#fobmnl

Fall Out Boy x Manila 

A couple of months ago I took a lot of posters down, most of them band ones. I kept a few up: The Academy Is..., William Beckett, my two framed Why We Broke Up illustrations, Elision's February covers, a Vans ad, two of The Maine Pioneer World Tour in Manila, and a Fall Out Boy fold-out from 2006. The last, I kept up in hopes of the hiatus ending.

This February, when they announced their resurrection and mission to save rock and roll, I went up, looked at the poster—all fresh faces and slacker stances and guyliner—and thanked it. I did the same last night.

I'm going to make this short. I missed them the first two times they came here, but I didn't miss the third. I saw it from the very top of a stadium with friends and was awed by the lights, the sounds, the chemistry, the enormity. You couldn't make out any faces, but everyone's presence shone through.

Concerts are weird. You spend a lot of time waiting, two hours living in the moment, and the rest of your life looking back. The whole experience hurts: the standing, the loudness, the screaming, the moving, the restlessness. And after, the heart. But nobody minds, do they? For the time being, everything from exhaustion to personal space stops mattering. The dark suddenly becomes safe and beautiful. Blinding light suddenly keeps your eyes wide open. Somebody yells at you and you yell back, and it's almost a sign of love. You're surrounded, you're alone, you're together, you're separated, you belong, you stand out, all at once. Suddenly you understand what "community" means. Sometimes being like everybody else isn't so bad, after all. You feel everything, good, bad, worst, best. Oh, yeah, and by the way, that band or artist that's been living in your hard drive or CDs or other physical forms of music for the last who-knows-how-long? Definitely in the same space as you right now.

You've heard this song a million times. But right now, it's the first time you'll ever hear it and nobody's ever going to hear the same thing you're hearing ever again, or at all. There are some things unique to every person—fingerprints, DNA, perception of the world. What they don't tell you is that at a rock show, nobody hears a certain performance the same way. That one version suddenly multiplies to thousands. And every second, thousands of new stories are born, over and over, adding to histories that in turn add to lives.

Fall Out Boy were amazing. So raw and magnetic. Their skill comes not from experience (although it does play a part) but from passion. They want to be there, onstage, playing for people who listened and happened to like and live for what they heard, because that's what they're happy doing, and nothing else. Patrick's voice (literally HOW). Andy's incessant energy. Pete's spiels and spins. Joe's total guitar god status. I got to experience being part of a wave for the first time and listened to old favorites as well as new ones. ("Death Valley!") There's fact that this is continually twelve years in the making, and a take-that to four years of what-ifs and despair. Everything, is, of course, heightened and made more intense by the fact that exactly half a year ago, there was no Fall Out Boy to speak of, only a vague memory of what used to be that was now lying in wait, a self-imposed coma.

Don't get me wrong. That used-to-be still doesn't exist anymore. But in its place is a unit of four that still holds the same essence, only lovingly weathered and worn by years of changes, growing up and life in general. And we went through similar shifts. The more things change, the more they stay the same, right?

Physically, I was looking down at them, but I'd never looked up to them more in my life.

The title of this post is a jumble of vowels because it's meant to make something complete, the way the concert did in so many ways.

I'd say what a show, but it feels weird calling it one. It feels more like a homecoming. A gathering, a manifestation, a manifesto, a beginning, a destination, a means, an end, a catalyst, a revelation.

Now just a memory.

But that means you can keep it forever, if you try.