WIZ KHALIFA
with Fall Out Boy
It has been almost 30 years since the rap and rock worlds collided on the Aerosmith/ Run-DMC remake of “Walk This Way” and a dozen years since those two titans toured together. Those genres have mixed in other places, as well, including the old Lollapalooza tours and the modern-day major festival.
But it was still head-turning when Wiz Khalifa and Fall Out Boy announced the co-headlining Boys of Zummer Tour, which stops at the First Niagara Pavilion tonight.
“I think it’s been a mostly good reaction,” Fall Out Boy singer Patrick Stump said in a phone interview. “I think people who follow us by now are used to a little bit of a surprise as far as who it’s going to be. Also, I think genre isn’t as much of a thing, not a thing that people focus on anymore. I think it’s been more some older folks who have been, ‘What? A hip-hop act?’ I think people are going to be shocked at how rock ’n’ roll Wiz Khalifa is. He puts on a rock ’n’ roll show, so it’s pretty fun.”
In 2009, the Pittsburgh rapper was wedged between rock bands Modey Lemon and Don Caballero on a bill at the Station Square amphitheater, lacking some punch with just a DJ behind him. The past few years, he has been touring with a band that makes it more of a full-on live show.
In a teleconference with FOB bassist Pete Wentz, the rapper said, “I’m influenced by live music so much in general. It’s the feeling that you get from a good band that is incredible, just the dynamic of each musician, you know, playing their heart out.”
He rattled off a list of favorite bands — Queen, Journey, The Police, Bob Marley and The Wailers, Red Hot Chili Peppers, System of a Down and George Clinton, among them — saying he’s inspired by “a lot of people who just really rock it live and really kill it.”
Nine years since his indie debut and five years into his major-label career, Khalifa, at 27, is as hot as he has ever been. “See You Again,” his salute to the late Paul Walker on the “Furious 7” soundtrack, has topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 10 straight weeks, making it his biggest single since “Black and Yellow.”
“It’s the biggest song that I’ve ever had in my career,” Khalifa said. “Every artist wishes for that, that reaction, that when the song comes on, everybody feels it. I’m blessed to have that kind of song and that kind of feeling happen. It’s just really good to keep people happy.”
Fall Out Boy formed in the Chicago suburbs and rose through the ranks of the poppunk scene starting in 2005 with a run of hit singles including “Sugar, We’re Going Down,” “Dance, Dance, Dance” and “This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arms Race.”
When that dried up around 2008-09 with “Folie a Deux,” and the band started to battle internally, Fall Out Boy seemed all but left for dead. Then, came a surprising comeback in 2013 with a chart-topping album, “Save Rock and Roll.”
“The comeback thing is weird. We went away for three years, and before that we had kinda had a natural run,” Mr. Stump said. “Most bands only get what we had. Not most bands,” he said, correcting himself. “Most
successful bands only get what we had in the first maybe 10 years ago, where we had a moment — we were on MTV and radio, and then it all went away, and that was it. For most bands, that’s the story, and that’s what we expected for ourselves.
“But we weren’t happy with the way things ended, and we wanted to make a record just to kind of finish things off. It wasn’t planned to be a swan song, but if that was it, it was OK.”
Fall Out Boy opted for a more bombastic sound and produced a No. 13 single and a sports anthem in “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark (Light Em Up).”
In making the follow-up, Mr. Stump said, “We said, ‘We don’t know why that worked, so if we try to pretend that we did and we know how to make big songs, we’re lying to ourselves. So let’s just go back and make a record and have fun,’ and it was a very relaxed record. It was the most laid-back I’ve felt in the studio in years.”
Fall Out Boy managed to repeat the success this year with another No. 1 album, “American Beauty/American Psycho,” led by the arena-rock single “Centuries,” which went to No. 10. The band approached this album like a rapper making a mixtape, using frequent samples: Among them, “Centuries” samples “Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega/Lolo, the title track samples Motley Crue’s “Too Fast for Love,” and “Uma Thurman” grabs “The Munsters” theme.
“We don’t like when rock music is a traditionalist genre,” the singer said. “We don’t want it to be a thing that the rules were established in 1975 and that’s it. And for that reason, we wanted to make some old rockers angry. I think a lot of people don’t understand sampling, and think it’s being lazy and not writing your own song, and we wanted to very clearly write our own songs. There’s a lot going on there in the way we reworked stuff.”
Another factor was wanting to churn out a record quickly by responding to how other songs made them feel.
“We come from this old-school recording idea,” the singer said. “You’d go in the studio and spend a year. You’d spend literally a week on microphone placements for the drums. You can’t really do that anymore, it’s inefficient. It’s one of the casualties of the modern record industry. It also boxes you in because you focus on little things instead of the big picture. We wanted to utilize samples as a way to react quickly, to say, ‘This is a lyric that we have, what does that make us think of? What’s another feeling or emotion that makes us feel?’ ”
What happened on “Uma Thurman” was the musical version of a malaprop.
“That came about where we had the sample and we were like, ‘That just feels good, that feels right.’ We played it for a friend and they thought it was the Dick Dale song from ‘Pulp Fiction,’ so instantly it became an outgrowth of that. It became this weird song about Uma Thurman with ‘The Munsters’ sample in it.”
Khalifa, who jumps in with a rap that has nothing to do with the actress or the Munsters, was excited to be part of the EDM remix of the song. Working with Fall Out Boy takes him back to watching MTV and VH1 when he was growing up.
“Everybody in the hood, they didn’t really listen to stuff like that, or enjoy stuff like that,” he said. “For me, it was natural. I liked the music. I looked up to it. I could always see myself collaborating with these types of artists and doing something with them. So now that I’m in the position where people know my name, and they think I’m cool, too. I just say call my manager. I can work with the bands whose sound and vision I dig, and what they do. When Fall Out Boy asked me to give them the remix of ‘Uma Thurman,’ I was like, ‘I just got to kill it, like this is my chance to do what I’ve been wanting to do since I was a kid.’ ”
The stop in Burgettstown tonight will be the 15th date of the tour, and certainly a special one for the rapper.
“Hometown shows are always the best, and they’re always crazy,” he said. “Backstage, you got all your family there, and it’s just a really good vibe.” Fall Out Boy plans to feed off it as well. “I’m excited to go to Pittsburgh,” Mr. Wentz said, “because I think it’s fun to see an artist in their hometown. That day is Wiz’s day, and it’s fun to be a part of that.”