From Under The Cork Tree Turns 20

"AM I MORE THAN YOU BARGAINED FOR YET?" is the perfect introduction to Fall Out Boy, and for millions of listeners, that's what it became.

Patrick Stump belts that opening line to "Sugar, We're Goin Down," the band's breakthrough single, like he's broadcasting a warning: Our band is a lot, and there's a lot more where that came from.

Many hits, two generations of fans, and countless LiveJournal posts scrutinized like the color of The Dress later, Fall Out Boy are one of the biggest rock bands of the 21st century. Their mainstream shenanigans trace back to From Under The Cork Tree, which turns 20 this Saturday.

I was 16 when Cork Tree dropped, highly invested in being part of what kids like me called "the scene," or what more skeptical outsiders called "pop-punk," "emo," or "embarrassing." Fall Out Boy's 2003 debut Take This To Your Grave made the Chicago quartet about as big as you could get within said scene without crossing over to the normie masses. You got the sense Fall Out Boy yearned for emo-pop stardom, and there'd been years of priming for it. In 2002, Jimmy Eat World hit with "The Middle" and Dashboard Confessional did MTV Unplugged. 2003 saw the apex of Taking Back Sunday's very silly feud with Brand New. And in 2004, a band called My Chemical Romance started getting radio play. Hot Topic emo was huge, but none of these bands pushed buttons and pissed off purists quite like Fall Out Boy.

Bassist Pete Wentz and drummer Andy Hurley had been raising hell in the Chicago hardcore scene since the late '90s, until Wentz, bored with windmills and floorpunching (and perhaps with being broke) enlisted vocalist-guitarist Stump and guitarist Joe Trohman for what he was calling"a weird pop-punk band." Fall Out Boy's early shows and recordings were far from memorable, until they began to realize the dizzying sum of their parts. A soul singer. A prodigious metalcore drummer. A lead guitarist who could jangle it all together. A bassist/mascot who was already a minor celebrity in the Chicago scene.

Fall Out Boy were obnoxious, extra, and adept at catering to their fanbase: teenagers who hung out in malls, spent a lot of time online, and sought an identity via music that was, say, 30% edgier than pop radio. The homemade videos for TTTYG songs like "Dead On Arrival" and "Saturday" getting some Fuse and MTV2 spins helped, but the gospel of Fall Out Boy truly spread on LiveJournal and MySpace — online hubs that were, like the band, deeply self-obsessed and prone to using "swoon" as a one-word sentence. Fall Out Boy used social media to do things like answer fan questions, post cryptic Rushmore quotes, and use those Rushmore quotes to guide fans to secret Chicago shows (if a band called Saved Latin was playing, you knew what was up). Wentz's preferred platform was LiveJournal, where he'd drift between tour diaries and angsty prose poetry, profess his love for Morrissey and Where The Wild Things Are, and recount the time he lied to his doctor about chest pains so he could give his girlfriend an X-ray of his heart. Older punks, I'd imagine, found Fall Out Boy unrelatable or insufferable. Island Records, who'd helped finance TTTYG on the then-indie Fueled By Ramen, saw the obvious star potential and called them up to the big leagues for LP2.

By 2005, the scene was littered with secret major label money and lofty expectations. Thursday didn't turn out to be The Next Nirvana, but maybe it would be some other band hustling the Warped Tour circuit. Selling out didn't feel as catastrophic as releasing the dreaded flop record.

Wentz internalized the pressure and fell into dark, anxious cycles. He'd sleep on the floor in the middle of the day or walk up six flights of stairs because he'd stopped using elevators. Just before the band was set to fly to Europe in early 2005, he took a bunch of Ativan in a Chicago parking lot. A bit later, he called up his manager from inside his car, near-unintelligible. When I interviewed Wentz for my book in 2021, he explained: "I think I just wanted to shut my brain off, you know what I mean? It wasn't about, 'Oh, you know, like, I want to kill myself.' It was more like, 'I just want this feeling to stop.'"

Buildup to Cork Tree did include discussion of the incident, but it never took front-and-center the way it might today. I remember reading Wentz's account in Fall Out Boy's 2005 Alt Press cover story, but never really hearing anyone else unpack it. Maybe it's because mental health discourse was so stilted then. Maybe it's because kids would rather focus on Wentz's jeans. Maybe it's because the new songs were so good.

"Sugar, We're Goin Down," the lead single, is a masterclass in everything Fall Out Boy had been building: a booming Patrick Stump vocal hook, a chorus crunching mosh riffs into ear candy. Hearing those breakdowns on Z100 felt like an inside joke, as if my friends and I helped smuggle them somewhere they weren't supposed to be. And aside from the hardcore signifiers, it's still a pretty strange song for a breakthrough hit. It's overstuffed with tryhard lines and five-dollar words, sung by a gifted, yet marble-mouthed singer who wasn't great at enunciating (Watching you two from the closet? Watching YouTube from the closet?). More than anything, the song's success — 42 weeks on the Hot 100, peaking at #8 — spoke to how perfectly it captured the energy of overcast teens in 2005. Boy bands and nü metal were out, and kids who didn't vibe with "Candy Shop" or "Hollaback Girl" likely saw themselves in the song's iconoclast boy-with-antlers video.

"Sugar" was originally called "Down, Down," but Team Fall Out Boy rechristened it, knowing they couldn't lead with a song so similarly titled to the surefire hit they had up their sleeve next.

"Dance, Dance" was an even bigger split from VFW Hall Fall Out Boy: a propulsive soul-punk song built around an irresistible groove that encouraged hardcore dancing as much as actual dancing. It went Top 10, and not only were Fall Out Boy two-for-two, but they'd done it with a masterstroke pop song that never could have been pulled off by MCR, Blink-182, Green Day, or any of their other emo-punk contemporaries. If you ask me, point blank, to name the best Fall Out Boy song, the answer has always been "Dance, Dance."

Whenever I listen to Cork Tree for the first time in a while, I realize I forgot how heavy it is. Especially the second half. Drop-tuned ragers like "I Slept With Someone In Fall Out Boy And All I Got Was This Stupid Song Written About Me" and "Get Busy Living Or Get Busy Dying (Do Your Part To Save The Scene And Stop Going To Shows)" — we'll get to those titles in a bit — are heavier than anything on TTTYG and really just a fun-as-hell romp through what it would sound like if a chugga-chugga mosh band had a singer unleashing Motown vocal runs. There's also Wentz's emo slam poetry at the end of "Get Busy Living" (sample couplet: "Now talking's just a waste of breath AND LIVING'S JUST A WASTE OF DEATH!"). I won't try to pretend this was some "precursor" to the emo rap movement or whatever, but it does stand out as a very 2005 encapsulation of where Fall Out Boy's vibe was at. Again, you either ate this stuff up or absolutely hated it.

Which brings me back to those song titles. They were long and melodramatic, stuffed with parentheticals, and almost never came from the actual lyrics. They were readymade for MySpace selfie captions and AIM away messages to get your crush to write you back. Fall Out Boy weren't the first punk band to indulge in long song titles, but since no one had done it so famously, they became The Annoying Emo Band With Long Song Titles. Wentz's riffs ranged from showing off his taste in movies ("Nobody Puts Baby In The Corner," "Of All The Gin Joints In The World") to "Seven Minutes In Heaven (Atavan Halen)," which referenced his recent brush with mortality.

Maybe being into Fall Out Boy at 16 hardwired me to think like I've earned a PhD in Song Title Studies, but all this makes me think of Pearl Jam, the platonic ideal of Gen X rock, and the simple, one-word song titles that dominate their biggest album, 1991's Ten: "Once," "Alive," "Black," "Jeremy," "Oceans," "Porch." To me, it's hard not to read this as a testament to how un-precious Eddie Vedder and company were about the whole process. Especially when you consider PJ's distaste for self-aggrandizing celebrity culture. By 2005, generational attitudes were changing. And just like their fans who were oversharing their lives online to anyone who'd listen, Fall Out Boy were eager to give you way too much information.

Supply matched a surging demand. Cork Tree went Gold before Fall Out Boy's stint on the '05 Warped Tour and earned a VMA and a Platinum plaque by the time they headlined the hyped-to-death Nintendo Fusion Tour that fall. Opening the bill were Panic! At The Disco, a teenaged Las Vegas quartet Wentz had discovered online and signed to his new label, Decaydance Records. The fledgling band sounded a lot like Fall Out Boy, only reimagined by theater kids who'd just discovered all the MIDI instruments that come with GarageBand. Vocalist Brendon Urie sang almost exactly like Stump. "More of that, please," was kids' overwhelming response, as tour stops were hurriedly upscaled to accommodate the Panic! explosion. I could go on and on about how Panic! were arguably as big as Fall Out Boy by mid-2006, but as this pertains to Cork Tree, it's a testament to the album's gravitational pull that it opened a lane for another multi-platinum Fall Out Boy spin-off so quickly.

Wentz & Co. had taken the hardcore-gone-pop bit as far as it could go. Their next move was to become a pop band.

For better or worse, Fall Out Boy spent the rest of the Cork Tree cycle accordingly. Wentz pushed more Decaydance bands, like Gym Class Heroes, the Hush Sound, and Cobra Starship. He walked the runway during New York Fashion Week for his hoodies-and-studded-belts line, Clandestine Industries. He tried to break a MySpace-aping social media platform called Friends Or Enemies. He beefed with the Killers, mostly so he could say he'd discovered a better band from Vegas. He got to know Jay-Z and started dating Ashlee Simpson. He grew from Scene Celebrity to Actual Celebrity around the same time bloggers like Perez Hilton were inventing new ways to terrorize ascendant A-listers. Just as the term "dick pic" was entering our vernacular, Wentz was victimized by a photo leak that put the band in headlines for a brand new reason.

2007's candy-coated Infinity On High pushed further into pop, and by channeling Justin Timberlake and collaborating with Jay-Z, Fall Out Boy scored more than enough new fans to replace the ride-or-die TTTYG-ers they lost. This era of Fall Out Boy, however, was not sustainable. The quartet grew isolated and exhausted. 2008's Folie à Deux was a commercial disappointment. They went on hiatus a year later. It wasn't until 2013 that Fall Out Boy Inc. devised a more equitable model of world domination and launched another decade of hits, indoctrinating a new generation of followers who'd never so much as read a MySpace bulletin.

Kids build walls between themselves and older generations to be smartasses, but also for community and self-discovery. In 2005, Fall Out Boy embodied that division: an attention-seeking vacuum of a band forged on in-jokes, growing up online, and indulging your most annoying tendencies. Along with a shared sense of knowing Wentz was always kind of doing a bit (but somehow dead serious, too).

In the end, I think both Fall Out Boy and their skeptics turned out fine. Today, Wentz comes off as a well-adjusted dad who posts Halloween pics year 'round and is really into tennis and expensive doughnuts. Cork Tree is a classic; on the other hand, it's no accident some of the first/best bands from the emo revival — which called back to the genre's grittier, less poppy pre-MySpace era — formed right around 2005, as the scene frayed from all the excess. Forget punk, Fall Out Boy struggled to be taken seriously as a rock band back then; today, kids tag them "emo" right alongside Lil Peep, Nirvana, and "Mr. Brightside," so, hell, why argue? It feels good to be in on the joke.