What follows is a damnation of emo, a genre of music more baneful than goth and somehow more annoying than polka:
I know I’m probably going to take the heat from legions of mindless, pasty-skinned teenage sheep, but I need you all to look up from your Alternative Press, pull your assymetrical (read: Stupid) haircut aside, open your ears and hear this:
My Chemical Romance is an almost incomprehensibly stupid band, and you endanger yourselves by listening to their music.
Before you get your skinny-cut Ts in a wad, let me tell you that I’m no stranger to mope-rock. I’ve done time with the true originals of the genre (Joy Division, Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode - and most importantly - Morrissey and The Smiths). Yes, there is comfort in surrounding your hyper-hormonal persons in despair-coddling, grey rock and hollow, thumping synthesizers. It feels good to scrawl your existential angst in secret notebooks you hide under your bed while you hear some po-faced artist describe in detail just how alone you really are. And you probably were switched at birth. Your “parents” won’t ever “get” you, and will just never understand how truly hard your life is. To quote Ally Sheedy’s character in the teen-angst bible “The Breakfast Club:” When you grow up, your heart dies.
I would be fine with all this - and your adoration of a patently terrible band - if you really were alone. But I always see you in groups, wearing your Atreyu t-shirts and black bangles on your arms, snickering and mocking the others around you for being so conformist. Nay, 15-year-old hypocrites - you are the conformists, the rats to My Chemical Romance’s pied-piper whine-fests.
The toxic sludge the band calls music is so overwrought and heavyhanded, with any other generation of teens, I’d have hoped America would be smart enough to avoid the insipid pandering of it all. Just look at the song titles on their self-important new album, The Black Parade: “Dead!” “This is How I Disappear,” “Cancer,” “Disenchanted.” They even start their album with a song called “The End.” How ironic! So clever!
Alas, I have been forced to teach classes of your age group and ilk and have seen the slovenly vomit you call critical thinking en masse.
But to My Chemical Romance, your band members, producers, handlers and image consultants, I bequeath you to cease and desist. On some level, don’t you feel guilty about exploiting the millions of 13-16 year olds? If you have no conscience, don’t you think you could at least curb the melodrama and detour toward something less serious everyonce in a while? I liked your band so much better in the 1980s when you were called The Cure, and again in the early-mid ’90s when you dubbed yourself Smashing Pumpkins. At least back then you were able to balance your mopey-ness with humor and fun (1987’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me) or at least back up your pomposity with sprawling albums and songs that defied genre (Siamese Dream, Melon Colie and the Infinite Sadness).
But if I have to hear Gerard Way sing about how he’s the voice of the fallen and damned over the sound of a marching band, squealing that he’ll “carry on” one more time, I might have hijack the Sound Shop for a record burning party. He’s trying so hard to be taken seriously, I find it just impossible to. (At least Morrissey has the guts to poke fun at himself and his brood of doe-eyed whiners in the process. At least Depeche Mode and The Cure write about enjoying something - even if it is sex. And at least Trent Reznor has the decency to come up with something sonically interesting.)
But this is the kicker. The final straw. The end between us, My Chemical Romance: Let Muse go.
How dare you take it upon yourselves to hijack maybe the best prog-rock band working to open for you on tour. Muse - the British three-piece who for once draw valid comparisons to Queen and Radiohead - released what could have been the finest album of 2006 when Black Holes and Revelations dropped last summer. It had it all - love songs, drama, political statements, virtuosic guitars, visions of apocalypse, anger, and nuance. And of course America ignored it, but it will go down as one of the best albums this decade. Mark my words.
And now, My Chemical Romance, you kidnap this band - a group of real musicians - to open for you, not just at your April 26 Charlotte show, but on all the shows at each leg of your tour. For shame. I just refuse to go stand around with a bunch of greasy 14-year-old boys (and their moms) when I want to get my rock on.
This is your last chance to redeem yourselves, MCR. For the love of all that is good and pure, please disband and allow music to thrive and grow once more.