By October 2006, the band My Chemical Romance, while popular among younger folk for their very sad and very loud songs about life, death, heartbreak, and bullying, had been thoroughly lambasted by the critics and everyone who wasn't a teenager for their first two very sad and very loud albums about life, death, heartbreak, and bullying, and also for their hair. The critics didn’t like their hair.
My Chemical Romance, or MCR, were a pioneering emo band, although they did hate the term. They abandoned rock-star ego and traditional rock subject matter entirely in their songwriting, instead writing songs about 9/11 and, in one of their most popular singles, “Helena (So Long and Goodnight), the death of lead singer Gerard Way and guitarist Mikey’s grandmother Elena. Rock on, amirite?
Critics and parents and the trash newspaper the Sun, all of whom had grown up in the musically happy-go-lucky ‘60s and ‘70s, worried loudly about the effect that this dark depressing music was having on Impressionable Teens. They got it wrong, just as they had a few decades earlier, when the Cure had hit the scene. The music resonated because it reflected pre-existing emotions, not because it magically instilled in teenagers a desire to be sad and angry. Heavy, emotionally involved pop-punk and emo music was for ‘00s teenagers an antidote to the hyperproduced bubblegum pop that dominated the scene (Britney Spears, *NSYNC*, JLo, etc.), just as gothic rock in the ‘80s served as a tonic to the meandering, blissed- and drugged-out anodynity that was the post-Woodstock mainstream.
Today, MCR is most often remembered for their third album, The Black Parade. A postmodern rock opera with influences ranging from Green Day to Edwardian vaudeville, The Black Parade is an exacting, in-depth examination of the emotional fallout of being dying and being dead, with guitars on. Taken all together, the album was everything the mainstream didn’t like about My Chemical Romance—sadness, death, guitar music (don’t forget that guitar bands are always about to go out of style)—but sadder, with louder guitars, and single-mindedly focused on mortality with the focus of people who don’t want to die.
Honesty and frankness run through the lyrics, uncaring of social taboo or sounding “too real.” MCR had always been about candor, and applying their no-holds-barred style to the subjects of illness and death, things we speak about with as much emotional distance as possible—when we are forced to speak about them—made for powerful, well-textured lyrics that, if the listener can get over their instinct to shy away, are very good listening.
Musically, the album is an ode to that which had come before MCR. The band were always students of their genre, and there’s not much in the composition that anyone who listens to a lot of music will find revolutionary. But, and I’ll use a quote here:
“’Talent borrows. Genius steals.’ --Igor Stravinsky.”
--David Feurzeig
What a smart guy.
Closer to the rock tradition: such luminaries as David Bowie (semiprofessional hair-dye model) and Andy Warhol (best known as the manager for a band called the Velvet Underground until they fired him on the grounds that he had made them no money) liked to tell people that originality is overrated. You could argue that there haven’t been any new rock sounds at all since the late ‘90s, after Nirvana and Bikini Kill made their mark. And on this album, MCR have a lot of fun paying winking little tributes to their influences, from the fact that the chord progression of the opening song is, underneath the radically different sounds, the same one that opened The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, to the throttling synthy guitars on “Sleep” that could be played by Slash himself.The Black Parade fits neatly into the rock tradition, although the rotting lace and a lead singer who looks like a child’s skeleton and sounds like a child’s ghost do set it apart a bit.
The Black Parade opens with the beeping of a hospital heart rate monitor, which sets the rhythm for the chords. “Now come one, come all to this tragic affair,” Way sings in a sunny major key. “Throw on your black dress, mix in with the lot.” The character singing the lyrics is singing his funeral wishes. The song is called “The End.” This will be an unusual sort of tragedy: it’s already gotten as bad as it can get. Hum.
All gothic rock since the Cure has had the spectre of mortality looming over the proceedings, the woolly mammoth in the room that lends more urgency to the lyrical angst. Death is usually implied in eye-socket makeup and skull rings, but left out of the songs themselves. But as we’ve discussed, MCR aren’t too fussed about treading lightly over graves. So, naturally, the second number (and the album’s first normal-length song) is actually called “Dead!” and includes lines like “Have you heard the news that you’re dead?”. Way chides the “tongue-tied and oh so squeamish” listener for their willful emotional detachment. The band tackle the taboo from the get-go, with a sense of humor that safeguards against self-importance.
The next two songs, “This Is How I Disappear” and “The Sharpest Lives”, are perfect pop-punk powerhouses, guitars a-throbbing while Gerard Way introduces you more fully to the things his voice can do, and he can do a lot. From a sensitive, childish yawp to a peculiar tri-tone screech that no non-metal singer since Paul McCartney has done so well, Way is an expressive singer with an emotional range that his metallic tonal quality wouldn’t have you believe. There’s very little sentiment in the music of these numbers; despite their dark lyrics, their stable chord structures, supporting some seriously heavy guitars and vocals, make you want to jump up and down. Death is celebrated, in its own weird way, by being rocked out to. Soon enough, there’ll be a run of four songs that will explore the subject matter in its more depressing contexts; there’s time first to dance and remember, Dío de los Muertosstyle. Glory in the skull makeup, friends.
The title track, “Welcome To The Black Parade,” is MCR’s most popular song, and for good reason. Musically, it starts with the sonic equivalent of standing by a glassy pond, marches up into the eponymous parade, and builds, collapses, and rebuilds in great crashing waves of catharsis. The lyrics fly at you thick and fast, each one a black-lipstick kiss of gallows humor and memory. Gerard Way, when writing about Queen’s 1974 album A Night At The Opera forRolling Stone, said:
“When My Chemical Romance were making The Black Parade, we watched tons of documentary footage about A Night at the Opera, Queen's best album. [...] But we didn't try to make another ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’ Whenever someone tries to do that, they fail.”
Yeah, so they 100% made another Bohemian Rhapsody. Like, no doubt. Maybe it was by accident, or maybe Gerard Way was messing with us, but they tried to make another Bohemian Rhapsody, and boy did they succeed. A quiet piano intro, lyrics about childhood and regret, an explosion into an entirely different sound, modulation through at least five movements; the similarities, if listed without context, would bore you, so I’ll stop.
On this track and several others on the album, MCR employ “through-composition”, writing songs that eschew verse-chorus structure in favor of a mini-suite that can and does change time signature, key, and pretty much everything else. Successful examples of this technique include “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” by the Beatles, “Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush, “Paranoid Android” by Radiohead, and yes, “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The end product, if made well, is often more emotionally and tonally satisfying than a song with a middle and end that can be deduced from the beginning.
Then comes the four-song suite of Deeply Depressing Songs that the band figure you’re ready for at this point. “I Don’t Love You”, the album’s first straight-up ballad, is an elegy to illness that distances the Patient from their loved ones. It also serves as a vehicle for some of Way’s most expressive vocals, from the almost-spoken “I’ll be gone” to the MCR-size chorus. “House of Wolves” is a devil-may-care rumination of the fact that pretty much everyone of the Patient’s faith (probably Catholicism, definitely some sort of Christianity) is doomed to Hell for some infraction or another. “Cancer” details the nitty-gritty pains and indignities that late-stage cancer gifts its bearer, and made me cry when I was eleven. “Mama” is an uncomfortable listen: familial regrets and resentments rise to the forefront of the Patient’s mind, and he rails against his mother and himself over a musical arrangement that starts out equal parts klezmer and mariachi (a nod to the Day of the Dead festival, whose iconography heavily influenced MCR’s touring costumes for the album) and finishes Sondheimesque, after a heavy metal interlude and an appearance by Liza Minelli. (You think I’m kidding?)
“Sleep” is another power ballad, and perhaps the album’s only bit of extra fat. Heard in isolation it’s quite a good song, but coming after all the laments from “I Don’t Love You” onwards, it sounds a bit redundant. It is nice, though, how the guitar lick at the end hearkens back to the beeps that opened the whole album.
Whew. The last five tracks sure were heavy. Good thing the next track is “Teenagers.”
“Teenagers” occupies the same corner of my mind as “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” by the Clash. Both are straightforward, mid-tempo rock songs; both of their performers usually go in for more complicated material; both are a heck of a lot of fun. It’s all well and good to write clever, involved songs that tackle the biggest subjects with humor and insight, but sometimes you need to turn the amps to 11 and jump up and down. The song is still tinged with the dark trickle of MCR flavor that sets it apart from any pretender to the hard-rock throne: notice, if you will, the nursery-rhyme cadence of the chorus that, when paired with the high-school violence that the lyrics detail, makes the whole thing creepily innocent while completely corrupted, like a rotten baby doll. Very goth. “Teenagers” is just a great song, and a welcome reprieve from the musical heaviness of the other tracks.
The more or less penultimate track, “Disenchanted”, is the least theatrical, least pretentious, least fictionalized song on the album. A gorgeous meditation on the band members’ loss of dreams and innocence, it opens with a guitar line that walks through suburbia on a hot summer afternoon as Way sings with a tired minimalism; his vocals, before the time-honored electrification of the second verse turns them into a scream, sound like Judi Dench’s Queen Victoria going through the motions after Albert’s death, or a Daniel Day-Lewis character hanging up his hat and coat and sitting down heavily in a worn-out chair. The actor emotes.
In the chorus, Way winks at everyone still listening to the tail end of the album in spite of all the bad press—“If I’m so wrong / How can you listen all night long?”—while scorning the worst of emo music, “sad song[s] with nothing to say.” There’s a quiet triumph in understanding the sources of your own sadness, and this is what the band celebrate on “Disenchanted.”
The finale, “Famous Last Words”, starts as another pop-punk song, fast and low, surf-rock influences playing in the instrumentals while Way snarls the lyrics through pain-gritted teeth. The middle eight lift it up a bit, then, after a beat of silence, a chorus:
“I am not afraid to keep on living
I am not afraid to walk this world alone
Honey, if you stay you’ll be forgiven
Nothing you can say can stop me going home.”
That’s a perfectly fine way to end an album. After twelve tracks of pain and tragedy, a powerful about-face to fight the forces of gloom and doom with a “throw what you can my way” determination is a hell of a message to send your teenage fans. And that is how the album ends. Until a piano cuts in and Gerard Way starts singing, with a vaudevillian’s exaggerated, self-parodying pomp, a light ditty about vampires. I dare you not to laugh.
An album about endings, that literally starts with The End, ends with neither a whimper nor a bang, but with a wink. And why not laugh a little? We’re all gonna die one day, or so we’ve been told.
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