15 Years Ago, Fall Out Boy's From Under The Cork Tree Made Emo's Horny Sadness Mainstream

By Danielle Chelosky


2005 was much less of per year and more of a weird dream. For once, emo had struck the radio waves, unlike the genre’s previous eruptions in the 1980s and ‘90s. Panic! At the Disco — a fizzy young sort that played with gender image — sang a peculiar, noisy anthem about infidelity deemed catchy enough for Z100 rotation. My Chemical Romance’s legions of depressed teenagers in black eyeliner (the “MCRmy”) grew by minute after the release of the theatrical masterpiece Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. And Fall Out Boy’s seminal From Under the Cork Tree debuted at No. 9 on the Billboard 200 whenever it dropped on May 3 — 15 years back this week — and remained there for two weeks.


From Under the Cork Tree wasn’t meant to be a mainstream part music. In the opening minute, frontman Patrick Stump makes a casual allusion to self-harm (“The ribbon on my wrist says don't open before Christmas”) on a song titled “Our Lawyer Made Us Change The Name of This Song So We Wouldn’t Get Sued,” which is, on its own, something else to unpack. The track is a tongue-in-cheek track about fame and egotism. It’s also a whimsical introduction to a jam-packed record where FOB call themselves liars from the get-go.


Around this time, social media network Myspace became one of the opening online spaces into which teenagers dove headfirst, making use of it as a new form of self-expression. The crossover between Myspace and emo culture was unmissable. Communities came to life through the comments and messages, and music connected users to one another more than anything else. Fans chatted for hours, discussing their preference songs, their take on recent rumors, and their preference musical group members. Hyper-sexualization and self-deprecation became the new trend, making From Under the Cork Tree one of the most resonant pieces of music.


From jealousy to caution, Fall Out Boy’s horny moments are usually intertwined with something dark. There’s the casual “Oh, don’t mind me, I’m watching you two from the closet / Wishing to be the friction in your jeans” in “Sugar, We’re Goin Down,” which, nevertheless creepy, became a relatable line. Jealousy is at the forefront of “Nobody Puts Baby in the Corner," and Stump shamelessly sings: “Can I lay in your bed all day? / I’ll be your best kept secret and your biggest mistake / Hand beyond this pen relives a failure every day,” proudly taking on role because the mistake, which happens a lot on this album.


Today, the album might not seem particularly game-changing. Although the aforementioned hyper-sexualization and self-deprecation — which are both scattered playfully and meaningfully while in the record — have become integral parts of contemporary online culture for both teens and adults. Myspace is dead, yet it’s no longer “edgy” to spend all of your time oversharing and making companions on social media; it’s expected. So is being both “horny on main” and outwardly sad. Fall Out Boy chipped away at the idea that depression should be kept indoor, and the walls have since come crumbling down. The modern manifestation of Cork Tree is essentially a finsta or a Twitter meme account.


The musical meaning of emo as a genre has largely been overtaken by the world wide web culture of emo. Plenty of people who’ve picked up the phrase, “I’m emo,” would laugh if they heard songwriter Pete Wentz’s cringe-worthy poem at the end of “Get Busy Living Or Get Busy Dying (Do Your Part to Save the Scene and Stop Going to Shows).” “He mentioned why put a new address / On the same old loneliness / Any time breathing just passes the time / Up until we all just get old and die,” he speaks over no music before the song ends. As awkward as most of the lyrics were, they served because the best away messages. It almost made more sense online than aloud.


If there’s a modern musical group that exemplifies the way internet emo culture has infiltrated music since Cork Tree, it’s 100 gecs. The Outline likened their album 1000 gecs to “a neon-colored Twitter feed,” and the record incorporates a song titled “xXXi_wud_nvrstøp_UXXx” that sounds like the musical embodiment of an online connection between two Myspace emo fans: “Baby, you know that I got you / I might never stop you / I would never stop you / ‘Cause you know I’m crazy,” sings a sheepish, high-pitched, slightly electronic voice. It also reflects the same dramatized love that drenches Cork Tree.


One of the reasons the album resonated so heavily was because of its drama. Fall Out Boy turned all of those gritty emotions — depression, heartbreak, longing — into life-or-death scenarios. Quite possibly the most over-the-top track is “I’ve Got Dark Alley along with a Bad Idea That Says You must Shut Your Mouth (Summer Song),” the title of which tells you this musical group indulges in self-pity like it’s something to be overjoyed about. There really are no jokes in this ballad, just a flood of poetically dismal lines that have been turned into edits and reblogged tens of thousands of times on Tumblr.


That’s what makes it so bizarre to think about the way emo began as an extension of hardcore music, totally pre-internet, without consequences about culture. Right now, the moderation with the term “emo” grows wider and wider, which is how someone like Billie Eilish can some days get pegged with the term. Her fame came through SoundCloud, and she wears an emo persona: a young, black-clad, sad-aura outsider. Last year, she was even photographed with Wentz. Her music features a haunting, unsettling atmosphere, yet at its heart, it’s still pop.


Then, there’s the late Juice WRLD, who gushed over his love for Cork Tree in our 2018 interview with him. His hit “Lucid Dreams,” which has surpassed a billion Spotify streams, is infused with the same obnoxiously heartbroken energy noticed in Fall Out Boy’s “Sugar, We’re Goin Down.” Cork Tree in part begat the full emo-rap movement, as it made it cool to use music to be shamelessly sad. There’s a reason Fall Out Boy were featured on Lil Peep’s posthumous “I’ve Been Waiting” as a tribute, and  nothing,nowhere. remixed Fall Out Boy’s song “Church.” Wentz routinely had a soft spot for hip-hop, also, which accounts for the unexpected yet astonishing Lil Wayne feature on Folie à Deux’s “Tiffany Blews” in 2009.


The list of current self-identified emo bands who were influenced by Fall Out Boy is endless, whether they know it or not. From Under the Cork Tree set the groundwork for today’s humiliatingly despondent tunes, from Modern Baseball’s self-deprecating Sports (which includes the notable track “@chl03k,” about talking to a crush on Twitter) to The Front Bottoms’s indulgent, personable Talon of the Hawk. It inspired other hopeless romantics to grab a guitar and sing wildly about their insecurities, their intense longings, and their depression.


Spinning Cork Tree today is weird. Yet any time Whenever I first came across this album, I was pulled into the self-pity-party and couldn’t leave, although I wasn’t a grown man who was sensitive, depressed, and horny. I wasn’t on MySpace either. It simply was my door into angst, and Once I turned the knob, I locked myself in.