It seems like everyone has an axe to grind with Paul Feig’s reboot of Ghostbusters. Whether you find the notion of an all-female cast pandering, or considering the use of African-American stereotype to be uncouth, negative emotions have prematurely surrounded the film. This week, the cycle of outrage extended to the movie’s title track. Fitting the spirit of reinvented 80’s classics, Fall Out Boy and Missy Elliot collaborated on a cover of Ray Parker Jr.’s iconic Ghostbusters theme.
I am on the record as an unabashed Fall Out Boy fan, from their pop-punk roots to their current top 40 efforts. I’m also a presumptive defender of the new Ghostbusters, holding out hope in the face of bad trailers and relentless social media cynicism. But when the track dropped online this week, my faith was shaken. I expected a take on the iconic funk track that would frustrate the online masses while still delivering an enjoyably corny experience.
Fall Out Boy’s cover (“Ghostbusters (I’m Not Afraid)”) certainly accomplished the former. It’s been called everything from “pure cancer” to “hauntingly bad.” Typically I’d write off such press reactions as par for the course, pieces of clickbait to elicit attention. Unfortunately the critics have a point. “I’m Not Afraid” is a disappointment for Fall Out Boy fans, a wasted opportunity for Missy Elliot fans and arguably a declaration of war against Ghostbusters fans. For everyone else, it’s just a remarkably bad song.

To start, calling “I’m Not Afraid” a “cover” isn’t entirely accurate. Lead singer Patrick Stump does backing vocalists through many of the iconic lyrics (raising questions of whom should be contacted when strange things occur in one’s neighborhood) but ditches most of the original song structure. Ray Parker Jr.’s composition is treated more like a sample, referenced and built upon for a larger pop-rock construction. If you’ve heard past FOB hits “Centuries” or “Uma Thurman,” this is nothing new. While those songs lift only a single element (like the vocal work of “Tom’s Diner” or the surf-rock twang of the Munsters theme) of their source material, “I’m Not Afraid” repurposes entire lyrical sections. All while wiping them of the ’80s funk guitar that makes the original song such a perfect earworm. The chorus adds insult to injury, with Stump repeating a single line “I’m Not Afraid” in mosh-friendly meter.
Missy Elliot also drops in for 30 seconds of instantly forgettable rapping and settles for the most generic rhymes about ghosts this side of a Halloween novelty record. The whole three-minute experience is downright unpleasant. It’s too heavy on Ghostbusters references to work as a Fall Out Boy single, and too entrenched in FOB’s signature style to work as a theme track. It’s a failure on just about every metric. Yet while I don’t care for the song, that doesn’t mean I stand by all the criticism being sent its way.
For all the bad decisions that led to “I’m Not Afraid,” it’s never going to deserve the seething online vitriol. The song has been accused of being both a “dubstep tire fire” and a relic of 2000s pop. There’s no consistency to this criticism, which boxes me into a corner. This song should be rallied against, because it’s terrible. Yet the criticism applied to it has been nothing more than cultural sandbagging. The insults levied against it don’t bother to surface what is actually going wrong.
The fact is: most people made their decision at the headline “Fall Out Boy covers Ghostbusters.” The band has always been a shortcut for critics to dunk on the guyliner-smeared emo-rock movement of the 2000s. They’re an easy target, and deserve to be hit hard for this confused remix. But it seems most people would have dragged them down regardless of how the final product would have turned out. Nobody gave this song a chance, and it turns out it didn’t deserve one. As a result, we’re robbing ourselves of something important. Can’t we at least offer something this bad a set of legitimate complaints?
There’s no more fitting movie for this song than Ghostbusters. Like its title track, the film has been dogged with online criticism, despite nobody having seen the actual final product. The complaints are not against the movie, but rather the existence of it. Just as Fall Out Boy must be tried at the public square for daring to cover the work of Ray Parker Jr., Paul Feig and company have been dragged through the streets of nerd media for touching the franchise in the first place. Presumptive conclusions do nobody any good. If the work is good, then the critics find themselves with egg on their face. But if the work is bad, critics are free to pat themselves on the back and walk away without ever really measuring how a bad idea went so wrong.
Follow Chris Berg on Twitter @ChrisBerg25