This is My Jam: “Welcome to The Black Parade”
I like My Chemical Romance, and for that I make no apologies. They’re not a “guilty pleasure” band, nor do I listen to them ironically, despite being a “grown-ass man” or something. My Chemical Romance (MCR if you’re nasty) is unapologetically fun, and their sound varies from record to record, so you’re never quite listening to the same thing twice. Enter The Black Parade, My Chemical Romance’s rock opera magnum opus. Released in 2006 at the height of their fame, The Black Parade is a story about a dying man coming to terms with his existence as he slips the mortal coil, and in true MCR fashion, it is a fun as hell album, you guys. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the album’s lead single, the exceptional “Welcome to the Black Parade”, a glammy, hammy anthem about somehow finding the strength to keep going, even when all else seems lost.
For the lead single on an album about death, “Welcome to the Black Parade” is nothing if not upbeat. While it starts slowly, a quiet piano riff plinking out before being joined by a marching band drumbeat and lead singer Gerard Way’s plaintive warble (“When I was a young boy / My father took me into the city / to see a marching band”), it quickly and effectively builds to something more. A wicked guitar riff explodes in, and Way’s voice shifts from a whisper to a shout, the mood quickly changing from melancholy to triumph, the repetition of the song’s opening lines, no longer a tragic paean to a long lost memory, but a celebration of life events. It’s this sound that drives the rest of the song, and its anthemic celebration of how, even though it feels like the whole world is stacked against us, we can still find the strength to carry on. By now, the song’s quiet beginnings are themselves a distant memory, and the band seems determined to prove that neither they, nor the listener, will go quietly into the night.
“Welcome to the Black Parade” is, at its heart, a song about not giving a single, solitary fuck, and it’s a song in which I personally find strength, even more than ten years later. It’s big, bombastic, and melodramatic as hell — arena glam for the emo era — and it’s absolutely my jam. I could honestly listen to this song all day without getting bored (and have been since I started writing this). While part of the reason for that is because it’s just a great, fun song, a larger part of it probably has to do with nostalgia. As anyone who knows me could tell you, I spend a lot of time lost in nostalgia for the media of my youth, and having been a senior in high school when The Black Parade was released, I was the absolute prime audience for this record. I had my own computer and was fresh out of my “There hasn’t been any good music released since 1985!” phase, thanks to Green Day’s American Idiot (I know), and so I was greedily devouring all the new music I could get my hands on. Which, this being the heyday of torrenting, was a lot of music. But of those thousands of pirated albums from high school, few have stayed in rotation anywhere near as long as The Black Parade has.
Unlike most, I really enjoyed my time in high school. I excelled in my studies, had a lot of friends, and just generally had a great time over those four years. I also hadn’t really begun to struggle with the depression that would define my life in the years to come. When I listen to “Welcome to the Black Parade,” as corny as it sounds, I’m transported back to that simpler time, when I thought I had everything figured out. When I thought I would always just be happy. I look back at the last ten years of my life and sometimes struggle to make sense of everything that’s happened since graduation, and even on my best days, it still feels like a blur. I can never really go back to those days — that’s just not how the world works — but for the five minutes or so when I listen to “Welcome to the Black Parade,” I get to go back to a time when everything still made sense and my whole future was still ahead of me.
For someone like me, “Welcome to the Black Parade” is catharsis given musical form — a memory of where I came from and a speck of light at the end a seemingly endless tunnel. The specter of death may hang heavy over The Black Parade, but “Welcome to the Black Parade” knows that ultimately death is just another part of life and recognizes how miraculous and wonderful it is to have ever existed at all. It’s about living your life unashamed, and damn the consequences — you shouldn’t have to apologize for who you are. “I won’t explain, or say I’m sorry / I’m unashamed, I’m gonna show my scar / Give a cheer for all the broken / Listen here, because it’s who we are / I’m just a man; I’m not a hero. I! Don’t! Care!” I don’t always follow that philosophy to the letter, but you can be damn sure I appreciate the sentiment. Life doesn’t always make sense, and it can be painfully unforgiving, but when it’s over, after the last strains of the music have faded away, though I may be broken and defeated, my memory will carry on.
This article originally ran November 2017, on Narrativity.com
