Throwback Thursday: Panic! at the Disco, ‘I Write Sins Not Tragedies’

Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly series showcasing an album, single, music video or performance of a bygone era and its personal and/or cultural significance.

Feeling a bit emo-ish today, why not beam up in the time warp and revisit one of the greatest modern pop classics on the planet? Panic! at the Disco, who just dropped their excellent new album, the timely-titled Pray for the Wicked, have been a mainstay for 13 years. Yes, if that doesn’t make you feel old, nothing will. Their most well-known hit continues to be the pounding, towering “I Write Sins Not Tragedies,” a cut from their 2005 debut LP, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, emo-pop at its finest. From its magical and spooky string intro to frontman Brendon Urie’s fearless and irresistibly sweet vocals, the song lurches from Disney villainy to gritty discordance rather abruptly, and when the arena-rock guitars crash inward on our eardrums, there is still something so downright medicating about it all. Maybe it’s Urie’s braggadocio or just his seductive ways. Who knows.

Even on the surface, the song dives deep into infidelity and its drastic consequences. “The lyrics are about infidelity, the sins that I felt were being committed by my friends. A sin is something you commit, and a tragedy is the person who has a sin committed against them. You can be powerless until you make your voice heard,” Urie writes of the storyline, unhinged by the first chorus. Skeletons in closets dance in our midst, supposedly. “At that time betrayal was huge. I had this friend, Eric — we were really good friends and he knew I was really into this girl, and she and I had been talking for a while. I was smitten over this girl. And I was slow at making a move because I was just so nervous. Next thing I heard: they were fucking. And that just broke my heart.”

Knowing the backstory only exacerbates the emotional weight, clawing through the skin right down to the bone, organs falling into the dirt, casually and unconcerned. “No, it’s much better to face these kinds of things with a sense of poise and rationality,” Urie masks his outrage and hurt behind a wall-to-wall of sonic thunder cracks. But it’s still so terribly heartbreaking in the end.

The visual taps into the deeply-layed dark humor, utilizing Urie’s charming wit to drive home the core message. Set at a wedding, where all the guests have painted eyes on their eyelids out of sheer boredom, the bride’s dirty laundry is exposed within the first few frames. The freak show aesthetics (e.g. top hat, pin-stripes, cast of side-show characters, etc.) only heighten the whimsy, cutting reality with farcical overtones. As with most of their compositions, little is left to the imagination; the imagery is quite literal, then swept with bold strokes of metaphors to give one final sucker punch. What a way to clap back and get over a broken heart, yeah?

Watch below:

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