WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE

My Chemical Romance rises from the grave in a glorious crash of electric guitar and passionate vocals on a day in May of 2022, after spending the eight years since they announced their break-up slowly sinking back into the hidden niches of nostalgic memory. This is the first new song they have released since 2014’s surprise track “Fake Your Death", which was then a fond send-off for the band and now also retrospectively fitting--after all, no one thought MCR would ever release music after that but here is "The Foundations of Decay" in all its glory. They are also performing again, four days after “The Foundations of Decay” dropped, with several concerts in Europe and a North American tour. The success of their return shows that though the golden era of emo is now behind us, good music--impactful music--outlives the first bloom of its conception. Time and experience has allowed both fans and artists the ability to reflect on the highs and lows of the 2000s scene, but there’s no doubt that My Chemical Romance was one of the best products of the era and their stuff speaks to things that touch all of our hearts.

​

Even at the height of its popularity, emo music has carried an oftentimes unflattering reputation, a kind of ridicule that follows from the unashamed emotional honesty that emo fans flaunted in the lyrical content of the music and their appearance. Having emerged from the hardcore punk scene, the genre itself was aligned with the counterculture, adding to the dismissal emo faced. These associations have also led to outright hostility toward the subculture, such as when the Daily Mail blamed My Chemical Romance and the “cult of emo” for reportedly encouraging the suicide of a British teen (Fitzsimmons), but they couldn’t be more off the mark. From a distance, the aesthetics of My Chemical Romance--from the dark eyeliner lead singer Gerard Way sports to their album art featuring skulls and spiders--appear to land far in the realm of edginess, but MCR has always strived to help people with their music (“My Chemical Romance Defend Emo). As their first ever song, “Skylines and Turnstiles” (My Chemical Romance, “Skylines and Turnstiles” 0:43), laid out: “if the world needs something better, / let’s give them one more reason now.”

​

What set My Chemical Romance apart from its many contemporaries was the depth of the subject matter they were willing to delve into, and how gracefully they handled it. In their love of concept albums--which three out of four of their released studio albums are--MCR has refined the way they use music to explore a single topic. 

​

Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge is an album in praise of revenge, from its loose plot following the journey of a dead man who makes a deal with the devil to reunite with his lover in exchange for “the souls of a thousand evil men” to the cathartic anger underlining the score--best exemplified in songs like “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)”, which boosted the album’s popularity. 

​

Revenge belongs to the realm of escapist fantasy, a sort of gleeful cruelty or reimagining of the self beyond practical application. Whether or not it’s healthy and justified to enact it in real life, the theme of the album and the way it gave listeners something to cling to, songs that empathized with the harsher aspects of emotional turmoil they experienced. “It took the quotidian drama of suburban kids and blew it up into a life-or-death soap opera,” writes Pitchfork’s Arielle Gordon. “Instead of digging its heels further into the pressures of adolescence, the album attempted to transcend them” (Gordon). Flashing on the screen between scenes in the music video for “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” were the words “If you ever felt alone / rejected / lost.. ..Be prepared to feel revenge” (My Chemical Romance, “I’m Not Okay (I Promise) [Dialogue/MTV Version]” 0:13). 

​

Three Cheers pulls you into a world of blood and gunfights in the second song of the album, “Give ‘Em Hell, Kid”, where the protagonist arrives in New Orleans and sets off on a killing spree. He fights through a wedding party in “To The End” and goes to jail in “You Know What They Do To Guys Like Us In Prison.” The story of the Demolition Lovers, as the protagonist and his lover are called, ends in tragedy as the man realizes the 1000th life he must take is his own, keeping him forever from his lover. Nevertheless, the protagonist takes on the untouchable, mythical traits of action movie heroes over the course of his journey. The fantasy comes from the way the protagonist has transformed himself through his suffering into someone empowered with the ability to act, to fight, to deal with the Devil himself. “We are made from the sharpest things you say” (My Chemical Romance, “Give ‘Em Hell, Kid” 1:17), frontman Gerard Way sings in “Give ‘Em Hell, Kid.” It allowed listeners to imagine themselves in the protagonist’s place, with his strength and tenacity, shown clearly when the later song “It’s Not A Fashion Statement, It’s a Deathwish” asserts, “I’m taking back the life you stole” (My Chemical Romance, “It’s Not A Fashion Statement, It’s a Deathwish” 1:05).

​

Their following--arguably their best--album took a sharp turn away from the lights and action of Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge to zero in on a single man doing one single thing: dying. The Black Parade is the story of someone whose only name is “The Patient”, from the day his life begins to end to a cancer diagnosis. Rather than tell a tale of devils and shootouts, all the songs in The Black Parade are of the Patient’s thoughts facing death, of his fears and regrets and the people he will leave behind. Where Three Cheers turned its pain outward, The Black Parade looked within, through all the scars and tumors we accumulate throughout our lives, for a shred of light to hold onto. 

​

The songs, reflecting their subject, move through a roller coaster of sound, from the cheerful nihilism of “Dead!”, the explosiveness of songs like “House of Wolves” to “I Don’t Love You” and “Cancer”’s mournful elegies. A solitary piano finds its place in many of the tracks. There’s a somber phrase for every one of The Black Parade’s emotive, crescendoing rock-opera moments. The album is not a farewell, an indictment, or a celebration of death--it finds its place walking the line between instead. While it is not afraid to face death’s darkest moments, neither does it drown in despair. As essayist Hanif Abdurraqib puts it, “the album, for all of its wild and operatic fantasies, stays honest” (Abdurraqib 89).

“Cancer” is the saddest song on the album--maybe the saddest song MCR has ever written. Worn down by his chemotherapy treatment, the Patient meets his loved ones, asking them not to look at his decayed appearance at the start of every verse. Though he has known he will die from the beginning, “Cancer” feels like the moment it sinks in--what will happen afterwards. Not what afterlife awaits the Patient, but the future that awaits the world he is departing from, the people he is leaving. The song is, like many others, a letter to someone else. “This is How I Disappear” is a desperate plea to be remembered through an old lover, “I Don’t Love You” a bitter sendoff to possibly a different relationship, “Mama” a pessimistic attempt to make amends with a parent, but “Cancer’s” message cuts through all the mess of past conflict. It is a kind of two-way grief, pure and uncomplicated in its misery. “If you say / Goodbye today / I’d ask you to be true,” the Patient sings. “Cause the hardest part of this / is leaving you” (My Chemical Romance, “Cancer” 1:42).

​

Having said his goodbyes, the Patient turns his eyes to his final destination. The next two songs, “Mama” and “Sleep” discuss his belief that he will end up in Hell, but the album’s titular song puts greater weight on a different route. In “Welcome To The Black Parade,” death is a marching band, a river of music flowing from this world to the next, picking up the newly deceased and leading them onwards. Sung in major key, the song carries a triumphant tone. The marching band is not an absolute fate, nor is it a painful one. It is based on Way’s belief that death comes in the form of your strongest memory, leading you beyond the pale with familiarity settled around your shoulders like a blanket ("The Black Parade Interview Part 1."). Through lines like “Do or die, you’ll never make me / Because the world will never take my heart” (My Chemical Romance, “Welcome To The Black Parade” 3:32) and “We’ll carry on, we’ll carry on, / and though you’re dead and gone, believe me / your memory will carry on” (My Chemical Romance, “Welcome To The Black Parade” 4:06), “Welcome To The Black Parade” introduces a sentiment that stands out against the rest of the album, echoed again in the final song, “Famous Last Words”: keep fighting when death comes to take you. Even when it appears inevitable.

​

At its heart, The Black Parade reaches for the same thing as Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, the same thing as the rest of My Chemical Romance’s work. Whether you’re a revenant leading a bloody trail through the States, a bed-ridden cancer patient, or anyone else, you can steel yourself. You can keep on going, and when you do you will find that you have the strength to. In “Famous Last Words”: “Honey if you stay you’ll be forgiven / Nothing you can say can stop me going home” (My Chemical Romance, “Famous Last Words” 4:18). 

​

All of the Killjoys--the post apocalyptic gangster personas MCR donned for their fourth and final album--die at the end of Danger Days, but Way and the rest of the band: Ray Toro, Frank Iero, and Gerard’s brother Mikey are alive and well. The punk scene attracted many people who are not but MCR, like countless of their fans, have survived the most turbulent years of their youth and come out the other side. They’ve started families of their own and found the space to explore creative endeavors outside of the band, now ready to bring those eight years of experience back on the stage. On the surface, “The Foundations of Decay” seems like a dark song. “Fate had left its scars upon his face / with all the damage they had done” (My Chemical Romance, “The Foundations of Decay” 0:57), says the first verse, establishing the song’s theme of lasting trauma. It’s an affliction for which there is no escape, a plague “Against faith / Against all life / Against change” (My Chemical Romance, “The Foundations of Decay” 3:38). The chorus brings up images of ashes and crawling vermin; everything about the song seems to be leading to the same conclusion, that the past will consume you, decay you. The foundation of decay in the song is the events of your youth rearing its ugly head again and again. The bridge of the song, sweeping in during the last of its six minute runtime, asks of you something different. “You must fix your heart / And you must build an altar where it swells” (My Chemical Romance, “The Foundations of Decay” 4:09).

​

My Chemical Romance cannot tell you how to do that, just as they can’t tell you how to come back from the dead. Like the Patient’s vision of the black parade, we are all collections of different griefs and different joys, but MCR’s music finds its life in connecting to the common threads of struggle we share. Three Cheers is for anyone who has been hurt and made helpless in their life, and death is something all of us face. It’s not surprising that after all these years, their work has a home so solid in the hearts of their fans that their return has been met with overwhelming enthusiasm. The original 228,600 tickets to their North American tour sold out in under six hours (“My Chemical Romance American Tour..”) and they headlined 2022’s When We Were Young festival, which seeks to revive the emo and pop punk acts of the 2000s (When We Were Young). Nostalgia isn’t the only thing powering them, though, as the content and purpose of their songs means it continues to find an audience in the newest generation. By encouraging people to continue to survive, becoming a hand to hold as we each navigate our unique paths out of the dark, so too does My Chemical Romance find its immortality.