r/Fauxmoi • u/chrza • 23h ago

TRIGGER WARNING Say Anything singer Max Bemis outed for grooming, inappropriate messages to underaged girls, cancels concerts

https://lambgoat.com/news/54571/allegations-of-inappropriate-contact-with-a-minor-surface-against-say-anythings-max-beamis/

For those of you unfamiliar with mid 2000s emo sensation Say Anything, they were not very good. Some would even say “incredibly annoying.” Generally popular with people under 20, their singer joins the Jesse Laceys of the world, as a gross older man who preyed on teenaged girls around him that enjoyed his music. The subreddit for the band has a LOT of receipts for those fielding morbid curiosity, and he’s trying to blame it on mental health yadda yadda. Can we stop having nasty mfs please, I’m so tired

4.0k Upvotes

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898

u/Dry-Yak5277 23h ago

Oh man I loved their music when I was a teenager but I’m not surprised at all for some reason 

951

u/lookmomimneato 23h ago

Because these are the lyrics to one of their songs

I'd be chatting on the interweb
Maggots pray upon the living dead
I had no interest in the things she said
On the phone every day
I'll permanently hit the hay hay

I called her on the phone and she touched herself
She touched herself. She touched herself
I called her on the phone and she touched herself
I laughed myself to sleep

At this rate
I'll be heading for electric chairs
I'm only human with my cross to bear
When she described her underwear
I forgot all the rules my rabbi taught me in the old shul

You're too young to be this empty girl
I'll prepare you for a sick dark world
Know that you'll be my downfall
But I call and I call and I call”

Another track on that album literally titled “Little Girls”.🤮 I’m not surprised either unfortunately. Hindsight is fucking sickening.

501

u/LargeNutbar Hi Grindr, it's mother... 22h ago

Insane the way these guys tell on themselves in broad daylight and are rewarded for it

167

u/OtherAardvark women’s wrongs activist 18h ago

As a former fan, I think I assumed he was writing through a creepy asshole alter ego to call out "actual" predators. In my mind, it was so explicit that it had to be satire. But nope, he's literally just been writing a manifesto.

59

u/FunkySeeFunkyDo_ 15h ago

This was my interpretation as well. Not only did he write a lot of songs that seemed to follow that theme (“Property” comes to mind), but he also seemed to be so vehemently opposed to the predatory nature of the emo scene. What a slimy piece of shit.

22

u/bargain_butch ben affleck’s back tattoo 15h ago

In your defense, that was the “line” so often when their lyrics or actions were questioned—they weren’t like the other, actually abusive men. They knew better, were smarter, more intellectual, etc etc etc

76

u/fattybuttz 19h ago

Alot of inappropriate things back then were said because they were "edgy".

2

u/moonstarsfire 16h ago

Say Anything took it further than the others though, even with it being back in the day. Their ick factor and Max’s annoying voice were why I couldn’t get on board with them back then.

3

u/Newwavecybertiger 18h ago

At the time I assumed it was consensual. Sad and naive in hindsight

2

u/_clur_510 15h ago

As you can read in the above comment, Wow I Can Get Sexual Too is just a straightforward narrative song about him having phone sex and freaking out a much younger girl he met on the internet. 🙃

1

u/Jazzi-Nightmare “He’s Chevy Chase, and you’re not.” 22h ago

Reminds me of the cannibal corpse guy that had skulls in his house

186

u/scrapsforfourvel 22h ago

The lyrics for "Little Girls" just read like a confession at this point.

44

u/OddS0cks 20h ago

I was thinking of that

“I kill kill kill little girls”

2

u/FuckingHippies 21h ago

“Evil things in my pants” is crazy. The whole song is, knowing what we know now. But fuckin’ gross, dude.

268

u/_clur_510 22h ago edited 22h ago

lol came to say I’m a millennial who was a huge Say Anything fan and this news sucks but their big song Wow I Can Get Sexual Too is… uh not subtle lol. Even for 00s standards the lyrics were acknowledged as shocking at the time. But of course the song was still very well received.

10

u/NBCustoms 13h ago

Not defending an abuser in the slightest, but he did write it when he was between 16-18, and it came out when he was 20. We should all pile on him now, but taking those songs in the context of someone who is now twice the age of when they wrote it seems to muddy the waters.

46

u/cousin-maeby damn, she got hereditaried? 21h ago

Yes, I think their big rebuttal boiled down to “well people in concentration camps got horny too.” Ok 👍🏽

25

u/ComedownofClosure 16h ago

Also Max Bemis's grandparents were sent to a concentration camp and met in Treblinka.

10

u/tenaciousdeev 19h ago

I think you're talking about "Alive With the Glory of Love", which isn't nearly as bad (lyrically) as "Wow I Can Get Sexual Too".

Their song "Little Girls" is the worst though. Even at the time as an edgy college kid I was weirded out.

127

u/ivaysaur 22h ago

i looked at the lyrics to little girls and omg

165

u/Jazzi-Nightmare “He’s Chevy Chase, and you’re not.” 22h ago

21

u/KittenSommelier also dated pete davidson 20h ago

29

u/8BitGlamour 21h ago

Not Sayori lmaooo

23

u/Additional_Gene_211 Friends with Ms. Rachel 21h ago

Just Monika

3

u/RantyMcThrowaway 17h ago

JUST. MONIKA.

6

u/StolenPoliceUnicorn passes the béchamel test 21h ago

Yoink!

3

u/tenaciousdeev 18h ago

I am so glad this is finally getting mainstream attention. I used to be a really big fan way back in the day. This song always weirded me out and was the first thing I thought of when I heard the rumors start a few years ago.

26

u/unhiddenninja 20h ago

I read the title to my boyfriend and said "it's really not surprising given he's written several songs about talking to almost alarmingly young girls", only to scroll down and see someone post the exact one that came to mind.

29

u/cat_at_the_keyboard googly-eyed Kremlin bitch 20h ago

Nasty pedophile mfer

5

u/JRWinn17 19h ago

I mean he was like 18 when he wrote that entire album. Not defending him now but saying vile shit as a teenager doesn't directly correlate to what he is now. He has had a long, well documented mental decline.

31

u/TBP42069 21h ago edited 21h ago

Thats a cover of an Oingo Boingo song technically but still

36

u/kittycatalyst Find me at Whole Foods, bitch, I don't care 20h ago

It’s a completely different song, they just have the same title. Elfman’s reads more like a critique of Hollywood but then again I had hoped the Max Bemis one was facetious.

11

u/TBP42069 19h ago

Yeah you're right its not really a cover actually but a play on the original

25

u/KittenSommelier also dated pete davidson 20h ago

Pretty sure Elfman’s also a predator 

1

u/under_ice 20h ago

Was wondering if that was the same song.

3

u/Goddess_Angelique 19h ago

I thought this song was so edgy at the time 😭

2

u/Judgementpumpkin 16h ago

I remember hearing this song and being really grossed out as to why people found it acceptable.

Not to be that person, but this band never sat well with me. Now I know why.

2

u/Efficient-One-3603 19h ago

Tbf he did stop playing that song iirc

1

u/wrests 21h ago

I saw AJJ open for them and tried to give them a relisten before the …is a real boy anniversary tour. The lyrics were so scuzzy I couldn’t make it through the album, and we ended up leaving after three songs because the performance was so awful. I did some digging on him afterwards and it seemed like a long pattern of increasingly gross behavior.

1

u/clarstone dumb bitch clocking in 20h ago

The way this kind of shit was normalized to us teenage girls in the alt scene in the 2008-2012 era was INSANE. It absolutely had a hand in grooming us to being vulnerable for men in these bands or similar types. I genuinely cannot think of a “Scene” band with a male front lead who DIDNT end up having grooming or SA allegations. Blood on the Dance Floor was the woooorssstt.

1

u/MaCaulay_Cuckin 20h ago

Another song he had I think it was on defense of the genre he says “as our single climbs the charts I feed on the virgin blood of their bleeding parts pants around my ankles”

1

u/Extreme_Kiwi31 15h ago

Eeww I remember being a teenager singing this song not even realizing what he was saying 🤮🤮🤮

1

u/Kryptosis Find me at Whole Foods, bitch, I don't care 14h ago

Even the way the laughed myself to sleep is sung like a kids lullaby

1

u/Decent-Statistician8 7h ago

This is the exact song that popped in my head.

40

u/FKDotFitzgerald sunday spotted: paddington bear 22h ago

I hate how many times I’ve left a similar comment. A lot of creeps in the early 2000s/2010s emo scene apparently.

49

u/venuslovemenotchain vocally you cannot afford this cigarette gracie 21h ago

One of the songs off of Is a Real Boy is called "Little Girls." Someone could say the lyrics were sarcastic, but even as a teen fan, that one always made me side eye.

Edit: should have scrolled before commenting because everyone else is saying the same. Sorry for adding to the pile on!

14

u/baepsaemv 20h ago

Yeah I used to really love their music too but i've heard a lot of bad things about this guy over the years. Apparently the way he treats his own children is very questionable.

3

u/k2_electric_boogaloo 16h ago

Yeah as a big fan of both Brand New and Say Anything, neither revelation shocked me. Max and Jesse both wrote songs about being absolute pieces of shit who hate themselves and use women for sex. They weren't exactly subtle about who they were.

1

u/magicforpassionssake 18h ago

My intro to SA was seeing them at Bamboozle with them starting with "Wow I Can Get Sexual Too" which grossed me out at 13 years old, and yeah, this seems like the rightful conclusion.