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Fall Out Boy through the Blender
Blender have wobbled from their usual format this month - instead of giving the cover story to a sexy young woman, they've slapped Fall Out Boy on the front instead. Trouble is, this means they've had to write a story to go with it. And Fall Out Boy are fuming, as they say it's been made up. Take, for example, the claim that drummer Andy Hurley punched a door frame in response to the Green Bay Packers doing poorly on the football:
"I never hit a door for 45 seconds. I may have been yelling, like all my friends and I do, but if I did anything that crazy, it was as a joke," Hurley wrote. "That is total bullsh--. I wound never slam my iPhone, and I never punched a metal door frame for any time. Yeah, I'm totally going to kill myself over a football game."
God forbid that anyone should portray the Boy as being overwrought and suicidey-grandstanders, eh? Actually, it seems that Hurley is more upset at the suggestion that the band might take sports seriously - presumably because that would mean that, rather than being the eye-linered sensitive souls they're marketed as, the group is nothing more than jocks wearing Cover Girl for employment purposes.
Patrick Stump, meanwhile, is fuming about being quoted out of context. Or rather, not quite:
"Did I quit the band? Did I say what appeared in the article? Of course. But followed immediately by it was something to the tune of this: I quit, until I started writing my solo songs and I realized how much I need him. My songs sucked without Pete and they were less fun to write," Stump wrote MTV News in an e-mail. "I love the guy, he's my best friend, and I realized that for all the decisions I'd ever gotten mad at him about, I likely would've done exactly the same in his position. I quit the band (as we all have, by the way, that's part of being in bands) and when I returned I resolved to keep doing this as long as all four of us were having fun."
So when Blender said that Stump quit the band, they're, erm, quoting him accurately? You can see how that would be upsetting. Perhaps the magazine took it as read that, since the band are doing an interview together for them, readers would be able to work out for themselves that Wentz unquit, and just maybe felt the "but he's my mate and I'm nothing without him" sounded like cheesy cant and was better snipped out.
If Blender made stuff up, that's unforgivable. But by editing out a large chunk of showbiz schmaltz (that, you'd be forced to conclude, is cover for 'the management pointed out we'd got contracts signed and we bloody well better get on') is more of a kindness to Stumpy. Magazines aren't obliged to print every single word of an interview. He could get a blog if Patrick wants unadulterated access to his people.
The band are also upset that Wentz is portrayed as a bit of a knob:
"As for the article, as I had hinted at before, I found it an objectively well-written (if plotless) thing ... It's an entertaining article that manages to take its hero from the heights of superstardom to the depths of narcissism," he wrote. "But it never redeems him and it does so at the cost of fact.
Surely if a person is a self-obsessed fool or some sort of sponsored-by-deodorant superhero is a matter of opinion, rather than an objective fact - and since when did a magazine piece have to have a redeeming conclusion? It's a profile, it's not a bloody rom-com.
Blender's response is best summarised as "wow - did they not realise it's a fawning puff-piece?"
