There’s always that one day, week, month, year for a member of a fandom where you sit at your computer and look up everything there is to know about your particular obsession. I have done it for all of my fandoms (William Beckett’s, of The Academy Is…, middle name is Eugene. Brendon Urie of Panic! At The Disco was recently diagnosed with ADHD, and Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance was in a production of Peter Pan when he was younger). So it goes without saying that there was a time where I sat at my computer, listened to a song, and then proceeded to scour the internet for every tidbit of information about Fall Out Boy.
This was how I stumbled upon a hard-to-find, and impossible to buy, album called CitizensFOB Mixtape: Welcome to the New Administration. This was an absolutely incredible viral campaign that promoted Folie à Deux. At the time, however, people thought that the campaign had something to do with Barack Obama’s election platform. In all honesty, I thought that too. There was this whole conspiracy that the FOB meant “For Our Betterment”and I totally bought it. Only, I knew it also stood for Fall Out Boy. I thought they were one and the same. Turned out, “For Our Betterment” was just a red herring.
You still cannot buy this album. It has to be downloaded from some tiny, hard-to-reach website on the internet and then unzipped. I had totally forgotten about this album until just before I started writing this post. Hopefully I made the right choice in writing about it. Maybe a few FOB appreciators will go out and find this album. Here’s one of the tracks to convince you to do just that:
Catch Me If You Can/Proclamation of Emancipation (ft Travis McCoy)
The Mixtape included snippets of a bunch of Decaydance songs in either draft or produced form. It came at an important time in my life, though I didn’t know it at the time. This tape was just before the Panic! At The Disco split AND the Fall Out Boy hiatus. It was the last shred of normalcy before my childhood fell apart. “Nearly Witches”, a song from Panic’s Vices and Virtues, was included under the nom de plume “The Paul Revere Jumpsuit Apparatus”. But an earlier version; very different from the one we know now. Then there was also “ALPHAdog and OMEGAlomanic” before FOB’s Greatest Hits CD, a snippet of “I Don’t Care” to promote what was to become the first single from Folie à Deux, and a demo called “Lake Effect Boy”. There were spoken word snippets from Decaydance artists (another reason I thought this was a political album), who said their piece about albums and singles and such but always ended with “Welcome to the new administration”. I was actually really excited that my boys and girls from Decaydance were supporting politics. But FOB had me duped. And can you blame me? Check out the album artwork!
If you are interested in finding this album – and you should be – you can download it here. Go nuts! And welcome to the new administration.
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- Throwback Thursday With Panic! At The Disco! (bmshook3.wordpress.com)
- Folie à Deux (2008-2009) (harrbr.wordpress.com)
- Panic! At The Disco’s Brendon Urie: Fourth Album Is A Confessional (hollywoodlife.com)
- Review: Fall Out Boy fails to `Save Rock and Roll’ (mercurynews.com)
- Sugar, We’re Goin Down to Nashville: Country Discovers Fall Out Boy (thenew1037.cbslocal.com)
- Pop-Punk to the Rescue! Getting Rid of that Nagging Anxiety (poppunkworld.com)
- Countdown to my date with Fall Out Boy – 8 days to go (infernalimagination.wordpress.com)
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- Countdown to my date with Fall Out Boy – 6 days to go (infernalimagination.wordpress.com)
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