There was once a young lad who travelled around the world quite a bit with his family. Whenever he was at an airport, he liked to purchase a magazine to read. One American winter, he bought a copy of Alternative Press. It was a time of musical discovery for this young lad, and little did he know that his life would be changed forever after that purchase.
There was an ad for a band with a cute frontwoman touring the States at the time. This band's name was Paramore and my literal thoughts at the time went something along the lines of 'oh. she's cute'. So i came home to Australia and downloaded the album All We Know Is Falling. At first, it was a little pop punk guilty pleasure, and it felt nice to have listen to a band that not many knew about way back in 2004. My sister's reaction was: 'He sounds like a girl'. How far we've come.
I like to gauge it this way. When i first started listening to Paramore, they had about 4,000,000 scrobbles on last.fm. Now they are fast approaching 100,000,000 and are arguably one of the biggest bands on the planet. I grew to love them like no other band i had listened to before. Radiohead engaged me intellectually, The Mars Volta, spiritually (lol) and Muse made me smile a lot, but I never really loved them like i did Paramore. It was a funny thing, but the kind of devotion Parawhores have for these people borders on idolatry. I hadn't quite gone that far, but I did order the $80 deluxe edition of Brand New Eyes, had it shipped to a friend in NZ and then posted over to me. Make of that what you wish.
As time went on, and as Riot! came out, the guilty pleasure soon blew out into complete and utter fanhood. When i found myself perusing their blogs and reading about the Farros trip to China, which sounded suspiciously like a 'mission trip' i was sold. Excellent music and (what appeared to be) excellent faith? I couldn't love them any more.
I went to their concert at the Roundhouse in 2007 (my sister's first concert ever) and fell in love even more with the undeniable charisma of the one and only Hayley Williams. I declared my undying allegiance to the band of Paramore.
The Final Riot came out, and the jam at the end of Let The Flames Begin further strengthened my love. In what was obviously a prayer of sorts, and their musical passion and dare i say, prowess, went straight to my heart. Further jams on youtube, Miracle outro and Brand New Eyes tour intro made me just amaze.
Ignorance was released as a single and i listened to it on repeat while in vacation in the States in 2009. Then Brand New Eyes dropped and I really lost it. The album was all killer, no filler, in the truest sense of the phrase.
I saw Paramore perform 3 times in 2009. Twice in February as part of Soundwave, and then again on their headlining tour with Relient K at the end of the year. And they did not fail to impress. As my friend Jen said, 'they are pretty much my favourite humans ever'. While Josh did seem a bit despondent in his performance, my sister assured me that's just how he plays. And no one suspected a thing.
And then come December, and the bombshells were dropped.
What I learned from it all, is that bottom line, the music industry simply can't be trusted. We are manipulated and our thoughts are shaped to no end. Essentially, we are directly lied to our faces without apology and without remorse. Fans of Paramore love the band as a whole, and acknowledge that Hayley gets a lot of the attention, but it was definitely something more than 'the coattails of hayley's dream'. However, it would appear that there was no 'whole' to the band to even begin with. A tragic end for many, as people's worlds were essentially shattered (hyperbole alert!) beyond repair. I can't even listen to Paramore in the same way any more.
Boo, you whore.
Anyway, this pretty much sums it up for me.
Time to move on to bigger and better things methinks.
/end story.
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