The Future is Bulletproof: The Return of My Chemical Romance
On Halloween 2019, after a six-year hiatus, the band My Chemical Romance announced that they would be reuniting for a concert in Los Angeles on December 20. Across social media, the announcement simply read “Return... Like Phantoms Forever…” And just like that, the Internet exploded. The band’s magnum opus, The Black Parade album, re-entered the Billboard Top 200 Charts. When tickets for the reunion show finally went on sale, they sold out in four minutes. Across social media blossomed posts about reigniting one’s “emo phase”. One Twitter user joked, “my chemical romance are back together but my chemical imbalance never left”, while a Tumblr user wrote, “brb gotta go darken my clothes and strike a violent pose” in reference to the band’s song “Teenagers”. A single concert announcement and it seemed that 20-somethings everywhere were more than ready for a true emo revival.
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Underneath my bed there is a box, and inside that box is a tiny strip of white graphing paper. The paper reads, “March 22, 2013: MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE BROKE UP!!!!!” Around the edges are teardrops and frowning faces, doodled in thick black Sharpie. I remember being 15 and crawling out of bed in the dark, ripping a strip of paper from my math notebook, feeling desperately that I needed to record the moment the world had ended.
I thought a lot in trying to write this essay about how to explain my love for My Chemical Romance without sounding melodramatic, but then I said fuck it. My Chemical Romance taught an entire generation how to wear black and have it mean something. There’s something unadulterated about joy, anger, and grief all wrapped up in a tight red and black bow. For all the discussion of MCR as an outlet for angsty, emo teenagers, I don’t think we listened to MCR because their music made us cry or because it gave us an excuse to wear eyeliner and skulls on our t-shirts. I think we listened because their music opened a new door for us—because it made us hopeful. My Chemical Romance allowed us to exorcise the terror of being weirdos in the suburbs, forced us to rebuild the world in the image of ourselves.
I first discovered My Chemical Romance in the eighth grade. The initial moment of enchantment is lost to me now; all I remember are the endless days I spent walking down fluorescent middle school hallways with “I’m Not Okay” blasting from my iPod touch. At the time, I couldn’t really understand why I loved this music so much. All I knew was that something was hidden there, unexplainable, that spoke to me. I was a horribly quiet girl in a small, overzealous Christian town. I wore white polos and white ribbons in my hair; I carried around a pocket-sized Bible to fend off bullies. Everything I did was an effort to cover up what felt like an intrinsic weirdness—everything except listen MCR. With My Chemical Romance blasting in my headphones, I felt, for the first time, that I didn’t have to cover up and pretend. They were the first band I ever fell in love with.
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Wrapped up in the weirdness and theatricality of My Chemical Romance is a politically radical spirit. The band wasn’t promoting sadness for sadness’s sake, or anger for anger’s sake, but rather expressing a deeper rebellion against widely-accepted ideas about gender, and money, and The Man. My entire generation of weird middle schoolers still carries this spirit with us today.
In a 2014 AMA, lead singer Gerard Way wrote,
“I have always been extremely sensitive to those that have gender identity issues as I feel like I have gone through it as well, if even on a smaller scale ... I have always identified a fair amount with the female gender, and began at a certain point in MCR to express this through my look and performance style. So it's no surprise that all of my inspirations and style influences were pushing gender boundaries: Freddie Mercury, [David] Bowie, Iggy [Pop], early glam, T-Rex. Masculinity to me has always made me feel like it wasn't right for me.”
These subversions have been part of MCR’s legacy all along. They often mix personal declarations of pain and gender confusion with anthemic lines almost professionally crafted to be screamed out the window of a car. There is a level of intimacy laced throughout even in the band’s most theatrical, barn-burning songs.
Famously, the first song Gerard ever wrote for My Chemical Romance was an act of catharsis after witnessing the horrors of 9/11. In the song, titled “Skyline and Turnstiles”, Gerard intertwines his personal existential fear with a message of collective hope:
like butane on my skin
stolen from my eyes …
tell me where we go from here
tell me where we go from here ...
and if the world needs something better
let's give them one more reason, now
Honoring the legacy of “Skyline and Turnstiles,” MCR remained a politically conscious artistic force throughout all four of their studio albums. In the song “Teenagers”, the band pens a rebellion anthem and expresses fear of a system that is bound to rip “your aspirations to shreds” and make you just “another cog in the murder machine.” With their fourth and final album before the 2013 breakup, the band crafted a dystopian concept album. Titled Danger Days, this last album sees the band fashion themselves as the “Fabulous Killjoys,” a group of post-apocalyptic renegades running through the Californian desert and fighting back against an evil corporation. Throughout the album, the band warns of a mysterious “they” who is going to “sell” and “kill” your tomorrows. And on the album’s finale, “Vampire Money,” the band strays from the narrative of the album and takes the opportunity to publicly reject an offer to record a song for the Twilight film franchise, slyly affirming their commitment to their creative work over an easy paycheck.
More so than any other political issue, though, the mixing of masculinity and femininity is a key ingredient to My Chemical Romance’s songwriting. In hindsight, Gerard’s detached personal relationship to masculinity is clearly on display. In the opening song of the iconic The Black Parade album, titled “The End,” the band frolics through despair, inviting the listener to throw on a “black dress” and join in on “this tragic affair”. Over the bombastic guitar, Gerard declares that he’ll attend his own funeral “in drag,” but in the same breath, offers a more pained confessional: “if you look in the mirror and don’t like what you see / you can find out firsthand what it’s like to be me”. The song is at once a grand opening ceremony for the album and a tongue-in-cheek declaration of self-hate. On “Mama”, Gerard sings, “you should’ve raised a baby girl, I should’ve been a better son,” alluding to a narrator both guilty and genderless.
The band’s second album, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, also frequently plays with gender, with the addition of a subtext of gay desire. In the song “Give ‘Em Hell, Kid,” Gerard asks, “well, don’t I look pretty walking down the street / in the best damn dress I own?” In “To the End,” the narrator is “never around” because “he’s always looking at men.” And in perhaps the most outstandingly titled MCR song to ever exist, “You Know What They Do to Guys Like Us in Prison”, our narrator recounts a woeful tale of incarceration, one in which his cellmates “make me do push-ups in drag.” However, he also speaks directly to another male inmate, singing, “and I don’t know / how we’re just two men as God had made us ... / pain in my heart, for your dying wish / I’ll kiss your lips again”. The focus of these songs never lingers on the image of push-ups in drag or men kissing the lips of other men long enough to really imprint on the listener, but as an attentive 13 year old, I can recall distinct moments of rewinding these sections of the songs over and over again, rapidly trying to untangle the implications of the lyrics, starry-eyed and hopeful for reasons I wouldn’t fully understand for years to come.
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The subversive elements of My Chemical Romance’s songwriting never amount to an explicitly political message à la musicians like Woody Guthrie or Rage Against the Machine, yet a mix of the personal and the political exists across their discography. Throughout their work, metal turns glitter, boy turns girl and back to boy again. And no matter if it’s a marching band in a funeral procession or an explosion of color in a barren desert, substance is never sacrificed for aesthetics. MCR makes music that feels like an invitation, like a welcoming. One doesn’t have to be searching for political music to stumble upon their rebel cries and, in a way, that is what gave and continues to give the band their true formative power. Whether it’s on the school bus in eighth grade or now, in our shiny, new adult lives, listening to their music is an affirmation that we, too, are invited to wear the makeup—to strike the violent pose—and to say fuck the money.