Fight With Your Bare Hands About It
a discussion of Paramore's "Riot!" with Carl Lavigne
About a year ago, some internet algorithm told me I would enjoy the work of Carl Lavigne, author of the excellent newsletter Shut Up, I Love This Song. Chalk one up for the computers, because Lavigne’s work is delightful and earnest and everything I love about musical criticism. So I was thrilled when Carl agreed to collaborate on a piece, and even more thrilled when we settled on Paramore’s iconic sophomore release, Riot!, as the subject of our discussion. We both had a lot of thoughts. Here’s a little mood music as we get started:
Carl
Riot! came to me like a call to adventure—first refused, then reluctantly accepted. My first-ever girlfriend was a huge Paramore fan, and I wasn’t onto them yet. I think I gave her brand new eyes for Christmas and she gave me A Day to Remember’s Homesick. Someday this will be a corny scene in a terrible A24 movie that will make me cry. We dated for barely a month. My first long-term relationship gave me a copy of Riot! because it had been gifted by someone else and they didn’t actually like it. I was a little ashamed back then of how much the music clicked for me. That person was big into Breaking Benjamin and Disturbed, and Paramore was too family-friendly. I know it seems hopelessly mainstream now, but in the very small town where I grew up, this kind of music actually felt deviant and defiant. I was exactly the target audience for the Bush-era mallmope megahits like American Idiot.
Brennan
After my college band had wrapped up practicing our wildly intricate, needlessly difficult prog-nonsense,1 we’d sit around playing Rock Band and Mario Kart 64 into the night. Since we were a five-piece and both of those games max out at four players, one of us was usually stationed at the computer in the corner, reading message boards and Myspace pages and sharing the good scene gossip with the rest of the group. That Fueled by Ramen had signed some pop-punk band with a 15-year-old singer was interesting, and that James Paul Wisner was producing their debut was mouthwatering. And then All We Know Is Falling came out and had, like, two-and-a-half good songs. But! Later that year, Paramore opened for an aging emo’s dream lineup: The Receiving End of Sirens, Acceptance, Cartel, Paramore. What a fucking bill. And when by-then-16-year-old-Hayley and Co. absolutely crushed their set, I couldn’t help but become invested. The eagerly-awaited Riot! dropped while I was working on an archaeological dig in West Africa (it was a whole thing), and despite the summer of 2007 being an aging emo’s dream release schedule,2 Riot! quickly carved out a starting spot in my listening lineup with its razor-sharp hooks and deceptive arena-rock chops.
Carl
There is probably nothing left to say about “Misery Business” but I would like to name my favorite section of that number as right after the bridge, when it’s only Hayley howling and Zac absolutely blasting the drums. Such a great break.
Brennan
I couldn’t agree more on that post-bridge excellence; that little bit of fry in Hayley’s voice is [chef’s kiss]. Skipping back a few tracks, and admitting that it’s not the best song on the record, I’d argue that “For a Pessimist, I’m Pretty Optimistic” is Riot!’s most underrated, particularly given that it’s got the album’s most chest-pounding moment: As the bridge comes in, the rhythm section goes to cut time, hammering out the downbeats to make everything feel huge, a finger-tapping solo rips past (!!), and Hayley eviscerates wimpy scene dudes by wailing “why don’t you stand up / be a man about it / fight with your bare hands about it now.” In retrospect, it’s for the best that Paramore didn’t further explore that metal-core impulse, but I continue to be ecstatic that they momentarily indulged it.
Carl
I think the verses on “That’s What You Get” have the most prescient guitar sounds of the record. There’s a watery delay effect on these bright little chords that feels right at home on the eventual opus After Laughter. Even if the less-loved Farro brother was bruising his guitar with butt-rock crunched chords, Taylor York always had an ear for the dreamier tones. York’s echo pedal also holds down “Let the Flames Begin,” which led to the very good “Part II” on Paramore. While “Flames” was a concert staple back in its era, it hasn’t been a regular on tour since 2014, which makes it underrated to me. I think it would be such an exciting (and maybe too easy) song to pair or mirror with “Part II” somewhere in the set. I am such a sucker for a double-time bass beat on the outro.
“Miracle” is also underplayed and underappreciated. The last really Christian-kind-of song before Hayley’s reassessment of faith on brand new eyes. “We’ll get it right this time / let’s leave it all behind / it’s not faith if you use your eyes.”
Brennan
Until I focused in on your cited examples of York’s jangly verse magic, it hadn’t occurred to me that, from an instrumental perspective, Riot! embraces the quiet-verse/loud-chorus arrangement almost to a fault. With only a couple of exceptions,3 the verse of every song on the record features either sparse, sustained notes/chords or palm-muted power chords before exploding into fully strummed choruses. It’s a testament to both the album’s production and Williams’ vocal performance that the energy never lags across the record and that the album’s sense of motion never deteriorates into a boring up-and-down volume rollercoaster. And while I’ll respectfully disagree with your assessment of “Part II,” which is saved from being a bottom-of-the-barrel track on the self-titled only because of that thrashingly good outro, I couldn’t agree more on “Miracle,” which is both deeply underrated and one of Riot!’s few songs that actually includes some six-string punch in the verse. Why wasn’t that one ever a single? I’m not a theist, but it seems wasteful to let a little hint of Christ stand between the masses and such a killer hook.
Carl
Going back to After Laughter, “Fences” feels like a dress rehearsal for the self-flagellating screeds to capital-F fame that Hayley eventually perfects on “Fake Happy” and “Idle Worship.” “Fences” seems sometimes directed outward at other unnamed artists, but listening now it seems to predict the band’s eventual fracturing and the public-relations fiascos of brand new eyes and Paramore. They haven’t played it since 2013, when even then it maybe was a little too on the nose. Also, what was up with bands doing these ragtime jive numbers in this era? My Chemical Romance’s “House of Wolves” and “Teenagers” both use a similar beat, as well as “Entertainment” by Rise Against. It’s sort of a carnival vibe, and I guess the sonic-shorthand for satire and crazed clowns was just in the cultural milieu. It feels very dated now, like a novelty track. The Gaslight Anthem did something like it too on “Casanova, Baby” and it’s just so clearly the weakest track on the record. I think “Fences” is probably the easiest to leave off this album, though I can see how it’s sequenced to lead into “Born For This.” “Fences” ends with that sardonic “you’ll go out in styyyyyyle,” and then the album closes in anthemic fashion, a sort of rebuttal or concession to the penultimate track’s predictions.
“We Are Broken” is probably also worth leaving off. Paramore could’ve made a whole career off bargain bin ballads like this, and I’m so glad they didn’t. This one is so earnestly post-9/11 it’s almost a parody. “Your arms / like towers / tower over meeeeee.” It’s giving American Flag slow-mo screensaver.
Brennan
I believe two votes constitute a quorum, so let’s just toss “We Are Broken” right now, as it’s definitely the album’s weakest track. “When It Rains” is such a better execution of Paramore-but-a-ballad, an approach that was taken to its logical conclusion with “The Only Exception” and then promptly eliminated from the band’s stylistic rotation, presumably because “The Only Exception” was so monstrously successful. Once you’ve climbed to the top of the mountain, I suppose there’s not as much joy to be had in going halfway up.
Counter to your point, though, I’ll continue to stan for “Fences” which, yes, has a novelty component to it—it’s arguably the weirdest song in the band’s catalog, though I will never stop laughing about the screaming in “My Heart”—but also has some of the more interesting melodic patterns on the record, from the bouncy verse to the languid first half of the chorus.4 If you want to say that the song is out of place on the record, well, it’s certainly sonically distinct from the rest of Riot! but I think that makes for a nice little palate-cleanser before jumping into the appropriately huge finale of “Born For This.”
Carl
The song I find myself replaying most often is “crushcrushcrush.” I don’t know what it is exactly, but it’s just off-formula enough to really differentiate itself. Hayley saves her vocal fireworks for the outro, instead speak-singing for most of the time. It’s got a very dance-pop beat—so bass drum forward. It’s just such a tense song. The bridge, to me, is the record’s best moment. Zac builds tension by opening and closing the hi-hat. “Rock and roll, baby / don’t you know that we’re all alone now? / I need something to sing about.” I love the vampy venom of this. It’s withering, it’s kind of funny, it’s very much the thing Taylor Swift is trying to do on a record like Reputation or The Tortured Poets Department. It’s also a great refrain built for an arena. “Born For This” might have the most obvious crowd-engagement back and forth on Riot!, but I’m far more compelled by Hayley demanding her audience give her something to sing about.
Brennan
The charm of “crushcrushcrush” is the song’s best part, that vibe of being something of a snot-nosed teenager, telling essentially everyone—critics, industry execs, basically everyone but the band and their fans—to fuck right off if they don’t like Paramore. Williams was so young for all of this but, with the exception of some “Misery Business” cringe and the light humor of “crushcrushcrush,” that youthfulness never really manifests as immaturity. In the latter case, at least, a taste of that attitude absolutely works. Of course, after playing “crushcrushcrush” roughly 8 million times in Rock Band, it is, for me, the album’s most oversaturated track, so I don’t return to it individually all that often. But, even in this Age of the Playlist, I’m an album guy, and as such, I’m partial to openers and finales and “Pessimist” and “Born For This” only reinforce that prejudice.
Carl
I definitely still spin Riot! without a special occasion. It’s great for driving and getting shit done. It’s still a fun singalong, and activates so many losers my age like sleeper agents, even if I do hear “Misery Business” semi-regularly at the grocery store self-checkout. If I’m picturing explaining to a kid who Paramore is/was, I can see them being pretty confused by the record, and writing most of it off the way I did the album cuts of Journey and the Stones that my parents would play. If the big guitars and chunky choruses aren’t already in your set of aesthetic interests, I’m hopeful Hayley’s insane vocal range could convert you, but I’m not certain it’s foolproof. Riot! tries a couple things, and it’s clear what stuck when you listen to follow-up brand new eyes. And like I said, once you reach After Laughter you can see Taylor York has always been Taylor York. Even when the pop-punk gloss fell out of favor, the band still had songwriting chops to carry the day.
Brennan
Even though your praise was guarded, part of me feels like “it’s great for driving and getting shit done” is among the highest praise that any album can receive. Drive time is hallowed listening ground! Being so internalized that listening can make doing chores manageable is rarefied air for an album! And I totally agree on both fronts. I’m willing to guess that I come back to Riot! more frequently than you do, even though you’re right that the flavor here is mostly Millennial Journey. My love for the Paramore catalog is vast, though my preferences therein shift and change with the frequency of Williams’ hairstyles. Last summer, just ahead of seeing the band in Detroit, I ranked Riot! as their best album. A year prior, the same exercise would likely have yielded After Laughter at the top, and today I’d probably lean toward brand new eyes. Here’s what I’ll say for Riot! today: Slick as the production is, it’s not as refined a pop-punk record as brand new eyes, and neither of those albums holds a candle to the artistic maturity and creativity on display on After Laughter and, at least theoretically, This Is Why. It’s impossible to ignore that Paramore, as a band, has gotten better with age. But Riot! is appealing in the same way that the first few episodes of a great sitcom can be; here are all these characters and elements that you’ll come to love, not yet fully formed and with some rough edges, but with the core principles already in place—if you’re going to love what comes after, it’s because there’s something remarkable at the heart of what’s already here. There’s something uniquely endearing about that phase of an artist’s genesis, and Riot! is a shining example of it.
Carl
That said, I do hope This Is Why grows on me, but it’s certainly taking its time. The Trump diss track will probably age about as gracefully as “We Are Broken.” Cornyyyyy!
Brennan
I’ll never understand why she wrote a whole new diss track when she can just reuse that bridge from “Pessimist” as often as she needs it. Stand up, be a man about it!
A label I apply with pride because I dearly love that group of people and the wonderfully weird art we made together.
In addition to Riot!, the following albums dropped between May and August of that year: The Dear Hunter’s Act II: The Meaning of, and All Things Regarding Ms. Leading, The Format’s Dog Problems, The Receiving End of Sirens’ The Earth Sings Mi Fa Mi, Envy on the Coast’s Lucy Gray, and As Cities Burn’s Come Now Sleep. Jesus.
I’m proud of myself for not making an “Only Exception” pun here.
I think we have to credit Panic! At the Disco’s 2005 debut, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, as the original source of this fad, though, to the best of my knowledge, The Dear Hunter was the first band to permanently integrate this faux-vaudevillian vibe into their core sound. At least some quality moments came out of this trend, unlike the accursed spoken-word monologue disease that festered in the scene for years.