![]() The man falls for a mysterious masked woman at the club who is revealed to be his girlfriend just as the authorities arrive and haul them both off in the back of a police car. It’s a completely stage-worthy set and costume change, from the conservative domestic scene to the risqué outlawed joint. The band’s next single, “But It’s Better if You Do,” about a man who ignores his girlfriend’s warnings not to go sing at an illegal strip club, begins in black and white before dipping into color, “Wizard of Oz”-style, to show us the showgirls and lascivious patrons. On its 15th anniversary, it remains a unique feat in the world of pop - a commercial success built on a foundation of melodrama and spectacle that simultaneously satirized and celebrated it. The throwback theatrics had been attempted before by artists in the alt-cabaret space (the Dresden Dolls and the World/Inferno Friendship Society, for example), but never this successfully on a mainstream level: The album went triple platinum and is the best-selling LP in the Panic! catalog. ![]() This is how Panic! at the Disco announced itself in the “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” video, the first from its 2005 debut album, “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out.” Though the band has undergone many reinventions in the years since, it’s closely associated with its original aesthetic: a distinctive theatrical sensibility that drew on the sound of early 2000s pop-punk while also referencing vintage performance styles - burlesque, vaudeville, old Broadway musicals - to illustrate themes of duplicity, addiction and broken relationships. Fifteen years ago, a mysterious top-hatted figure and a parade of circus performers interrupted a wedding in a music video with an unconventional soundtrack: an energetic pop-punk song with a bouncy, carnivalesque cello opening.
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