CRASH FEVER MUSIC PROFESSIONAL
CRASH FEVER MUSIC SERIES

Where other mainstream pop artists brought professional polish to their colorful dramatics, Panic! crested purely on the outlandishness of their garage-incubated ideas. Even without the resources of a major label, every video executed an intricate and sometimes nonsensical concept, complete with a sea of dancing extras and enough makeup to deplete half the production budget. Ross, Urie, and their bandmates, Spencer Smith and Brent Wilson, may have come from the cookie-cutter suburbs, but their style was weird and maximalist.

CRASH FEVER MUSIC SERIES

Wide-eyed and brokenhearted, these greasy-haired Nevada teens channeled their woes into elaborate, vaudevillian theatrics instead.įever’s music videos were larger than life, a series of vignettes that unwittingly reflected the prerecession excess of mid-2000s celebrity. They shirked political commentary, distancing themselves from the punk and nu-metal bands that proliferated in Vegas at the time. Nor did the band just strip down to raw emotion like Dashboard Confessional, or introduce itself with macabre imagery like My Chemical Romance. The songs “Nails for Breakfast, Tacks for Snacks” and “Camisado” chronicle Ross’s experiences navigating his father’s alcoholism, with the latter building to a defiant chorus: “Can’t take the kid from the fight, take the fight from the kid.” Yet Fever wasn’t all self-serious pondering and car-crash metaphors. Like other pop-punk bands whose saccharine musings soundtracked the mid-2000s, Panic! at the Disco made music that relished the agony of suburbia. As SPIN’s Emily Zemler wrote at the time of the record’s release, “The songs blend together into one seamless aural experience that worms its way into your head and mercilessly nests there.” By the following year, when “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” won Video of the Year at MTV’s Video Music Awards, the album was everywhere, whether you liked it or not. Like all good emo, the record was beloved by the most assiduous arbiters of feeling-teenagers, who embraced the band’s earnest yet playful approach to youthful angst. “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” took Fever to the heights of MTV’s Total Request Live charts, back when that was the ultimate marker of pop-cultural relevance. Along the way, it sneaks in some genre-characteristic misogyny, most notably in a line that feels tailor-made for skeptics to mock: “What a shame the poor groom’s bride is a whore.” “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” opens with creeping strings and builds to an impossibly catchy and now-infamous chorus. A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out was stacked with allusions to the kinds of books that crowded Urban Outfitters shelves: Much of the album was inspired by Chuck Palahniuk’s fiction, and its breakout single takes its name from a line in a Douglas Coupland novel. Their obsession with multisyllabic words ( nitroglycerin, surreptitious, caricature) made some songs feel like SAT essays. Panic!’s insistence on melodrama and literary flourish, shaped in part by the influence of Wentz and other labelmates, was easy to parody. Rock purists weren’t the only ones who rolled their eyes at the wordy song titles and self-conscious lyrics. But 15 years and a few band-member departures later, Fever still holds up as an audacious and unlikely classic-a polarizing product of its time that has continued to resonate with young listeners well after the glory days of emo and pop-punk. A lot has changed since the mid-aughts, when the airwaves were ruled by bands such as Paramore and My Chemical Romance, which sublimated young heartbreak into screeching ballads and whimsical stage plays alike. The debut album they released the next year, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, vibrated with the same anxiety that accompanied their cyber Cinderella story. “Pete had only heard, like, two to three songs, and all of a sudden we were expected to go and write a whole record.”

“There was a lot of pressure,” the lead guitarist and main lyricist, Ryan Ross, later told MTV News. In the blur that followed Wentz’s listening to their demos and deciding to sign them, Panic! at the Disco became a bona fide pop-punk quartet before they had performed a single show. (Nigel Crane / Redfern)īefore TikTok, SoundCloud, or even YouTube existed, four gawky teenagers from suburban Las Vegas found success by posting their music to an unlikely platform: the Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz’s LiveJournal page. Wide-eyed and brokenhearted, the greasy-haired Nevada teens of Panic! at the Disco channeled their woes into elaborate, vaudevillian theatrics.

Crash fever music