Panic! Is Now Panic (Minus the !)!!!

January 11th, 2008

Brendan Urie of Panic At The Disco reacts to the news

Let us take a pause cafe from Britney nonsense (Breaking: “Brit’s Boy has Bruises and Bitemarks!“) (Also Breaking: “Kids Sometimes Roughhouse“), to focus on pop cult matters that bear great weight. The kind that are truly momentous, instances of history being made, the stuff that is so significant it will top year end lists of top news stories, even though such lists are 11 months away.

Drum roll please, the HUGE[!] news awaits: Las Vegas quartet, Panic! At The Disco is no longer. The boys have not broken up. Rather, they have become Panic At The Disco. Panic (not Panic!) have pared down their punctuation.

No good reason for the change, though conspiracy theorists might deduct that it was for – GASP! – publicity. It was also announced yesterday that the guys will be headlining the 45-city Honda Civic Tour which kicks off April 10 in San Francisco (no word on other dates yet). And, oh yeah, they have an album, Pretty.Odd, out March 25.

Giving up cynicism was one of my New Year’s Resolutions though, so let’s give them a little credit. Maybe they had genuine reasons for the change. They felt they had outgrown it: As the guys from the land of slot machines increase their global presence, mayhaps the symbol was a little too local. In terms of punctuation, the exclamation point just screams “VEGAS” [!!!!!!!] It’s so flashy, so shameless and attention-grabbing. You can’t get more Nevadan. They may as well have had a picture of a slot machine appearing after Panic or some reference to 99 cent AYCE buffets. Maybe they thought that the point was too quaint, something that prevented them from meeting international potential?

Or maybe it’s an excuse for them to reissue their music on albums featuring the shiny new logo. Whoop! There I go…

OK. So let’s talk about how major this is. In terms of significance, I would rank it something like this on the Identity Crisis Scale:
1. Prince becomes [insert symbol here]
2. Panic is the new Panic!
3. [Insert symbol here] reverts to Prince
4. Robot/actor Tom Cruise refers to “Katie Holmes” as “Kate” in interviews, as “My malleable pretend wife” behind closed doors
5. The week where Mischa Barton was into girls on The O.C. – what you’re looking for is at 1:40) tied with the episode of Full House where Michelle forgot who she was and then had the out of body experience (and then was fine).

What do y’all think? Will you miss the exclamation point? How do you predict it will affect the guys from the land o’ glitz…or will it? Is it like when Kevin Richardson (who?) left the Backstreet Boys and no one really noticed?

And are you gonna check out the tour?

Photograph Courtesy Getty Images

Posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 1:37 pm by Sabrina Jalees and is filed under Celebrities & Pop Culture.