So, in a move that surely ruined Christmas for thousands (millions?) of pubescent teenage girls all over the world/universe, superstar Hayley Williams announced that brothers Josh and Zac Farro were leaving mutli platinum rock band Paramore at the weekend. Cue about a million tweets along the lines of: @yelyahwilliams thank you for staying with us, @yelyahwilliams Do not give up on us! We are with you! @yelyahwilliams I think I luv u, pls follow me.
Anyway, today in response Josh and Zac posted a pretty lengthy statement about why they left the band, which you can read here on Josh’s personal blog, and the internet has gone absolutely crazy! In it he claims that when the band first got signed, it was only Hayley Williams who was signed and not the entire band and that they were on Atlantic Records from the beginning and that, shock horror, they weren’t actually a DIY band – they just got set up with Fueled by Ramen in order to build a fanbase ‘organically’ (or some other stupid word like that) rather than appearing to be the manufactured product of a major label that they were in actuality!
OMG. Is this really that surprising? Anyone over the age of 15 who knows anything about the music industry probably knows that the majority of indie labels are feeder labels to majors in any case and that stuff like this happens all the time. Does it make it wrong? Does it make anyone involved bad people? No, the music industry is exactly that and as an INDUSTRY it does what it needs to do to sell records. And if that means taking advantage of the youthfully naive idea that everyone in a band is friends working hard to achieve their dreams then that’s what it will do. It’s called a gimmick and it helps to sell records. And it worked pretty well for Paramore, and I’m pretty sure that Josh and Zac aren’t complaining about how much money they probably both have right now. You know, considering Paramore got a bunch of platinum/gold records out of the deal.
Furthermore, do Zac and Josh they think anyone will actually care about this? Do they really think that the band are going to lose fans because of this? Stuff like this happens all the time when band members leave/get kicked out of a band, see: The King Blues, Taking Back Sunday and look where those bands are now. Way bigger and more successful than when the lineup change was initiated, and they were nowhere near the size of Paramore when it happened.
Sure, people might whine and moan about it for about a month, but they will ultimately forget about it when Paramore get Travis Barker or someone to drum on their new album and it fvcking rocks. This is because Paramore are still working hard and making music, whereas Zac and Josh are off living in a monastery or whatever they’re going to do (more on that later), and if you keep going and work hard then people forget the past. People only generally ever care about the here and now. There’s a proven record for that kind of thing, just ask David Beckham or John terry.
Or if people are still pissed off about this (unlikely) then there’s a whole new generation of 15 year olds to win over. Nothing has changed except the vaguely anonymous guys playing with the band might be different. I mean, Hayley is the selling point of the band right? The majority of people don’t even care about the other dudes. They probably won’t even notice they’re different. Just to illustrate this I had a really hard time finding pictures for this blog as I couldn’t tell which ones featured Zac and Josh as I don’t know what they look like and the band has had about four different line ups over its career. Did anyone else know that/care? Hopefully they’re in this one:
The statement descends into hilarity when Josh then goes on to discuss how it was really hard touring all the time, how Hayley was always treated more importantly than the rest of them, and how stuff finally came to a head when they were writing the Brand New Eyes album and they disagreed over some of the lyrics she had been writing. Particularly distressing for him was the line ‘the truth never set me free’, which directly contradicted a passage in the Bible (John 8:32 – ‘and you shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free’). Yeah, you can see why that would be the straw that broke the camel’s back right?
He then goes onto say how this is what God wanted, quotes another Bible passage, and how they came to the decision to leave through substantial prayer and counsel. If any positives come out of this incident, I guess it’s the vague possibility that Josh and Zac might link up with Romance on a Rocketship.
