoustic guitar. The fact that FOB got their drummer, Andy Hurley, to throw castanets on top of this speaks to why I love "Thnks fr th Mmrs" so much. The stylistic shifts are constant, but never half-assed. The song fully commits to every ill-advised flourish. Midway through this bridge, Babyface comes swooping in with a mandolin, cementing the absurd image of Patrick Stump serenading us outside of a riverfront cafe in Seville.
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Having spent years marveling at this glorious mess, I was curious to hear how the band plays "Thnks fr the Mmrs" in concert as a four-piece without a bass trombone or castanet in sight. I guessed that it wouldn't live up to the studio version, and I was right.
It's not a bad song. The hook, in particular, is as sturdy as any mall-punk single from its era. But check out the video of "Sugar, We're Goin' Down" from the same 2007 concert. It hits so much harder. Seeing "Thnks fr the Mmrs" performed by an unadorned rock quartet confirmed what I already expected to be true: the superfluous, everything-but-the-kitchen sink elements are what make it my favorite Fall Out Boy song.
My FOB fandom is limited to a handful tracks from their first three albums. "Grand Theft Autumn" from Take This to Your Grave? "Our Lawyer Made Us Change the Name of This Song So We Wouldn't Get Sued" from From Under the Cork Tree? Obviously, "Sugar We're Goin' Down"? All incredible, and all more economical and streamlined than "Thnks fr th Mmrs." The rest of Infinity On High bears little resemblance to my favorite parts of "Thnks fr th Mmrs," but its overall ambition makes it the only FOB album I ever want to hear front-to-back
Fall Out Boy have gotten even more extra since 2007. Their biggest hit of the past 10 years, 2015's "Centuries," taps into Imagine Dragons-style stadium bombast. "Thnks fr th Mmrs" already teetered on my arbitrary boundary between good and bad taste—and that precarity is the main reason I love it—but everything since has tipped the scale in the wrong direction.
I recently noticed that I've been gravitating towards busy, ambitious, maximal music, and I explored that in my 2024 year-end newsletter. For years, I could never quite explain why I loved the trashy excess of "Thnks fr th Mmrs" so much, but this newfound realization put it into focus for me. FOB's later exploits are equally cluttered and gargantuan, but they're not nearly as inexplicable or shocking as the compositional choices made on this song. Pivoting towards the dominant mainstream rock sounds of the 2010s feels calculated; throwing Southern rap and Flamenco into a blender is just plain stupid.
Everyone with a functional brain recognizes that popular culture has stagnated in the 2020s. The 10 highest grossing films of 2024 were all based on existing IP (even the one I had never heard of, the Chinese-made YOLO, is an adaptation of a 2014 Japanese movie). There's still great art being made in every medium, and though I may feel like it's happening with less frequency than it did 20 years ago, that might just be a product of my age. What I can say with certainty is that the middle tier of big-budget art has vanished. Everything's either a massive safe bet or a shoestring-budget indie success. There's no longer room for asinine gambles like "Thnks fr th Mmrs" Playing with house money has lost all of its fun.