Not too long ago, I was listening to the radio when “Holiday” by Green Day came on. I was relishing in the nostalgia until the stinger for the classic rock station came on, and I realized how much time had passed since then; it was also the oldest I’ve ever felt.
The early 2000s were a strange time for music. Post-911, we saw an uptick in patriotism in pop culture which carried on for several years after the event. It made for a lot of safe, predictable stuff that isn’t remembered fondly outside the lens of nostalgia, and even irreparably damaged country music in the mainstream eye. It also brought about a New Jersey emo band formed after their singer, Gerard Way, witnessed the events while working as a cartoonist in New York.
At this point, the My Chemical Romance name is synonymous with alternative & emo music, but as someone who remembers their rise, it was a weird trajectory for them.
2002’s I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love was released to not much fanfare. An album described by Gerard Way in an interview with the Nerdist as them trying to sound like At the Drive-In, it would later go on to earn a lot more attention upon the success of the band’s sophomore album, 2004’s Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge.
Any millennial who remembers this album can tell you what a sensation it was among the emo subculture. The video for “Helena” became an obsession amongst my emo friends in middle school, and I listened to my CD copy of it so many times that I’m not sure it even plays anymore (but I’m still glad to own it).
However, it might be surprising to those who came on to the band after their mainstream success that the album also had to struggle to get to where it is now. I have a distinct memory of the MTV VMA’s that year snubbing MCR left and right to the point that the host of the program (who uhhh will not be named) asked them to play an unscheduled performance of “Helena.”
Three Cheers was an album with so much staying power that it satiated us until 2006 when yet another video for an album’s lead single hyped us up, this time with the band in sepia tone, dressed to the nines in a dismal parade. A couple months later, The Black Parade dropped, and even STILL it felt like the band was fighting for mainstream recognition.
To put it into perspective, despite a lot of the press at the time making it clear the band had hit it big, on the tour for the album, they played in Lincoln at Pershing Auditorium, and even then, the venue only opened itself up to half capacity. It’s a show that I still think of fondly–it’s a band whose music I found right at the start of their fame, and I got to see them at a smaller venue in the midst of their heyday.
Would I go see them again? Probably, but nothing really beats the intimacy of what we experienced. Hell, Pershing’s full seating capacity is approximately 10% of the size of crowds that the band now draws. Ray Toro even pointed at us (or maybe he just pointed into the audience and we just happened to be in the crosshairs of his fingers; the middle school mind likes to make things up).
Much like many of the classic albums of the era, it’s one that has grown in quality as I’ve gotten older, and not just from a nostalgia standpoint. The album came out in a post-American Idiot era of pop culture, in which a national trauma was now deep into an ongoing war and tanking economy. Back then, I was definitely too young to understand these issues, but damn if the music & promotional material wasn’t engrossing. I was just in it for the aesthetics.
As an adult, these issues are more apparent in the songwriting. Though the album revolves around the concept of a man dying of cancer, there are themes of loss, resilience, mental health, and even war.
Around this time, I had also started to get more into classic rock–the 80s version, not the backbreaking realization I mentioned earlier where Green Day has now been around that long. The band was heavily influenced by a lot of those bands, including Queen & David Bowie, which is evident in the album’s title track having a “Bohemian Rhapsody”-like structure, or the album’s opener, “The End.,” bearing a strong resemblance to Bowie’s “Five Years.” Other than my preexisting love of the band, this drew me in even more, especially when I remember being disappointed it wasn’t as “emo” as Three Cheers.
Despite the album’s opener bearing resemblance to Bowie, it’s a banger, very theatrical in its presentation, an almost carnival-like waltz that pulls us into the negative mindset of the main character. Given the album’s double-entendre lyricism that separates itself from the album’s narrative story, it can also be read as the band’s struggles with mental illness, which was a major influence on the band as they isolated themselves in the haunted Paramour Mansion during the recording of the album.
This record also does something that I haven’t seen many albums do before that, and it’s a double opener. “The End” seamlessly transitions into “Dead!,” an even louder take on louder classic rock that feels like Queen turned up to the max (think “Killer Queen” with the speed & intensity of “Stone Cold Crazy”). In its lyrics, the main character of the story is faced with his impending mortality. It also raises the question of if we deserve the bad that happens to us, and the impression we leave behind, another example of the double entendre lyricism of the album. On a lighter note, it also features two bitchin’ guitar solos by Ray Toro.
The theme of “what we leave behind” continues into the album’s next track, “This Is How I Disappear,” a song whose guitar intro feels almost orchestral. This song also solidifies the album’s larger-than-life feeling and conceptual aspects, elevating itself above the cut-and-dry natures of Bullets and Three Cheers.
The following track, “The Sharpest Lives” delves into debaucherous living and its consequences. In the context of the album’s narrative, it’s our main character reflecting on what he’s done in life. However, looking at the subtext, Gerard Way’s struggles with alcoholism had already been chronicled in Life on the Murder Scene, a documentary album that had come out earlier in the year. Looking back now, it’s more apparent that the main character may just be an insert for Way himself.
“Welcome to the Black Parade,” the (somewhat) title track and lead single follows, tying all these themes together. Not only does the song have some religious undertones (a father asking his son to save the damned before he becomes a phantom), but there’s also a sense of defiance in the lyrics (literally has a line, “defiant to the end, we hear the call”). The song’s parade-like bridge solidifies this theme with acceptance of his situation, pushing back against the negative themes of the preceding songs.
“I Don’t Love You” to this day still feels like it doesn’t exactly play into the themes. You could argue it does–”You never fell in love” being a line in “Dead!”–but it’s pretty loose. That being said, it’s a song that does still hold up in and outside the album.
We’re brought back into the conceptual narrative on “House of Wolves” which ties together the religious themes of “Welcome to the Black Parade” and themes of debauchery on “The Sharpest Lives.” The band’s hard rock take on big band jazz, it shows the main character glimpsing into hell after reflecting on his life. This seems to have an effect, as the following track “Cancer” takes us into an emotional turn in the album, a short piano ballad once again reflecting on impending death but from a much more somber point of view.
The main character also deals with feelings of regret and trauma following their time in a war, chronicled in the song “Mama,” a dark cabaret-style powerhouse featuring the illustrious Liza Minelli, where the narrator expresses guilt about his actions in battle through drinking-song-style lilt. This track also feels like the opposite of “I Don’t Love You,” where it seems more attuned to the concept, however the War on Terror was going strong at this point, and it can be easily argued that it ties into the themes presented on this song.
“Sleep” follows this, and is a song that took me quite a while to grow on, as its first 30 seconds terrified me at the time of release. It opens with a recording of Gerard Way describing his suffocating night terrors he was having during the album’s recording at the Paramour Mansion. The song is intended as a double-entendre for what he was experiencing during this period, as well as the narrator’s own sleeplessness as he reflects on the events spelled out in “Mama.”
The band dives into ragtime on the next track, “Teenagers,” another one that feels a bit disconnected from the narrative. Having been a teenager at the time and reflecting on it as an adult, the song feels more like a response to the social apathy that was happening due to the political situation of the time, all while pop culture was still trying to appeal to its main demographic, teens. It’s definitely one of the more lighthearted tracks on the album, and a nice reprieve from the heavy themes.
But we’re right back into heaviness, as “Disenchanted” follows, a song that reflects on the meaninglessness of a lot of aspects of life. It was a song I did not care for when the album came out, but as I’ve gotten older, I can relate to the lyrics a lot more. It feels more like a spiritual successor to the last track–while “Teenagers” dealt with a humorous look at an adult having anxiety around the Young People, “Disenchanted” deals with the emotions of still being that adult and seeing how things have changed. It’s a much more deep look at this type of nostalgia outside of the shallowness of “things were better in the good old days.”
“Famous Last Words” closes out the album, and in my opinion, is the band’s overall best song. It’s a “feel good” anthem that certainly doesn’t feel good; while most corporate power up anthems deal only with empowerment, “Famous Last Words” looks at the negatives and openly defies letting them get to you. It gives a hopeful ending to the album, leaving it up to the listener to decide whether or not the narrator actually dies, with its double-entendre lyrics encouraging its audience to keep going in the face of the worst.
There’s also “Blood,” the hidden track. It’s cute.
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, so I’m glad there’s still music of my era that not only has lasted the test of time, but seems to have kept the band going, despite its only new release post-reunion being a single in 2022. The Black Parade is one-of-a-kind being not only a band who crossed over to the mainstream from a formerly niche genre, but for having appeal to a younger crowd as well as the classic rock purists. Now it is classic rock by definition, and still manages to hit 20 years later with listeners who were there when it came out, as well as younger listeners–as someone who has been to many an emo night, I’ve found myself thinking the old person thought, “Were you even born yet?” when I see the age range of folks who gravitate towards this music.
This has been a long entry, and I didn’t even get to the 10 year anniversary edition of the album where you could hear early demos of the album that sound NOTHING like the final product. I encourage you to seek out whatever you can about the album, if you’re one of the few people who hasn’t heard it. It really is a “something for everyone” deal, and I hope its legacy continues for another 20 years after this.
