first round

(8) Sophie Ellis-Bextor, “Murder on the Dance floor”
silenced
(9) Fall Out Boy, “Dance, Dance”
237-171
and will play in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/6/24.

Luuk Schokker on Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Murder on the Dancefloor  

It feels foolish to write about Murder on the Dancefloor in the year of our Lord 2024 and expect to get away with ignoring its resurgence in popularity. (If you think you’re getting away, I will prove you wrong—right?) Then again, I don’t really know who Barry Keoghan is, I haven’t seen Saltburn, and I don’t feel much for haphazardly interweaving cultural criticism in a piece that’s mostly about me (as it should be, considering the song at hand). But hey, I’ll play along. I should at least point out the obvious and mention that the song reached #51 on the Billboard Hot 100 earlier this year, a list it never managed to make upon its initial release, courtesy of the Irish actor dancing around naked to it in the 2023 Emerald Fennell movie, introducing the song to a whole new audience in the process.
Here’s what I can do. I can imagine being back on the ship. Being driven up to this industrial beast of a machine, rectangular and off-white, bluntly blocking the view of the horizon over the North Sea. The steam rising from its chimneys. I can re-imagine its interior, a non-space if there ever was one, a plug-and-play commercial area that might just as well have been anything else, anywhere else. A German airport, a mall in the Balkans, whatever. What counts is not the ship itself, but the fact that we’re about to come aboard. We have a school exchange trip to England ahead of us and this journey across the Channel is our gateway to testing our shiny new vocabulary on actual native speakers, our chance to finally see if our extra hours in class mean something in the real world. The two buses that park deep inside the belly of the beast hold three freshman classes and just as many teachers. Upon leaving school grounds, it feels as if we’ve taken a sizeable chunk out of the student population, but by the time the buses unload, there’s an even bigger crowd to dissolve into. We’re kids, young and clueless. And yet we walk around boastfully, act as if we board these giant cruise liners on the daily, pretend we know what we’re doing. There’s some seventy of us, the boat is as big as our school—there’s no way the three teachers can keep track of us all, much less oversee what we will do for the next couple of hours, but we take their lackluster chaperoning for a vote of confidence and strut around the ship as if it is, indeed, the local mall. Watch us go.
 The change in atmosphere is almost palpable. It happens in every group of teens doing something exciting for the first time, and our entrance on this giant ship is no different. We summon more confident versions of ourselves to mask our prepubescent insecurities; we collectively hide how impressed we are by these otherworldly surroundings, how much the second-rate casinos wow us, look at us adulting here, no big deal. We hope it all comes true if we continue to play the part, going at it with the same frantic eagerness us little nerds tend to reserve for our schoolwork. It’s not all an act, though. It doesn’t take much to believe it. As we take the first candid shots with our disposable cameras, we really do start to feel as if we’re evolving from secondary school freshmen to citizens of the world. There’s something about this journey that sets free actual confidence in even the shiest among us. We intuit that this five-day trip marks a shift in how we move through life. Only a year ago, we were kids, rehearsing songs for our primary school farewell musicals[1]. Now, we embark on an international adventure. (Recalling this experience more than twenty years later, I can obviously see how this trip barely qualified as life-changing—I mean, we were twelve and thirteen years old, we practically still had to discover there even was such a thing as an individual self to shape at all. Still, a feeling often makes a more lasting impression than the actual experience, and the ship undoubtedly stirred up our feelings.)
In anticipation of a new audience, the English, the soon-to-be exchange buddies we have yet to discover as real people, real-life versions of the headshots on photocopied sign-up sheets, being on the ship nudges us into re-shuffling our freshly established social hierarchies. We restlessly wander around in unaccustomed groups of five or six, gauging what cruise life has to offer. We line up for off-brand fast-food, burn through our pocket money in the tax-free stores. We find the right form for talking about girls and boys we may or may not like by coarsely ranking our classmates in ever-shifting top-5’s. The year is 2002, and when we pass any of the giant screens that seem to appear everywhere on the passenger decks, we are ambushed by music videos, Top 40 songs blasting on a volume that we never hear during daytime. These are the songs that will soon turn up on the quarterly Hitzone CDs, records we copy religiously so we can listen to these same tracks on our discmen over and over. For the coming weeks, it will be one song in particular. Wherever we walk, wherever we huddle to share our fries and chicken nuggets, re-iterate our top-5’s, munch on overpriced yet undertaxed candy, we can hear the same song—an anthem of showing yourself to the world that fits the moment like a glove. It’s Murder on the Dancefloor by Sophie Ellis-Bextor.
There’s something remarkable about Ellis-Bextor’s breakout hit that hits right from the get-go, when the singer’s distinct Queen’s English first joins in with the snappy instrumentals, singing—almost whispering—murder in a way that demands the listener’s immediate attention. Of course no one is actually murdered on the dancefloor, but still, the very concept of murder instantly clashes with the Ellis-Bextor’s quirky tone and the song’s upbeat instrumentals. She comes out swinging with what I suppose I can best describe as a performance of self-confidence—the accent that doesn’t directly match the bluntness of the lyrics, the posh voice that you wouldn’t expect to insist on burning the goddamn house right down. Here’s someone who is stretching the limits of how she wants people to perceive her, acting tougher than she is so that doing so can make her tougher in return. (A comparison to Britney Spears’ I’m a Slave 4 U comes to mind—if you want people to think of you differently, showing a more explicit side of yourself in your lyrics may help seal the deal.)
There’s a reason why Murder on the Dancefloor has remained Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s biggest hit in a career that now spans more than two decades, why she still loves to sing it and why audiences keep requesting her to do so. It’s the same reason why it suits a movie about desire so well and why, back in the pre-summer of 2002, it feels so fitting to constantly hear it on the boat to England, to have it become an inescapable anthem for our inaugural trip as a herd of individuals. When Sophie Ellis-Bextor demands her audience to hear me when I say, hey, she sounds a little shrill, slightly hoarse, but somehow in control. This, I’ve come to think, is the essence of the song, perfectly echoed by the line “If you think you’re getting away, I will prove you wrong”. There it is again, the desire that comes true because you speak it out loud. Ellis-Bextor is breaking out of her mold, egged on by the playfulness of the strings—an element you could easily miss if you don’t pay close attention to it, but which is essential to propelling the song forward over its repetitive beat, giving the arrangement just that little bit of chutzpah. Yes, it’s murder on the dancefloor, but just as much, it’s us twelve-year-olds testing the waters of our stunted individual voices. It’s the perfect nu-disco translation of what this trip will come to mean for us.
The song keeps reappearing for the full six hours it takes to cross the Channel, blaring its message from every giant screen the ship has on display. I am a person in my own right and if I have something to say, you better damn well pay attention. The fact that I connect it to what we’re experiencing is a performance in itself, to be honest. I mean, what do we know? We’re cubs. When we roar, actual grown-ups will only want to pet us. But we recognize the song for the truth it carries in its package regardless, instantly understanding the universal message that will keep ringing true until and beyond Murder on the Dancefloor’s chart re-appearance in 2024. A surprise revival, you might say, but is it really, though? Sure, a naked Irishman going wild over the beat is bound to tickle the unpredictable whims of the TikTok generation, but I’d say this song was always destined for a comeback. As far as hyping up self-confidence goes (and don’t we all need that every once in a while?), Murder on the Dancefloor is up there with the very best. The magic is there. It’s always been there. And it always will be. Sophie Ellis-Bextor will continue to blow us all away. (Hey.)

[1] Yes, this is an actual Dutch tradition.

Luuk Schokker writes short stories and the occasional essay. His work has been featured on Catapult, as well as on Papieren Helden, De Optimist and Hard//hoofd in his native Netherlands. In addition, every once in a while, he makes an appearance as an unexceptional but crowd-pleasing DJ, heavily (and joyfully) relying on 00’s bangers.

moira mcavoy on fall out boy’s “dance, dance”

Dance, dance. These are the lives you would love to lead
I’ve spent my night refreshing Twitter for updates on the opening night of the second leg of Fall Out Boy’s recent tour. Much like the first, it’s equal parts homage to the past and celebration of the present, a welcome into the fold for the new generation of fans and an act of gratitude to those of us who have stuck around for these last two decades, like me. 
And man have I, former AIM user whereisurboyfob9, stuck around. I can identify any song in their catalog within the first bar, know all the lore and the bits and the interludes and the adlibs, and managed to get floor tickets to not one, not two, but three shows on this upcoming leg, which will bring me to 11 lifetime Fall Out Boy shows, and my sixth within the last year. I’ve spent thousands and thousands of hours and dollars in adoration of this band over the last 19 years of my life, so you’d think that writing on their work would be a slam dunk, and yet this is the most difficult time I have ever had finishing an essay. It’s hard, I think, to pay homage to something you love when so much of yourself is tangled up in it, especially when so much of that time was spent feeling unknown, unknowable, and unknowing. 

*

Fall Out Boy would lean into the lore and mythos of their own work and create their own cinematic universe as their career progressed, but when the video for “Dance, Dance” was released, it was simply familiar. Part of the familiarity was thanks to its overt nods to Revenge of the Nerds, but moreso, it felt like what you, an adolescent, imagined being an adolescent was supposed to be like: a stereotypical high school dance in a dingy gymnasium; the worst outfits you can possibly imagine but somehow worse; a band (Fall Out Boy) shredding on the precarious stage as a group of nerds (also Fall Out Boy) are passing the time as aloof outcasts at best or victims’ of bullies’ torment at worst. Time passes, the nerds fight back–through dance–and their sick moves win the day as they were always destined to, the palpable joy of their victory pulsing through the mass of sweating, real-high-schoool-student extras, eventually outshining the rockstar-version of the band’s onstage performance.

Dance, this is the way they'd love
If they knew how misery loved me

Released as the TRL-approved wave of 2000s pop punk was hitting its fever pitch and on the red hot heels of improbable mega-hit predecessor “Sugar, We’re Goin Down,” “Dance, Dance” instantly became Fall Out Boy’s second consecutive Top 10 hit, peaking at no. 8 overall, no. 2 on the Alternative, and no. 5 on the Pop charts. They headlined Warped Tour. The song was in constant radio, MTV, VH1, and Fuse rotation. The track was on Dance Dance Revolution.
The band’s meteoric but sustained success changed everything. It cemented their status as formidable rockstars and catapulted charismatically chaotic frontman, Pete Wentz, into the pop culture spotlight as scene It Boy, one position among many he seemed to greet with a degree of apprehension, and no wonder–he went from a mentally ill Livejournal poet and hardcore screamer to a mentally ill celebrity being trailed by paparazzi and torn apart on TMZ. 

*

The “Dance, Dance” video is a classic narrative about the inherent power of being yourself, sure, but it’s also a testament to the discomfort of being yourself and the unsureness of which version of yourself you are. Here is you as downtrodden nerd–forgotten, bitchless, but brave and searching for possible happiness. Here is you as rockstar–adored, glistening, spinning out of control on stage to uproarious applause, outshined by a you from which you've distanced yourself reaching towards authentic joy.

*

The music video for Fall Out Boy’s self-aware, apocalyptic single “This Ain’t A Scene, It’s An Arms Race”, released just a year after “Dance, Dance”, and just a year after the band had been rocketed to stardom, opens with a familiar sight–the band hitting the last notes of their set on that rickety stage in that old high school gymnasium. The song ends, they sigh a breath of relief, then a production crew quickly appears, revealing the crowd of kids—fans, tormentors—were cardboard cutouts all along. The dance was never real: all that remained was their fame, the band exiting to a flood of paparazzi and subsequent stereotypical celebrity mishaps. As the video closes, we discover that this, too, was all a dream of Pete’s before a show at a school—a fabrication within a fabrication—as he attempts to stage dive into a crowd that could never catch him. 

Despite their commercial crossover success, by this point, the inescapable wave of popular opinion crashed over the band. The oldheads accused them of selling out or making shitty pop music or phoning it in for clout, and while the band made jokes about it with their merch, they could feel the animosity in a very real way.
Fall Out Boy would release one more frantic, anxious, combustible album, Folie A Deux, a year later. Folie feels like a dizzying race to the bottom: every song is imbued with a sense of unavoidable disaster or doom or disappointment. The recording process tore the band apart, and upon release, was so unwelcome by many fans that the band was frequently pelted with bottles when playing new songs on tour. They would announced their indefinite hiatus months later.

*

I didn’t know who I was as a teen, so I decided to hide behind my interests. My entire personality was understanding F. Scott Fitzgerald on a deeper intellectual level than my peers or loving chicken nuggets or being the biggest, most knowledgeable Fall Out Boy fan at my school. 
The most important part of growing up–like, really, truly growing up–for me has been recognizing that, as a tween, I was wrong about a lot of things that I used to build up my sense of self. I was more concerned with sounding right than being right, because that was easier than having actual knowledge and being wrong. And I was wrong often and loudly, which was a great accompaniment to my penchant for dedicating hours of my precious fleeting life fighting with adults on songmeanings dot net (dot com?) about what I thought various Fall Out Boy songs meant, because I was pretentious, and I was smart, and I loved language, and I wasn’t sure who I was or what anything actually meant, because I was thirteen. 

Dance, dance. These are the lives you would love to lead

I likely lost hours of my life to talking about this lyric. I’ve lost more of that time again, just now. It’s about wanting to get laid, obviously, but to me, as an overly enthusiastic teen in need of validation of my unparalleled fandom and superior knowledge, there had to be SOMETHING else and to me, that something else is the construction of another self–a fracture self perhaps, one version of yourself projected to obscure another, an unending, ever-necessary performance. This made abundant sense to someone who had seen the music video countless times, and as someone as self conscious as me, and someone projecting so much of that self-consciousness onto Pete Wentz.
I’ve carried this interpretation into adulthood because it makes sense. The kicker? I’ve had the lyrics wrong this entire time–the entire last 19 years up until this moment. There is no “would” in the chorus to triple platinum single “Dance, Dance” that I personally have seen performed live at least 5 times.

Dance, dance. These are the lives you would love to lead. 

I’ve been wrong this entire time. I built an entire interpretive framework around a misheard lyric. Of course the argument still holds up—the lives being led by the others (“you”) are inherently different from the lives being led by the speaker, and thereby a differentiated sense of self, which IS part of what the song and the band has always been about—but it doesn’t matter. Those weren’t the lyrics. I was wrong, which, even just a few years ago, would’ve been an earth shattering revelation as somehow who had constructed Fall Out Boy super fan as a categorical sense of self.
It’s funny, because that entire sense of self was fabricated from the start with a lie, in the way most tweens are wont to do. I like to say that I discovered Fall Out Boy thanks to my cool next door neighbor having an original pressing of the Take This To Your Grave CD. This is bullshit. I found them when the “Sugar, We’re Goin Down video was playing on TRL in the summer of 2005. My cool next door neighbor, who does exist, was much more into the likes of Christina Aguilera and Mariah Carey. I had no idea what the volume of CD pressings even meant–I just read about it a few years later on a forum, and it sounded cool, and I wanted so desperately to be cool, which is why I have largely lied about the origin of my fandom . I wanted to cool and punk and interesting and special, and MTV was commercial and accessible and not cool, as if there was any other way a 12 year old in Chesapeake, Virginia would’ve found out about a pop punk band from Chicago when surrounded by adults who loved country and pop and divas (Pete Wentz being a diva notwithstanding). Like so many teens I wanted to be something different than what I was even if that difference was seemingly in service OF what I was. It didn’t matter that I WAS a massive fan who resonated deeply with the music and spent the majority of my time listening to, reading, writing, talking, or thinking about the band. I needed to be THEE massive Fall Out Boy fan, or else I was simply someone else, and that is terrifying.

*

The Folie tide has shifted. It is now considered a fan favorite, an evolution supported in no small part by the increasing awareness of the toll fame was taking on the band at the time—a lesson easier to learn with time and distance—and the artistic arc of their work having come into fuller focus. It is one of their most cohesive works, and one of the most authentic, and the last time Pete let his lyrics meander and skitter and indulge in cleverness just for cleverness’ sake, free from well-documented post-hiatus concerns about how no one knew what he wrote or what Patrick was singing.
Fifteen years later, the band has finally played the entire tracklist live over the course of their ongoing tour in support of their fifteen-year-newer album. That decision was not borne of nostalgia: it was a brave reach reclaiming a missed past self, perhaps only fully recognized and embraced in hindsight, the joy of which reverberated though just the right audience. 

These words are all I have so I'll write them
So you need them just to get by

Fall Out Boy’s newest album, So Much for Stardust, marks both a return to form and a reclamation of a history. It marks their first work with producer Neal Avron since 2008 and revisits many of Folie A Deux’s existentially anxious themes with a lens of age and maturity, the two albums being 15 years and three records removed from each other.
The music video for So Much For Stardust single “Hold Me Like a Grudge” is again, familiar. We pick up where “This Ain’t a Scene” left off 18 years earlier. Pete is flinging himself into the floor, breaking his leg and learning it needs to be replaced with a bionic leg that gifts him super human speed. We time jump two decades and learn that it, much like in the reality we all inhabit, Fall Out Boy had disappeared after the album cycle for their 2018 release MANIA, and that this is so significant that if they do not perform on stage by 7PM that very night (with Patrick in his signature hats), a black hole will entirely rip apart the space time continuum. We follow Pete as he collects his old band mates from their ludicrous alternative realities (a wrestler, a monk, an actor) and rushes onto that same school stage from 2005, playing the new set as decreed as the clock ticked down the seconds towards apocalypse. It didn’t matter who was in the crowd. This reunion literally saved the world. 
The “Hold Me Like A Grudge” video doesn’t end with the final notes of the band on stage, but with Pete outside, alone, leaning on a car and talking to his mom on the phone. It’s a tender intimate moment cheekily punctured by her saying she doesn’t like the new song as much as their old stuff, to which he just laughs, says “okay,” and hangs up.

*

There used to be a prevailing Fall Out Boy joke that it’s fine if you don’t know the lyrics to a song because lead singer obviously didn’t either. That was somewhat true, thanks to Stump’s underdeveloped enunciation and Wentz’ verbose, meandering lyricism. In his LiveJournal days, Pete said that his lyrics only ever made sense when Patrick was singing them. It didn’t matter that no one knew what Patrick was trying to say: Pete trusted him enough to let him craft the world’s image of his emotions, however they came out, regardless of what he actually wrote or what was in the tabloids. There was a truth somewhere, misheard or otherwise, and that can be enough from the right source. It was enough for me, even if I didn’t recognize it. 

*

Fall Out Boy are old now. They know it, and they want you to know it, too. The setlist for their current tour not only features a piano cover of Gen X mainstay “Don’t Stop Believin,” but also rotating cover snippets of 80s hair metal classics like “Crazy Train” by Ozzy Osbourne and “Enter Sandman” by Metallica. The last song on their preshow playlist was their own cover/re-write of “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” an output so obviously trying to be contemporary that it made me, an extremely online 30 year old, feel ancient. 
I too am now old, and I know it. Most of my body hurts more often than not, I lobby for every concert to be over by 10 PM, and as I’m writing this, there’s a heart monitor tacked to my chest, keeping continual watch for something that is likely fine, but Good To Keep An Eye On With Age. 
When I jumped into the mosh pit during Fall Out Boy’s perennial show closer “Saturday” at the same venue where I annually dehydrated myself at Vans Warped Tour 15 years before, I watched as my glasses were smacked off my face, over the flailing arms of dozens of other 30 year olds, and under multiple sweaty pairs of Vans and Converses. I thought I’d be left blind for a week. I felt sore for three full days later. I had a five hour train to catch the next morning on three hours max of sleep. It didn’t matter. For a few seconds, I felt like meeting an old self, cataclysms and criticisms and all, for the first time. It was fucking awesome.
I still don’t know who I am, and maybe that doesn’t matter anymore. I still don’t know what some of these songs I’ve devoted my life to are even saying, but that doesn’t matter much anymore either. Maybe it just matters that I can scream along what I think is being sung in the crowd, a body among bodies, and maybe a knowledge of a self is less important than the feeling of one, the luck of continued being anything, the grace of being able to grow old along with the music that I needed just to get by. 

*

“Dance, Dance” has an eternal position on the Fall Out Boy setlist, though on their current tour, its staging is different. We have the band on stage in front of the undulating masses, but sans Pete, who instead moves to the middle of the crowd, clad in a hoodie and noise canceling headphones, emerging near the mix. Last go round, he accompanied the band from the sound booth, nearly a part of the crowd himself, unseen by many in the amphitheaters. This time, instead, he emerges alone on a platform, shredding the iconically recognizable bass line a dozen feet in the air.  In this moment of singularity, it doesn’t matter who he is—he’s not a front man or a nerd or a trainwreck or a superhero savior—he is just Pete, finally above it all, playing bass as we dance.

Moira McAvoy lives in Washington DC, has managed to build an entire life around music, and still cannot dance.