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Araceli Lemus-Carrera | BlogAuthor
Ah yes, the Fourth of July β the national holiday named after a Fall Out Boy song. A perfectly crafted lyrical masterpiece straight from the pen of Peter Lewis Kingston Wentz III, who has never in his life written a more desperate plea for the attention of a twink named Mikey Way.
Popular belief holds that Fall Out Boy is just misogyny wrapped together in a way no Chicago accent could enunciate. But are the lyrics really misogynistic if almost every single love song is about a man?
That's the thread we are unraveling today:
What is yearning? Yearning is wanting something just out of reach β the ache of almost, the reach that never quite closes. It's not heartbreak, because heartbreak means you had it and lost it. Yearning is worse: you never got it at all.
Which is exactly Fall Out Boy's whole bit. Nobody tugs the soul like a band that turns bro, you're not getting the guy into a four-minute love song. That's the pull β the lyrics don't just describe wanting, they make you feel the wanting, and then leave you sitting in it. And what you're sitting in, if we're being honest, is a situationship.
A situationship is the relationship that refuses to admit it's a relationship. All the feelings, none of the labels, zero of the closure. You're together enough to get hurt but not enough to call it anything β ouch. The not-knowing is its own kind of anxiety. So when the yearning in these songs lands a little too hard, that's why "Fourth of July" (one of my favorite songs) is more than just a mood disorder with a bassline.
Let's look at the first verse:
I'll be as honest as you'll let me
I miss your early morning company
If you get me
You are my favorite what if
You are my best I'll never know
Those two lines say so much β especially that tiny bit of reassurance that there was a possibility, that what if. And then comes the next line: You are my best I'll never know. So as listeners we understand that this is an insecure relationship, where there isn't really a committed relationship, just the idea of one β the fantasy of what could have been. And I feel like it could be, dare I say, relatable.
And I'm starting to forget
Just what summer ever meant to you
What did it ever mean to you?
The questioning for reassurance but there is a bit of weight to this whole q. What did that specific summer mean to you? There is so much lore to this story and it starts with "The Summer of Like" the festival where they both performed and had a summer fling and had that passion die down after Mikey's pic w/ a different lover leaked on some blog or something like that but regardless of this drama we continue to dissect the masterpiece lyrics of that New Mexico sunset:
Oh, I'm sorry I didn't mean any of it
I just got too lonely, lonely, whoa
In between being young and being right
You were my Versailles at night
Comparing someone to the beautiful lights of Versailles before it was cool. I mean just the sheer genius of this lyrics and then the chorus then comparing their "love" to Fourth of July fireworks that just happened to go off to soon (which I believe is a metaphor for their fling) it's possible it was a secret, in their own bubble of high emotions, high compatibility that resonates so well with the puppy love Wentz typically writes about. And again, this is the type of passionate writing I myself yearn for in my favorite artists. And speaking of yearning, unrequited love will most definitely have you feeling like this over a man (or woman or anything).
And Finally we get to my favorite part of the song:
I wish I'd known how much you loved me
I wish I cared enough to know
I'm sorry every song's about you
The torture of small talk with someone you used to love
I'm sorry every song's about you- Holy shit, I don't have asthma but I need an inhaler. That's basically half, no, more than half of Fall Out Boy's discography. Every song kind of sort of is ... about a twink who plays bass in My Chemical Romance. The heat of this situationship has marked the legacy of Fall Out Boy. I mean it has indirectly brought us fans so many bangers off of the tears of Pete Wentz but at least he can look back and be glad he at least monetized it. The yearning for what could have been, because our brains hate unfinished endings.
Happy Fourth! πΊπΈ
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-Celi β€οΈ
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