Panic! At The Disco’s first single, “I Write Sins Not Tragedies,” came out over a decade ago, a prime example of glossy mid-aughts mall emo. MTV’s stranglehold on youth culture has long since been relinquished, and emo has now seeped out from this aesthetic to be a sort of all-encompassing mood within popular music. How might we hear the song with fresh ears, today, in 2017?
The answer, it turns out, is with many kazoos at once:
Cool. That’s 25 kazoos connected to each other. Here they are shredding the 1954 Chordettes hit “Mr. Sandman”:
And here’s some musical theater, if that’s your thing:
These deconstructions recall, in their way, the recorder-based mayhem of the YouTube channel Shittyflute, yet they strike their own uniquely shitty chord within the broader musical landscape. We have turned a corner in postmodern deconstruction of pop music; this is the year of the kazoo.