“And what of the dead? I own that I thought of myself, at times, almost as dead. Are they not locked below ground in chambers smaller than mine was, in their millions of millions? There is no category of human activity in which the dead do not outnumber the living many times over. Most beautiful children are dead. Most soldiers, most cowards. The fairest women and the most learned men – all are dead. Their bodies repose in caskets, in sarcophagi, beneath arches of rude stone, everywhere under the earth. Their spirits haunt our minds, ears pressed to the bones of our foreheads. Who can say how intently they listen as we speak, or for what word?”
- Gene Wolfe
All great American rock bands eventually fuse with the essence of something bigger (it doesn’t really matter what) and become synonymous with it. It can be massive and concrete the way The Red Hot Chile Peppers became one with the spirit of California or as niche as the city of Winslow, AZ erecting a statue to commemorate that a member of The Eagles once stood there and kinda looked around. Semisonic more or less has squatters' rights to the aura of closing down the bar, and woe be the fate of the Fenway Park PA operator who decides to shake things up in the choice of music in the 8th inning.
My Chemical Romance may just as well choose the Ouija Board as their talisman, for no band has ever been better at serving as our middleman for connecting with the other side. As they took the stage once again for their 2022 reunion tour, one can’t help but feel as if a threshold has been crossed, that time and space heeled to the whims of the performers more so than your usual reunion tour. A band that had made their mark mourning ghosts had become phantoms themselves— but now, inconceivably, wear flesh and blood again.
Before they took the stage, the band opted to open with, and this is only an estimate, maybe eight~ consecutive minutes of an ambiguous fluttering that sounds like a sensitive microphone pickup on a motorcycle idling outside on the street. By minute two I was still excitedly bouncing on my heels. By minute four I watched the younger attendees reach for their phones to fill in the gap of the missing stimuli, but by minute six the elders did not prove to be much better. In the waning moments, before it stopped without warning, I had legitimately begun to wonder if an amp was half-plugged and 20,000 people were mistaking a feedback loop for artistic intention while roadies were frantically checking their inputs for the troublemaker delaying the start of the show.
Preshow theatrics and sonically setting the mood without their own music is hardly a new strategy. LCD Soundsystem funneling in 10cc’s already tension-building I’m Not In Love before opening the festivities with another round of rising tension with the distant boops and beeps of Dance Yrself Clean is a strong example. I once watched The Front Bottoms take the stage to This is How We Do It as blow-up Inflatable Tube Man roared to life and promptly bumped its head on the low ceiling, forcing it to leer over the audience like a stage diver frozen in amber.
My mind couldn’t help but wander in those empty, sonically repetitive moments. Maybe this bit was extended because there was some legitimate technical problem that arose, or maybe rockstars also have to poop at inopportune times (they’re just like us!).
Or maybe there’s a value to subjecting audiences to the emptiness, to the drone that does not end, perhaps what lies on the other side of death’s fence.
Here’s a splash of cold water: We are but infinitesimal quarter-specs on the infinite tapestry that is spacetime. We’ve come into this world after eons of evolution made it possible for humans to create society and invent things like credit scores and Love Island and will spend an infinite amount of time dead after we leave the lobby (as we understand it right now, anyway). It is what makes reunions so special— any time we depart, whether it’s till the next birthday on the calendar or till after work— we fulfill a tiny promise, easily broken, that there was a “later” or “till-next time”. One day the reaper will call and we will only exist in memory— with no bankable promise of reuniting.
It was My Chemical Romance that helped build the grammar of grief with their music. They weren’t the first group to write about death— but were among the first to linger in that space between life and death, to go behind enemy lines and report from the final frontier.
Though the explosive honesty of I’m Not Okay would cultivate generations of loyal and angsty teenagers as their first mega-hit, a subject matter surrounding feeling not only left out, but actively antagonized was familiar ground in 2003. It was the two other singles on their sophomore album The Ghost of You and Helena that helped MCR break from the pack of alternative bands mostly concerned with meat and potatoes emo problems like when a girl doesn’t love you back, or when a girl doesn’t love you back and also she’s a bitch.
Helena, arguably the greatest song the group ever wrote, is the tip of the spear on Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. It’s laced with bitter, biting sentiments but not as a jilted lover— but for the ways we curse the cosmos for taking a loved one from us— for giving their spirit a head start from which we can never close the gap. From this point on: they are gone. The lyrics depict someone wrestling with what awaits every mortal life:
Burning on
Just like the match you strike to incinerate
Each match that is struck is done so with the knowledge that the flame will eventually go out. But they must burn. This is the implicit promise of both the match and the human race— why we continue to live our lives and bring more life into this world while opening ourselves up to harm knowing how each and every life will eventually end. If we’re lucky, our deaths will shatter everyone close to us. And yet, we must go on. Tis better to have struck and burned than to never have been struck at all.
And what's the worst you take
From every heart you break?
And like the blade you'll stain
Silly as it is, it can feel like a selfish act, dying. Anyone who has ever had to clean out the home of someone who has passed on knows the feeling, but it passes. It always does, and the speaker in Helena knows this even as they vent their grief. Eventually, they throw dirt on the grave and move on.
So long and goodnight.
The speaker in The Ghost of You feels closer to the invasive thoughts that the one in Helena appears to eventually defeat.
At the end of the world
Or the last thing I seeYou are never coming home, never coming home
Could I? Should I?
There is temptation, always temptation in these moments of mourning. The thought of joining a loved one in the great beyond where there is no more pain, no more suffering, no more robocalls in the next life. Or maybe it’s the drone that does not end?
Yet even though these depictions of mourning the fallen did help MCR break from the pack of their contemporaries, it still was not a wholly unique perspective. It wouldn’t be until their next album, The Black Parade, that they bridged the lines between life and death and ended up immortal.
The first musical chirp out of the album is the whine of the heartbeat monitor before a lonely acoustic guitar twangs along to words luring passers by in like a busker on the street. “Come one, come all—you will all come eventually, may as well get a head start”, the song essentially says. The opening track is fittingly called The End to establish early that death may yet be the start of another journey, that there is something after.
MCR gave name to that something with The Black Parade: The eternal choir that houses all souls and saves a spot for each and every one of us on the bandstand. Even as the melancholic childhood memory recites over the sad piano in Welcome To The Black Parade— MCR makes death a triumphant thing. Death is the one unifier in a divided world, the only thing that peels back the flesh reveals our parade dress. And what a privilege it is to belong somewhere. This is an anthem for the end of morality, a reminder that someday in the future, even if it’s sooner than we’d like— we’ll break from the sidewalk and join the passing parade, not in some uniform military lockstep— but dancing behind in a second line.
The rest of the album continues to poke around notions of death with the disturbing and spoiled Calliope music of Mama (in which hell awaits us all, and the required insanity one must adopt to brave it) and Famous Last Words, a familiar return to form in which we promise to endure and continue living despite the futility of raging against the dying light and alluring call of the afterlife.
Even if these funeral dirges are surprisingly head-bangable— the band’s primary source of energy has come from this sense of edge and danger that has always underscored many of the stories MCR tries to tell: The Bonnie and Clyde romance of Demolition Lovers, the sacrificial last-stand of Save Yourself, I’ll Hold Them Back, or even the drugged up airport fistfight of Vampire Money. My Chemical Romance has always, perhaps surprisingly, appealed to the outlaw fantasy of shirking responsibilities as a productive member of society in favor of shootouts in cemeteries.
Back to the show: After opening with Foundations of Decay, they immediately shifted gears into the frantic, good-time anarchy of Na Na Na— a song that sounds like the opening number of a Cyberpunk musical, a song about vigilantes after the corporate apocalypse. Perhaps the potential for eye rolling is high— many fans of emo music tend to skew younger and aren’t exactly the pistol-packing type. There is also the argument that MCR has always sounded too big for its melancholic sentiments. But this makes them no different than writers, directors, and the like who purport to have tapped into something dangerous in their art when they lead decidedly safe lives. But musicians are a front-facing type, often requiring the thick skin of the outlaw.
Frontman Gerard Way is five years away from fifty. Energy and vocal conservation is a reality of touring at that age for anyone— and it would be a nice sentiment to lie and say that the energy of the show is full throttle at all times, but the band shows its age. Way takes verses off where the crowd supplies the vocals, the support players of Frank Iero, Ray Toro and brother bassist Mikey Way are mostly sedentary compared to the free-range they used to have. Long gone are the days of people actually being able to stagedive at these shows, as is the cross to bear for stadium seating. The energy is there, but that danger is a facsimile at best, and a reminder this was all pretend at worst.
But they have always been equal parts showmen as well as musicians. Just as the band sings about the joy in death or the glory even in defeat for the criminal that goes down in gunfire, there is nothing ignoble about the furious expenditure of energy even if it wilts in comparison to the band’s glory days. Way stalks the stage and growls at the crowd like an animal behind bars. Though he doesn’t play an instrument, a bouquet of pedals and distortion knobs looms at the edge like a pulpit. He rakes at it with both hands, haunched over and stirring it like a witch preparing brew, pulling and twisting at the switches like a Rubiks Cube made from the corpse of a Decepticon. All the band’s arsenal of anthems go down smooth, and the performance has enough urgency to convince you that it’s the last time the group will ever hear music, let alone play any. Maybe it is not a triumphant return, but it is a roaring one, a roar that echo’s across time’s abyss. The memories made during their heyday have all calcified, the wounds stinging with absence have healed and been paved over. This tour is a shock to the system, a brush with the supernatural, the ghost of Billy The Kid dropped into Blade Runner.
It’s unclear if new album releases are on the horizon for MCR. Just as summoning spirits does not mean their life begins anew— this reunion may only be temporary. Such is the nature of ghost rituals and all communications with the dead; why Ouija Boards are associated with bored teenagers and not cultists, and the same reason MCR is known for swelling anthems, never too self-serious. Waking the dead is only good for one thing: Finding the party.