The Song
Title: Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying (Do Your Part to Save the Scene and Stop Going to Shows)
Artist: Fall Out Boy
Album: From Under the Cork Tree
Year: 2005
The Story
Am I about to spend a dozen paragraphs making fun of “Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying (Do Your Part to Save the Scene and Stop Going to Shows),” a song whose title is seemingly longer than the novella it references?1 Yes, I most certainly am. But as the great Michael Wilbon is fond of saying, two things can be true. So while I’m about rag on a track that stands as maybe the single most illustrative example of emo excess, please also be aware that this song slaps, from its killer verse to its comically-overdone-but-still-great bridge, which is really just that verse again.2
Alright, so in 2005, everyone hated emo which, by that point, had become an inescapable, oversaturated cultural phenomenon.3 I mostly blame Dashboard Confessional’s “Vindicated.” That summer, if someone had managed to make eye contact through your swooping, jet-black bangs long enough to ask you if you were emo, you’d’ve felt a surge of shame and screamed “no!” like the second vocalist in an emo band. Local news stations were running hard-hitting investigative reports on the scourge of the emos. Even emo bands didn’t want to be emo. And here comes Fall Out Boy with a song so perfectly sculpted by emo’s genre tropes that you’d be able to recognize its shadow in a cave.4
Where to even begin? Let’s go with that song title which features more words (19) than a haiku has syllables (17), references a movie that has nothing to do with the song’s content,5 and includes a parenthetical that reads less as witty and sardonic and more as petulant and whiny. Look, I’ll admit that I’ve got some blood on my hands when it comes to naming songs after other tenuously-related-at-best shit,6 but this combination of length-plus-non-sequitur-plus-winking-comedy was insufferable at the time. It’s downright painful now.
The song’s lyrics? Even more on brand. The chorus has a combination of pettiness and not-actually-clever wordplay that could have been lifted directly from two frenemies going at it during a junior high dance. Let’s go to the tape:
I know this hurts / it was meant to / your secret’s out / and the best part is / it isn’t even a good one / and it’s mind over you don’t matter
Ouch! No one’s going to want one of your friendship bracelets with that kind of attitude.
The second verse carries on the juvenile sneering as vocalist Patrick Stump seems to mock the band’s critics for “falling apart to songs about hips and hearts,” which is not as cutting as he seems to think it is and also seems to be an admission that the band’s songs are kind of vapid? The tone is of the “what are you mad about, I wasn’t even being serious” variety. Charming! No wonder emo had become the new disco.
Still, some deserved praise: The melody of this song’s verse rips, and it’s a legitimately interesting creative choice that such a great melody was used for the verse rather than a chorus.7
The sonic and rhythmic structure of that verse is then put to use in the song’s second-boldest gimmick: Pete Wentz and Patrick Stump trading off words and phrases in the back-and-forth stereo vocals of the bridge. I love production chicanery as much as the next guy,8 but this plays out in a truly ridiculous manner. There’s no logical reason, musically or lyrically, for these lines to get carved up like this. It makes no sense at all. That said, it’s pretty fun?9 Some things are both dumb and fun and this is one of them.
Fittingly, the bridge crescendos with another trope that seems even more preposterous, albeit understandable, given the fads of the time: Wentz and Stump fully scream the concluding line. Fall Out Boy! Screaming! Put this on a plaque with Paramore’s “My Heart” and send it directly to the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame for inclusion in the broom closet where they’re keeping all the other screamo artifacts.10
Of course, that performance is undercut seconds later by the song’s boldest gimmick, which happens to be the nadir of a truly disastrous emo trope: the spoken-word monologue. Why was this a trend?! From Thursday’s Geoff Rickly babbling about “paper scraps” in “I Am the Killer” to Andrew McMahon spelling out his questionable laundry routine in Jack’s Mannequin’s “I’m Ready,” spoken-word passages had become a pox on the scene. Were emo acts jealous of how cool hip-hop seemed? Was everyone really into slam poetry? I didn’t get it then and I don’t get it now.
Wentz’s contribution here is egregious not only for serving no purpose in the song—it’s just bolted on at the end, apropos of nothing11—but also for its genre-defining melodrama. “Now talking’s just a waste of breath, and living’s just a waste of death,” Wentz tells us, treating moderate heartbreak with the unhinged histrionics of a distraught Victorian prince.12 I have said before that I don’t believe in guilty pleasures in music—listen to what you like! it’s all subjective, people—but if someone walked in while Wentz was rambling about “the same old loneliness” I would slam on the pause button faster than a teenaged boy scrambling to close a Pornhub tab when there’s a knock on his door.13
And yet! After all of that, we have to go back to Wilbon’s Theorem: Two things can be true. This song is utterly ridiculous, but it’s fun. Just like emo, really.
The running bit of this newsletter demands that I’ve got to score this complicated mess of a song, and since I don’t love the thing—which is usually my threshold for a five-star rating—I can’t give it full marks. But it is great, in its weird way, so this should be a four-star track. But, to the song’s detriment and my everlasting distaste, that spoken-word outro is just terrible. I have to dock it a point. The result:
I give “Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying (Do Your Part to Save the Scene and Stop Going to Shows)” three out of five stars.
The song’s title—or at least the part that fits outside the parentheticals—was almost certainly taken from 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption, but that film was based on Steven King’s 1982 novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. The line in question appears in both the novella and the film but the word-count joke really only works if I reference the novella. And now, by explaining it, I’ve killed what small amount of humor was there in the first place. Writing is fun!
The verse here is so good that I’m willing to overlook the identical rhyme of “matters.”
Here’s where I have to make the academic distinction that I’m talking about third-wave emo, which is not to be confused with the genre’s hardcore roots or its “midwest” incarnation or its “revival” or when—actually, you know what? It doesn’t have to be this hard. Think about a band, any band will do. Are they emo? Whatever you answered is correct. That’s all the definition we need.
Songs & Stories: Come for the song recommendations, stay for the philosophy jokes.
But earlier in the post, didn’t I say the title was from a novella? You must have skipped Footnote #1. Try to keep up.
Boy howdy, did my college band do this. And since I was naming the songs … well, at least I kept my references to Poe, Capote, and Whitman short and tied to the songs’ subject matter. It’s also important that your unconnected cultural allusion points to some work of art that is materially greater than your emo song. So you get Fall Out Boy referencing Shawshank and Casablanca, Panic! At the Disco pulling quotes from Chuck Palahniuk novels, and Underoath repurposing Tolkien.
(A rare exception to this rule: No offense to Chucky P., but I prefer the Panic! record.)
We’ll keep the really academic stuff to the footnotes: I’d argue that the verse is so effective because it plays a neat little trick on us. The opening bit—“this has been said”—features an exact repetition of a two-note pitch and rhythm. And then the next bit—“so many times that”—enters (“so”) with what seems like more repetition, only to introduce more syllables, new pitches, and a faster pace. Then the line partially resets with “I’m not,” since those words are back on the “this has” structure, before concluding—“sure if it matters”—with a recap of the same melodic and rhythmic ground, but featuring the new wrinkle of using the same melodic intervals at higher pitches.
All of that is to say that, after the structural repetition we hear in those first few words—“this has / been said”—our brains expect more of the same, and when that “so” hits, it seems like we’re going to get it, only for the song to deliver something different. But the variation is slight. It’s different than what we expected, but not that different. The result is both surprising and comforting, an exciting bit of novelty that still fits mostly within our expectation. It’s my belief that this balance of newness and familiarity is at the heart of most successful pop music.
More than him, most likely.
The internet tells me that Fall Out Boy has never played this song live and I partially wonder if that’s because Wentz and Stump didn’t want to have to manage singing “this / been / so many times that / matters” or “has / said / I’m not sure if it / matters” without filling in the gaps. Because of course your brain wants to fill in the gaps! It’s nonsense otherwise.
More quick praise: Once he gets to take full control of the melody again, Stump recites those key lines again with real power—as far as I’m concerned, those two lines may be his best performance in the band’s catalog.
Like the horrible rap that Stephan Jenkins bolted on at the end of Third Eye Blind’s “Summer Town.” God, I hate that rap so, so very much.
The extreme stake-raising here sets this type of melodrama-about-nothing apart from songs like The Starting Line’s “The Drama Summer,” of which I said, “Is it objectively silly to be in love with someone that you met two weeks ago in a high school cafeteria? Sure. Is it even sillier to be utterly destroyed when that not-quite-epic romance comes crashing down a mere two weeks later, this time in a mall food court? I mean, yes, of course. But the silliness doesn’t make the emotion any less real, doesn’t lessen the lived experience of love and heartbreak … It is possible to feel something extreme without extreme circumstances.” I stand by it.
I had been working on this piece for a few days when I was invited to join Music League with some friends—it’s basically a fantasy sports league but replace the athletes with songs and the game results with anonymous voting from your buddies. One of our first categories was “Guilty Pleasures” and, despite my stance against feeling guilty about enjoying music, this was the song that I felt best fit the bill, so I submitted it. In addition to murdering this song, we can add my standings in Music League to the list of Wentz’s spoken-word victims: “Get Busy Dying” got me last place in that event.