WHAT EVERYONE SHOULD BE TALKING ABOUT THIS WEEK
Why now is the perfect time for The Black Parade to return.
Words: Ali Shutler.
“If you could be anything, what would you be?” That’s how My Chemical Romance teased their grand return last week, alongside an image of a city landscape, raining vinyl/pixels and a mysterious set of glyphs that could say MCR but could also say literally anything else. It was very MyChem.
Days later, the frustratingly mysterious band announced details of the ‘Long Live The Black Parade tour’, celebrating the gloomy rock epic in stadiums across North America. Promoters Live Nation confirmed the album will be played in full across the tour, but the band? Well – they’ve been less direct.
“It has been seventeen years since The Black Parade was sent to the MOAT,” reads a post on Instagram. “In that time, a great Dictator has risen to power, bringing about “THE CONCRETE AGE”; a glorious time of stability and abundance in the history of DRAAG. His Grand Immortal Dictator wishes to celebrate our rich and storied culture, fine foods, and musical entertainments by welcoming you to these great demonstrations of power and resolve. And lending voice and song for the first time in six thousand two hundred and forty six days, their work privilege ceremoniously reinstated, will be His Grand Immortal Dictator’s National Band… The Black Parade. Long Live Draag.”
Like you, we have questions. What is MOAT, The Concrete Age, and DRAAG? Why do some Instagram captions (Good Boy, Long Live, Opera and The Concrete Age) have quote marks around them? Why are My Chemical Romance celebrating The Black Parade’s nineteenth anniversary?
Nineteen years on, why The Black Parade?
Long story short, people care so much about that record because it is ambitious, flamboyant, flawed and full of so much heart.
Before the album was released, My Chemical Romance were already one of the biggest 00s rock bands around thanks to 2004’s snarling ‘Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge’ and breakout emo anthems ‘I’m Not Okay (I Promise)’ and ‘Helena’. 2006’s ‘The Black Parade’ took things to a whole new level. A swaggering punk-rock opera about life, death and what comes next, it brought together goth theatrics, defiant venom and a dash of hope, if you knew where to look.
It’s easy to look back now and see ‘The Black Parade’ as the beloved, generation-defining record it is today – but at the time, My Chemical Romance were a divisive group. ‘The Black Parade’ was a rebellion against the success of ‘Three Cheers’ as much as it was a reaction to the fear and anxiety that could be felt post-9/11. Emo really wasn’t cool, but the scene still provided a sanctuary for outsiders before the internet became a communal playground. That intense fanbase provoked a backlash from those on the other side of things. MyChem were bottled when they played Reading Festival in 2006. The same thing happened again at Download the next year. Meanwhile, certain corners of the press were trying to ignite a moral panic, claiming the band were leading a sinister suicide cult. There was a whole lot of grief and misery, but rather than wallow, all that pain was used to fuel a rallying cry of fearless self-expression.
Making the album was hard. Mikey temporarily quit the band to go to therapy for depression and addiction, Gerard got obsessed with death. “We were always on the brink,” Frank told Kerrang!. Touring the album was even harder, with the band heading out on a gruelling world tour that saw them play one set as the fictional The Black Parade, before returning to the stage as My Chemical Romance. They definitely killed their alter egos off in Mexico 2007, releasing that final concert as The Black Parade Is Dead the following year.
And this new tour could be teasing a sequel?
My Chemical Romance love comic books, and what’s more comic book-accurate than reviving a previously dead marching band?
‘The Black Parade’ was the final part of Gerard’s overarching vision for My Chemical Romance. After it was done, they were supposed to ride off into the sunset after conquering the world. “Against every fibre in my being, I kept going,” he told Kerrang! in 2014. At first, there was a back-to-basics punk record that was scrapped (but eventually released as ‘Conventional Weapons’) before they released the controversial day-glo positivity of ‘Danger Days: True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys’ in 2010. The band had started work on fifth album ‘The Paper Kingdom’ that seemed to tap back into the gloomier world of ‘The Black Parade’ – focusing on a support group for parents who are dealing with the loss of their children while a fictional world-within-a-world would see those same children fighting a witch. They broke up before it could be finished, though, and farewell track ‘Fake Your Death’ was lifted from those sessions.
In the years since, working titles have been leaked from the record, including ‘Dog’, which ties into their recent Instagram picture of a Doberman and Gerard getting the crowd at When We Were Young to “bark like a dog”. There’s also the use of speech marks around certain phrases, which does feel like a deliberate hint towards potential new song titles, while the slowly evolving post-apocalyptic vibes of the Swarm tour also lean into what we’ve been shown about The Concrete Age.
As well as a gushing post about getting to play MetLife Stadium in their hometown of New Jersey, Mikey recently teased “and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Dreams can and will come true if you hang on hard enough. It’s an honour to get to continue this story for and with all of you,” which certainly feels like this run of shows is bigger than a simple anniversary tour. The band have also poked fun at nostalgia and cheap cash-ins before with the whole of ‘Vampire Money’ and them dressing up as old men for the first When We Were Young. Hitting back at claims of the run of shows being a cash grab, Frank wrote: “With all due respect, sit down and close your mouth. This will be a once in a lifetime experience. You have literally no idea what is in store for you. We do not disappoint.”
And then there’s also the new lore. MyChem have put together cinematic trailers for post-reunion events before, but stuff like ‘A Summoning’ felt more like a celebration of the story so far. The new characters, costumes and backstory of “Opera” does feel like the start of something, rather than a neat short to drum up ticket sales. And let’s not forget the Shrek theory. The first four films in that franchise were released in 2001, 2004, 2007 and 2010, the exact same years MyChem released their first four albums. A fifth Shrek is due in 2026, so…
So, why now?
My Chemical Romance broke up because it stopped being fun. “When things start to succeed and go really well… that’s when a lot of people start to have an opinion, and that’s when you run into struggle…everybody had a fucking opinion about what MCR should be. So it made it difficult to figure out what direction to take next. You get caught up in this trap of ‘Is it ever gonna be good enough,” Gerard told The Guardian in 2019. “It wasn’t fun to make stuff any more. I think breaking up the band broke us out of that machine.”
Their reunion tour was certainly driven by a sense of glee. The everchanging setlist celebrated every corner of their back catalogue, and the four members looked like they were having the time of their lives onstage, free from overarching lore, onstage costumes or having to deal with weird debates about emo. There’s no reason that spark couldn’t lead to wanting to do more. We’ve already had one new song, ‘Foundations Of Decay’, after all.
It also feels like the perfect time for a band who always preached “Art Is The Weapon” to become active again. My Chem were formed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and, throughout their career, used imagination, escape and creativity to deal with the uncertainty and hate that was taking over. “This band needs adversity. If we don’t have that, then we’re not doing any good. We need something to fight against,” Gerard told Kerrang! in 2019. A couple of years earlier, he told the ipaper that one of the reasons behind the initial split was because “it didn’t feel like the world needed My Chem anymore.”
“When we were breaking out, there was the Bush administration, wars for oil, and all this stuff, so it was a good time to be counter-culture. But when ‘Danger Days’ was out, we had Obama; things were going really well, we were making so much progress. I’m able to read the writing on the wall pretty clearly, and I was like, ‘Nobody really needs us now – I think it’s time to finish’.”
Well, you’ve seen the news. What better time for art that picks apart power, control and the comforting safety of nostalgia – whether that’s new music or a reimagined take on ‘The Black Parade”s original message of freedom, strength in self-expression, communal perseverance and hope.
“My Chemical Romance is done. But it can never die,” Gerard said back when My Chemical Romance first broke up. “It is alive in me, in the guys, and it is alive inside all of you. I always knew that, and I think you did, too. Because it is not a band – it is an idea.” And right now, the world needs those more than ever.
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