#migos

Takeoff has passed away at the age of 28.

Fall Out Boy’s Make America Psycho Again Was Ahead Of Its Time

There needs to be a case study done on Fall Out Boy’s post-hiatus material, because people seem to love it or hate it. Newer fans that got into them when they came back in 2013 seem to love it, but the older fans don’t care for it. Thankfully, I believe in nuance, where two things can be true at once: their older material is “better,” but mainly because of nostalgia, and their post-hiatus material has plenty worth going back to. I’d easily go back to albums like 2023’s So Much (For) Stardust, or 2015’s American Beauty / American Psycho. I’ll kind of be talking about the latter today, but not the actual album. Some time after they released the album, they dropped a remix album called Make America Psycho Again.

Now that title has not aged well at all, as Donald Trump has become a shit stain that the United States keeps trying to wipe away but diarrhea keeps coming out. Truthfully, it really didn’t age well the second it came out, but I get the idea. The album was a remix album through and through; it didn’t just feature a rapper on every song, but the production was redone on each song to make them a hip-hop track. It’s super cool, but a lot of diehard fans really hated this album. I can’t lie and say I don’t get it, at least in retrospect, but as a huge fan back then, I hated that people wrote off anything they did as being a “sellout move.” I kind of think this album was ahead of its time, especially with the band trying to break down barriers with genre.

You see that a lot more now, but rock music was stuck up its own ass a decade ago. A lot of rock bands hated being associated with pop music, but not Fall Out Boy. Makes sense, as vocalist Patrick Stump made a pop album during their hiatus, and the band is very much into pop and rap music. While American Beauty / American Psycho was a successful album, this remix album was kind of forgotten about. Hell, I forgot about it when I talked about American Beauty / American Psycho for its tenth anniversary last year, so I guess that’s why I’m talking about this now. I rediscovered it recently, and I decided to spend some time with it, just to see how it’s held up over the past decade. Honestly, it’s held up well, but it has its issues that prevents me from saying this is their best album or something like that. That said, there is a lot to really like about this album, and it’s mainly Patrick Stump, which is a great or terrible thing depending on who you talk to.

Unfortunately, the rest of the band takes a backseat on this album, but it’s in favor of hip-hop production. Producers like Zaytoven, Childish Major, and ID Labs came in to bring a hip-hop flavor to the record, especially a 2015 flavor. That’s one issue I have with the album, actually — as much as I like it, it’s a very dated album in that it sounds like it could have only come out in 2015. That also comes into the fact that almost every rapper featured on the album was popular in the early 2010s, and only a handful are still relevant. For every rapper like Wiz Khalifa, Migos, Black Thought (from the Roots), or Juicy J, rappers like UZI, OG Maco, and Azaelia Banks appear. I’ll admit that a bunch of these features still sound great, especially Migos (RIP Takeoff), A$AP Ferg, and Juicy J, even if they sound dated.

Stump’s vocals fit so well with this production, too; his voice rides a lot of these beats, but they’re not very far removed from the original songs, either. Some songs, such as “Uma Thurman,” get a dancier feel to them, whereas songs like “Irresistible” and “Jet Pack Blues” have these sick trap beats that I can’t get enough of. The songs basically became something new, almost a Frankenstein’s Monster, if you will. It shows how music can be interpreted different ways, but I love it. I won’t say this album is an essential piece of Fall Out Boy’s discography, but it’s a cool little album that I think holds up relatively well. The rappers they enlist range from really solid to completely forgettable, but the songs themselves are pretty fun and they have some new life in them. Patrick sounds incredible, and the songs are still super catchy, but it’s cool hearing hip-hop production behind the band.