Recently, I wrote a story on a pop-punk band that peaked about 10 years ago called Cute Is What We Aim For. They played at High Dive two weeks ago as part of the band’s 10-year-anniversary tour for their only commercially successful release. I was originally irked by the idea of some old one-hit wonder cashing in on the nostalgia of 20-somethings who used to shop at Hot Topic; after all, I used to shop at Hot Topic. I felt cheated after I interviewed the guys from CIWWAF and learned they haven’t written any new material since 2008. Who were they to stop making music for almost a decade and just jump back into the scene 10 years later? Then I considered why the band quit in the first place. They released a hugely successful album in 2006 through a small indie label. In 2008, after getting signed to Atlantic Records, their sophomore album flopped, and they were dropped from the record label.
With their first album, CIWWAF joined bands like Simple Plan, Paramore and All Time Low in pop punk’s brief venture into the mainstream of the early- to mid-2000s. “Punk” was the fashion, albeit in a mutated, commercialized way. Bands like CIWWAF took advantage of the industry’s demand for skinny, white hairless dudes with stretched earlobes and tight clothes. These pop-punk bands gave young audiences vague, sexual lyrics and formulaic verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-chorus structured songs.
CIWWAF’s career crashed right around the time pop punk fell out of the mainstream. The guys got discouraged and quit for a while. They worked day jobs for almost 10 years until now, when their old pop songs are suddenly “throwbacks” and their shows are well-attended by young adults who fondly recall what they used to listen to in high school.
While I personally find the songwriting of CIWWAF immature, boring and even misogynistic at times (see the line in the song “Newport Living,” “In every circle of friends there’s a whore / The one who flirts / And does a little more”), I do think there are some pop-punk bands from the 2000s who made decent music. Sure, we know them from our cringe-inducing memories of years ago, but even in a period many of us would like to forget, there were a few stand outs.
Consider My Chemical Romance, whose album, “Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge,” I recently revisited on a long drive across the state. Dueling distorted guitars certainly felt “punk,” if not in the quasi-political style of bands like Fugazi or the Sex Pistols, then at least in their harsh energy. Gerard Way’s voice was filled with emotion: He strained, it cracked and so it felt genuinely poignant. So what if the lyrics were unclear? Or corny? The occasional imagery of funerals, prisons, hospitals, graveyards, vampires and other horror elements are enough for me.
Fall Out Boy is another pop-punk act from the mid-2000s with music that still strikes a chord with me today. Here’s a band who used the pop-punk sound to their advantage, one who touched on unique poeticism while still using heavy, straightforward instrumentation to build energy but not scare away typical pop listeners.
In the end, I think what sets these bands apart from the run-of-the-mill 2000s pop punk is their vocals. Bands like CIWWAF use squeaky-clean, almost auto-tuned,high-pitched chants about seducing women. MCR’s Gerard Way gave listeners genuine voice cracks and horror-themed lyrics. FOB’s Patrick Stump seemed like a hopeless romantic at heart and had a unique vocal slur.
Still, I don’t think there is any success in recording music for these bands anymore. The pop-punk craze has come and gone. FOB came out with a couple of albums since 2013, both of which were met with poor reception. MCR called it quits after their 2010 release “Danger Days” The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys.” That’s not to say a comeback tour for any successful 2000s pop-punk band wouldn’t bring out fans paying inflated prices to hear their favorite throwbacks one last time.
