By Gwen Howerton, PR Director

If you’re in your late teens or early twenties, you know “Welcome to the Black Parade” by My Chemical Romance. I’m probably leaving some people out, but seeing as I am included in “late teens to early twenties” that’s who I’m going to talk about. Anyway, whenever “Welcome to the Black Parade” by My Chemical Romance comes on in a room full of late millennials and zoomers, you’re bound to get the same reaction as a room full of middle aged white people when they hear “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey (and if you don’t know what that looks like, I encourage you to put it on at your next family barbecue, post-COVID of course). There is something so special about My Chemical Romance that sets them apart from the other emo / pop-punk bands that dominated the alternative scene of the 2000s and early 2010s. Every group has their fans who are still streaming and wearing merch to this day (My CD copy of From Under the Cork Tree by Fall Out Boy permanently lives in my car’s center console), but just because I still like Fall Out Boy doesn’t mean that any of their music has aged particularly well. Classic emo albums like the aforementioned From Under the Cork Tree, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, Tell All Your Friends, and a few albums by Blink-182 might be loved by fans to this day, but to me haven’t all withstood the test of time the same way that My Chem’s “Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge” or “The Black Parade” have. My Chemical Romance especially has seen a cultural revival with many older fans revisiting their discography with a more critical eye – even big critics like Anthony Fantano (eye roll!!!) have given albums like “The Black Parade” rave reviews in the past year or two. But why is that? What sets My Chemical Romance apart from Panic! At The Disco (besides the fact that MCR would never do “High Hopes” in a million years)? What is so enduring about My Chemical Romance that they can instantly sell out stadiums across the world after returning from a seven-year hiatus?

My Chemical Romance was founded in the weeks after 9/11, with the song “Skylines and Turnstiles” being one of the first songs that front man Gerard Way ever penned to express his feelings about watching the Twin Towers fall. Shortly after meeting guitarists Ray Toro and Frank Iero, Gerard and younger brother Mikey Way formed MCR and put out their first album “I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love”, a pure punk album about death, loss and vampires. The fact that MCR was formed in the shadow of 9/11 has a great deal to do with what makes their music so timeless. “Bullets” is such a raw and emotional album for the pop punk genre, from Gerard Way’s screams on “Honey This Mirror Isn’t Big Enough For The Two of Us” to his soul-wrenching pleas on “Early Sunsets over Monroeville”, a love letter to the classic George Romero flick Dawn of the Dead. There is an air of anxiety, of fear woven throughout “Bullets” that sets it apart from anything else that was going on in the burgeoning scene of 2002. “Skylines” is a great example of the tone that MCR took throughout their entire career – after seeing the World Trade Center crash to the ground from just across the street, Way looked at the carnage and decided that music was the best way that he could change the world. My Chemical Romance stared down the barrel of the post-9/11 world, of the War on Terror, of the nascent surveillance state and fear riddled hellscape that the next generation of Americans born at the turn of the century would have to live through and decided that if they could tell just one stressed-out teenager that it will all be okay, that someone understands that the world is a cold dark place and it is okay to just feel something, anything, then it would all be worth it.

Where other bands wiped off their eyeliner for the chance at a top 40 radio hit, My Chemical Romance consistently put out incredibly honest and emotional music that took their fans as seriously as their fans took them.

The raw emotion of My Chemical Romance’s discography isn’t anything totally foreign in the emo scene of the early 00’s and mid 2010’s – ask any number of zoomers today to name their favorite heart wrenching emo tracks and you’ll come up with any number of songs in the your-scars-are-beautiful-my-dear genre. Stuff like Pierce the Veil’s “Hold On Till May”, Of Mice & Men’s “When You Can’t Sleep At Night” and “If I’m James Dean, You’re Audrey Hepburn” by Sleeping With Sirens immediately come to mind as examples of songs that, while still bang, can be summed up as “I will kiss your scars and tell you you’re beautiful”. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that sort of music because for a lot of people, myself included, having someone tell you that your hurt and sadness doesn’t make you irredeemable is valuable. At the same time, there is something to be said about how much this type of music led to romanticism of stuff like self-harm and this character of a broken girl all alone in her room that nobody understands. To the extent that My Chemical Romance was talking about the feelings of misunderstood and cast-out young people, they were never really writing songs as surface level as their contemporaries. It’s important to recognize that as much as MCR is a staple of so called emo rock, Gerard Way himself famously hated being lumped in with that scene, going so far as to call the whole genre “fucking garbage”. That’s not to say that MCR didn’t touch on this territory; tracks like “Welcome To The Black Parade”, “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” and “Teenagers” were always the anthems of misfit teenagers who didn’t make the cliques and had no intention of doing so. The difference is that these songs tap into a deeper, rawer emotion than anything else that was going on in the scene at the time. There’s more to these songs than the cliché story of a sad girl in her bedroom who nobody understands except for some guy named Kellin Quinn. There is a raw and unfiltered pain in Way’s vocals that touches the part of you that wants to scream in your car and let out all of the bad things that you’re feeling. There’s an honesty to My Chemical Romance that is more emotional and sentimental than the nostalgic wit of pre-2013 Fall Out Boy or the baroque pop anthems of “Fever” era Panic! At the Disco. By the end of My Chemical Romance’s incredible four album run (and subsequent breakup), they had managed to hold onto the same sound and feel to everything they touched while still having evolved as artists and without having compromised their vision of a kinder world. Where other bands wiped off their eyeliner for the chance at a top 40 radio hit, My Chemical Romance consistently put out incredibly honest and emotional music that took their fans as seriously as their fans took them.

With My Chemical Romance having come back at the end of last year, I revisited the music that had touched me so much as a teenager and discovered that it still stirred emotion in me. It still made me feel like I was a part of something bigger, like the world could be a gentler and kinder place even if the act of trying to make it one was scary. The thirteen year old who loved My Chemical Romance and worried about what her friends thought of her in homeroom became a twenty year old who worried about student loans and speeding tickets and climate change and fascism, and through it all there was My Chemical Romance telling me that it was okay to be scared as long as I had the heart to face it head on. A few nights ago I stayed up until two in the morning listening to “The Black Parade” while I was working on a project, and when the closing track “Famous Last Words” came on I sang every word and cried. As I sat in the dark listening to Gerard Way sing, “I am not afraid to keep on living / I am not afraid to walk this world alone”, I realized that it was true. I wasn't.