Fall Out Boy’s Local Roots

Digital connection through archiving and music

Learn about Chicagoland's hardcore punk scene in the late 1990's, and an archival team's efforts to preserve its history.

Before Fall Out Boy became a multiplatinum-selling rock band, they cut their teeth in the Chicagoland hardcore punk scene. Tracing the members' participation in this scene during the late 1990s and early 2000s uncovers a rich and vibrant history of local DIY music. The FOB Archive Team began in the summer of 2024 as a fan project to uncover this more deeply. Fall Out Boy rose in the early aughts, a time when digital promotion was beginning to take form. In this new era of the unfamiliar, the history of this local music scene survived in remnants on now old, forgotten websites across the Internet. The scattering and disappearance of parts of the Internet have also led to misinformation, and amongst our central goals is dispelling this. 

For the research team working more than 20 years later, old websites saved over the years by the Internet Archive offer several clues to understanding the musical landscape that the Fall Out Boy band members came from. The archivists explore not only the relation between this music scene and the Internet in the past and present, but have since birthed their own thriving community through archiving it. 

The Fall Out Boy Archive Team (FOBAT) is a fan-run team dedicated to researching and preserving information revolving around the band Fall Out Boy and their affiliates in the hardcore, pop-punk, pop, and adjacent music scenes. They operate almost entirely online through various platforms. Visit their website at https://fobarchive.com. 

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