Like a number of songs on Folie à Deux, this track is about the emptiness and superficiality of life in the 21st century. Frontman Patrick Stump explained to MTV News: "Like the chorus says, 'I don't care what you think as long as it's about me.' It's that pop culture thing again, where people don't care about anything but the superficial, and I think there's something so tragic about that. I also thought there was something so ironically anthemic about the chorus, where it's not something you want to sing along to, because it's vacuous and empty. So I wanted something really anthemic underneath it, like something you'd hear at sports games or whatever, because I wanted people to hear it and be confronted with how empty that is. I didn't want anything to be superficial on this record unless the point was to point out superficiality."
This song featured in TV and radio ads for the 2008 teen movie Sex Drive and was used in the film's end credits.
Frontman Patrick Stump told MTV News that the song's music video is, "a little bit of a satire on the rock-and-roll archetypes of being a jerk." Bassist Pete Wentz added: "It's a series of vignettes, and in the end, the joke is: Everyone in the world who is famous is just a WWF character. And some of you are Hulk Hogan, and some of you are the Undertaker, and it's awesome. It's just as great to come out to the boos."
Bassist and lyricist Pete Wentz told MTV News: "It's more of a narcissist's anthem than a nihilist's anthem. 'I don't care as long as you're thinking about me.' To me, it's like a YouTube anthem for the YouTube generation, just about how our attention span is about seven seconds, maybe twice that if you have a Red Bull and fast broadband, so you really have to slam people in the face. But at the same time, it asks, 'Why can't we get people to pay attention for two minutes and 35 seconds?'"
Folie à Deux is French, it means a madness shared by two. Folie à Deux is a rare psychological condition where psychosis is somehow transmitted to another person. Wentz explained to
Rolling Stone why he named the album after the psychiatric term: "It's like when your fans want you to be crazier, so you become crazier." He added that the concept fits into the record's theme, which loosely deals with the bassist-lyricist's growing celebrity.
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Suggestion credit:
Brittany - Townsville, Australia
Gilby Clarke, who was a guitarist in Guns N' Roses in the early '90s, appears in this song's music video. He is the subject of the video's surprise ending, where he removes his mask to reveal that he is actually Sarah Palin.
Stump confessed to AbsolutePunk that he and Pete Wentz won't tolerate self doubt in each other's writing abilities and as a consequence, the two of them got into a fight over this song. He explained: "The day I wrote it, I didn't feel it, I wasn't there. And he was like 'You don't understand how good this is, you don't understand,' and then a day later, I was like, 'I'm really glad I wrote that song, cause now it's one of my favorites,' but he had to talk me into it and take me off the bridge, and that's kind of the thing with the band."
This is the lead single from Fall Out Boy's fourth studio album. As with their previous release, Infinity On High, the pop-punk band wanted to expand their sound by incorporating different musical styles and instruments. On this track, '80s arena rock meets the blues with, according to FOB guitarist Joe Trohman, guitar work modeled after ZZ Top.
This was used on the TV shows One Tree Hill ("Letting Go" - 2009) and The Hills ("While Lauren's Away…" - 2008).
The day before the album's release, the band staged an impromptu free concert at New York's Washington Square Park only to be told by police they'd be arrested if they so much as picked up an instrument. Instead of abandoning the gig, Fall Out Boy led the crowd in a sing-a-long, with Joe Trohman playing air guitar and Andy Hurley using his knees as makeshift drums.
