Sounds

Fall Out Boy is the high school boyfriend you never had. Tortured, talented, smart and sad, singing his secrets into your ear late at night. Lyrics like “I swear I’d burn this city down to show you the light” turn me back into a lonely 17-year-old, desperate for someone just as over-dramatic and poetic as me.

Fall Out Boy just wants to be your boy. Everybody’s boy. While most of the band’s career has focused on infiltrating the bedrooms of every young woman in the world, their new album, “Infinity on High,” makes a bid for broadening their boyfriend base into an entirely new realm: the gay market.

Bassist/songwriter/propaganda mastermind Pete Wentz gives interviews to The Advocate, makes out with boys, and picks fights with homophobic moms at concerts. There’s an overall absence of personal pronouns on the new record — a big shift from their bloody-brilliant last album, “From Under the Cork Tree” — and I’m sure that this savvy business boy left things intentionally gender-neutral so that gay guys can come on board.

Wentz is not gay, he maintains (repeatedly, to the millions of young girls to whom FOB Sexuality eclipses the War in Iraq in terms of Most Pressing Social Issue), but, y’know, he’s not down with the whole homophobia thing. While I want to welcome them with open arms, something about FOB Culture feels too calculated and commercial. Who are these boys, and what do they want from us?

I’ll say up front, before FOB’s hordes of die-hard fans start threatening me with death for daring to criticize their rock god idols, that I love their music. I firmly believe myself to be their Biggest Faggot Fan. The energy and the melodic prowess they bring to their songs puts them light years ahead of all the other contemporary post-punk acts they’re constantly being compared to (even if their new album is more of a mixed bag, with my boys going a little crazy on the keyboards and the melodrama). Tearing apart the things we love is what makes us human, isn’t it?

Fall Out Boy comes out of emo — as in -tional — a subgenre of punk distinguished by naked displays of emotion and vigorous yelping, with songs about romantic relationships and the hurt feelings that come out of them. Punk was built on a rejection of 70s glitz and hype and macho cock-rock swagger, while emo takes that a step further to reject punk’s own masculine obsessions: honor, strength, independence, politics.

A casual sampling of FOB lyrics reveals the extent to which they’re still bogged down in the emo swamp (”wishing to be the friction in your jeans;” “I’m sleeping my way out of this one/with anyone who’ll lie down;” “why don’t you show me/the little bit of spine/you’ve been saving for his mattress”).

In theory, the central tenets of emo sound pretty progressive in terms of gender politics — a vast community of young men refusing the stoic manliness that patriarchy demands of them. In practice, though, for all its earnest emotion and treating girls like Madonnas instead of whores, emo has not been a bastion of anti-homophobia or feminism. The rest of the punk community has always had a distinctly cynical take on emo boys — in short, that they’re manipulative little pricks pretending to be sensitive so girls will sleep with them. The time I’ve spent with my own emo friends, and the excessive hours I’ve logged at emo shows, bear out this assessment.

Wentz got his rock star schooling in a world where showmanship and salesmanship are indistinguishable. Opportunist is probably a strong word, but he’s built an enormous empire around a semblance of intimacy between himself and his audience that feels disingenuous and exploitative. His blog is so relentlessly confessional you might not notice all the product placement. His maybe-suicide attempt, and nonstop subsequent interviews, have been widely cited as a publicity stunt. Hell, he’s created his own clothing line so he can transform emo fashion into big bucks.

Emo fashion is like punk fashion (a rebellion against fancy suits and expensive couture to focus on edgy working-class clothes), with a liberal dose of grad-student/record-store-clerk chic. Tight pants, thick-rimmed glasses, sturdy belts with ironic buckles, All-Stars, t-shirts with that vintage 70’s kitsch thing that’s so popular lately. Which is great when it’s the product of a DIY thrift-store raid, and creepy when a big rich rock star is making you pay through the nose for it.

Fall Out Boy writes brilliant songs, and when I’ve got my headphones on that’s all I can ask of an artist. But Wentz seems so bent on being a fashion maven (he’s been quoted as saying his goal is to “sexify emo”) that I’m inclined towards cynicism. With him at the helm, it’s impossible to say where FOB stops being musicians and starts being salesmen.

Interviewers call him a “dream,” because he just won’t stop talking. Those “accidentally leaked” crotch shots have launched a thousand articles. Eternally hustling, Wentz is the first rock star to be so of the internet age, spending such exorbitant hours visiting blogs and chatrooms and newsgroups, that one wonders if he’s got a sweatshop somewhere, with dozens of little boys endlessly trolling the internet in his name, in search of discussions of FOB (what will they say about me?).

With their vulnerable lyrics and gallons of eyeliner and new gay-friendly focus, it’s tempting to read Fall Out Boy as a paradigm shift — an indication of pop culture’s rejection of macho posturing in favor of sensitivity and sincerity. But this is not new — ever since its start, punk rock has made periodic intrusions into the mainstream, and each time they’ve brought little earthquakes of queerness. Look at Patti Smith’s androgynous persona, and songs about gay gang bangs. Look at dress-wearing Kurt Cobain making out with his bassist on “Saturday Night Live.” All of which is fabulous, and all of which has been followed by the same old dreary Jock Jam crap. It’s the nature of the marketplace to take anything that’s new and edgy and exciting and immediately start to churn out safe bland carbon copies.

If anything, Fall Out Boy showing up on the queer doorstep with flowers and cheap cologne is more proof that the gay community is just one more stop on the pandering tour of every politician and would-be superstar who will gladly take our money but won’t do anything on the issues that impact the queer community. When was the last time you heard Colin Farrell or George Clooney or any of the other straight stars who routinely grace the cover of The Advocate address the disproportionate number of queer youth who are homeless — or the continued, disgraceful underfunding of housing and health care services for people living with HIV/AIDS? Even gay marriage, which is so assimilationist it’s only controversial to crazy people, is lucky if it gets a little lip service.

I’m excited to see in the coming years whether FOB’s love for the gays is simply exploitative and shallow, or if it comes with a real commitment to build a world where, as Wentz told one homophobic concert-goer, “treating other people as inhuman is unacceptable.” For that matter, it’ll be interesting to see whether queer audiences will remain content with token nods in our direction or will start to demand more active engagement around the issues we still face.