My daughter went to their alleged concert last night. Is it me, or is Fallout Boy the young sidekick to Radioactive Man? She said they are a rock band, which immediately makes me suspect they are rappers, albeit panzy rappers, as she went with a freind and her mom, and didn't report any violence .

heheh, not rappers just the new type of popular 'alternative' music. Which of course isn't alternative.

I've been a bit out of the loop as well, but it seems a distant relation to grunge + some goth.

They seem to play to the non-football non-jock types.

They're an early teen band. Simple riffs, hooky choruses, whiny vocals. I guess they would be defined as pop-punk. I'm sure the mallrats dig it.

I just saw a clip on my daughters phone. Its a boy band that has been taught three chords According to her friends Mom, it was chockfull of yummy mummy's, but doubtful I could take that kinda of music long enough to "funky walk and dirty talk" my stuff!

Definately not the Violent Femmes or Iron Maiden

They're a HORRIBLE but admittedly catchy pop-punk band. Basically, they suck.

Sacretis

Whenever I've had the misfortune of being subjected to them all I hear is "whine whine whine".

It saddens and hurts me, that the little girl I brought up singing the Grateful Dead, Rush and the Violent Femmes now thinks "Fallout Boy" is rock!!

it makes me laugh when kids today say that they listen to "punk rock" and it's stuff like Queens of The Stoneage and Greenday

Fallout Boy are the arse end of Emo. But why anyone is surprised that what's in the mainstream and popular among teens is crap, I do not know. It was always thus, even though many will hold some fondness for the crap of their own particular youth.

But, the internet and file sharing do give some hope. No longer can the record companies and media conglomerates control what people are exposed to. Today's kids grow up with more musical choices than we could even have imagined. There's more music being made and released today than ever before - plus there's the world's back catalogue of stuff, both mainstream and obscure (right now I'm heavily into late 60s' Brit Psych/Proto-Prog which is full of acts that no one but the most obessive vinyl collectors knew of five years ago, but that anyone can easily find online now).

Bands and artists are not only surviving outside of the record company system, some - like - are even thriving, making a very good living and building a lasting fan base.

Less mainstream genres, from Goth to Prog, Grime to Rockabilly, Bluegrass to Breakbeat, Doom Metal to Polka are all seeing booms in releases as artists can now record at home and reach their audiences with less fuss and cost than ever. Afficionadoes of the various subgenres, of the obscure bands the labels won't touch, can band together and network their knowledge.

Odds are that there's great music being made today, no matter what you like. All you need to do is to have some interest in searching it out. Music lovers have never had it so good.

Fallout Boy and others are just the last gasp of a dying industry. No doubt they will be replaced by something equally vapid, but at least it'll be a vapidity chosen by kids themselves, not foisted on them by Big Media (case in point: - selling out their UK tours based on two downloadable singles - although they are kind of fun).

The good end of Emo, you ask? The Mars Volta. The Dear Hunter. Biffy Clyro.

And that's just the beginning.

Not trying to crush your spirit or anything, but I'm going to offer my perspective of working for financial transaction corporation that has strong ties with telecommunications companies all over the world. Anything I relay here is just a bare peek at some of the stuff I read about every day here at work (since I won't violate the company's policy).

Actually, the RIAA and the MPAA aren't going anywhere soon. They are firmly entrenched here in the States, Canada and South America. And they give power to the IFPI in the EU, who is getting co-operation from the big phone companies in the EU to share IP information for lawsuits of copyright infringement. France's Orange Telco and AT&T being the first of the line-up-and-serve dummies.

Even vaulted Sweden just for more action lawsuits in cooperation with AT&T, Hilf Comm, Citrus, Brother UK, and Orange. That one court decision just settled 9k other cases in a matter of four days. In four days, they managed to get settlements in their favor outside of court! Our company collected on 4,000 of those lawsuits for the IFPI. That's two months faster than settling a matter of identity theft in the EU.

They are all opening their databases to the RIAA, the IFPI and the BPI. Hell, even the just won a huge case for obtaining private information on web servers in Japan as they see fit throughout their influence area by indirect investigation of telecom companies. And then they totally a file-sharing company in less than one month with funds provided by the RIAA in the US. There are 2,600 cases starting in the US against the sharing of JPop, Anime and Japanese pornography just this month alone!

Don't tell me it's dying. , IBM, Cisco, Paypal and KKR are planning on helping the RIAA/MPAA/IFPI in the next few years by actually giving them funding and providing legal endorsement across our network areas. Plus KKR is leading the charge against piracy on a level that literally scares the pants off of me (including reading personal email on private corporation servers like Hotmail and GMail).

I'm with you that it's been made into a bigger deal that it should be and the actions of these organizations are ridiculous, but I'm watching all our privacy on the Internet go down the drain quickly as the present US government with all its allies across the globe hop onto the band wagon of repealing laws to protect your private information clear down to the ISP level, and sharing it amongst themselves to "catch terrorists," "stop pornography," and "prevent piracy." KKR, Unicredito, BHP, BSCH and about a dozen other transaction/banking companies want to crack every freaking telecom open in Europe, Canada and Australia, and has already helped the British fuck over 200k people since the beginning of this year.

I'm hoping at the next EU conference where there's already a lot of disputed policies being laid on the table that they don't give the privacy complaint a pass. Or both COLT and ECI Telecom will be allowed to give the information of their 2 million plus customers in the EU to any goverment who coughs up a court order. ECI (who my company deals with regularly) is just iching to cooperate, because they want to take government money.

It doesn't baffle me why every major corporation is now backing out of the fight to preserve our privacy. There's money to be made increasing the amount of shared knowledge on the private citizen's spending, web surfing and piracy habits. If you own a credit card, chances are by 2009, the government will be able to look at your bank account and vice-versa on a whim (as in the bank will be able to query your identification number and get your personal information as held by the government without your consent - Canada is already moving forward with it faster than the US is). Britain and the Bank of Scotland may already be doing this - I can't be sure since I don't actually work with those people.

I wish more companies were like WorldWorks Games. They will enjoy a great success against piracy because they promote a trust between customer and the distributor. But banks and large telecoms are out of control, and only getting more bold every day to this strategy of turn the customer into a pile of information that can be easily passed around to the exclusive circle of privilaged corporations.

Worst part is I work for one of the giants who is going to put its back and entire effort into being a financial big brother. And they have the assets to do so. I personally hate them for it. If I quit, however, I lose my house, my car and about half my future life security. And I'm leading a fight to protect card users against ID theft that would not get attention in my company otherwise. There are people depending on my entire business unit and section to fight the good fight for everyone who holds a Visa, Discover, Mastercard or American Express. Someone has to take up the fight on the outside, because they maneuvered me into a position where myself and credit card users can't afford it.

I encourage everyone to continue to write their governing officials about their concern of the loss of personal privacy in the digital world.

As bad as the "present US Government is", what would certain candidates from a certain party do? Said candidiates who abhor all notions of "private property", "privavcy" and "individual rights"? I would think it would get worse! Only Fred Thompson or Ronald Reagan Incarnate can save us