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Concept Albums Explained
The Black Parade
My Chemical Romance
2006
“And Lo! Once bequeth-ed of the bread and of the circuses by our Lord + Savior, Rock and or Roll— plus the effect of a few stray packets of sugar— those that Death had undone did arise from their dead kid town to… DANCE, KID”
— some weird literary combination including but not limited to: King Kong’s Arabian Proverb; the Roman poet Juvenal; the Simpsons; that bastard fascist Ezra Pound; probably the Gospel of Luke, or something; T.S. Eliot; the Washington Social Club (!look that band up!); I’m almost positive Tim Burton’s in there, somewhere; and Joe Strummer as spoken to author throwing elbows in the front row for the Streetcore tour.
“The Black Parade” is a celebration of a cancer patient, who grapples with their disease, says goodbye to their loved ones, ultimately speaking their final words of, “nothing you can say can stop me going home” (though the lyrics on the vinyl insert intriguingly end with the last words, “awake and unafraid, asleep or dead”).
The album takes this patient on one hell of a death trip, the neurochemical voyage of the pineal gland, a psychedelic trip through introspection and memory, regret and self-judgement, manifested as an abandoned city populated only by a grim parade of black-clad marchers, complete with falling snow and spewing fire.
2006 was a righteous year for the Zeitgeist on Earth— with books like “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”; films like “Pan’s Labyrinth”; comics like “Pride of Bagdad”; and albums like “Opheliac” by Emilie Autumn, “Bigger Than Your Boyfriend” by the Washington Social Club, and “The Black Parade”, itself, all released in 2006.
Welcome to Concept Albums Explained. Here, we concern ourselves only with the microcosm of the text— only with what appears in and on the album: the lyrics and musical movements, liner notes if they exist, and the cover, back cover and interior if they exist. Neither band history, or song writers’ exterior personal life concern us, here, and no intent of the authors will be considered.
So what can we make of “The Black Parade”, a concept album with an extensive concept outside of the album, with characters such as Mother War and the Patient?— the names of these characters never appear in the lyrics, and the name Mother War is so buried in the credits of the liner notes as to barely exist.
Unfortunately for you Spotify listeners, whilst simultaneously fortunate for listeners of vinyl and CDs, the expansive back cover and the interior fold-out provide us with glorious images of the full parade, including My Chemical Romance members clad in black marching band uniforms, a woman wearing a gas mask, and a cancer patient in hospital gown with IV tube in arm.
But what of the music videos? you streamers of MP3s might scream-o. And you make a valid point. We shall include the three music videos for “Welcome to the Black Parade”, “Teenagers” and “Famous Last Words” in our analysis.
It all begins with “the End”, and the beeping of a pulse oximeter. Critically, the pulse of this patient does not flatline as the acoustic chords strum in. This patient’s heart still beats.
With the first lyrics, singer Gerard Way takes the role of a carnival barker, “Come one, come all… you’ve got front row seats to the penitence ball”. This parade, all cloaked in black, is one of sorrow and regret, but also of penitence, in the sense of repentance. This death trip will be one of atoning for one’s actions in life.
On equal with the most ecstatic songs about dying in all of pop music history, a track follows titled “Dead!” “Did you get what you deserve?” asks Gerard over and again, promptly answering his own question— not with a yes-or-no judgement, but by supplying us with exactly what we all deserve, “the ending of your life”.
The Patient from the inserts and music video is then created through an elegant method of character development— explicating their greatest regrets. “Tongue-tied and oh, so squeamish, you never fell in love, did you get what you deserve?… No one ever had much nice to say, I think they never liked you anyway.” It is lack of action that will haunt The Patient for the remainder of their dwindling life.
For soon comes the diagnosis, “during this operation, found a complication in your heart… now you’ve got maybe just two weeks to live.” The Patient is dying, and soon. Aren’t we all. To quote the poet, we’re all dead or dying, with a little patience.
Cue ecstatic, Burton-esque “La, la, la, la, la”s. This death is something to sing about.
In “How I Disappear”, the next track, Gerard begins a lyrical balancing act that only complex texts need address— what is Gerard’s narrative voice, what character is speaking the words coming out his mouth? In the first track, he sang as a Carnival Barker, but this is to change in “How I Disappear” for the remainder of the album.
The lines “without you is how I disappear… I can’t hurt you anymore” contain an I figure as well as a you figure— noticeably distinct from the you of the previous track. Gerard’s voice is shifting into the introspective death trip in the Patient’s first-person perspective, ultimately to end back with Gerard’s own perspective by the last four songs.
Yet Gerard accomplishes something extraordinarily sophisticated. By singing, “drain all the blood and give the kids a show” at the very beginning of the song, without you first becomes the kids at the show, while Gerard, and by extension the Black Parade album, will disappear without kids listening and paying attention. This parallelism at work creates a seam, some sort of literary axis, for the transition of the narrative voice, sewing together the disparate perspectives.
Voicing aside, I can’t hurt you anymore— now clearly an interior thought of the Patient— continues the Patient’s lack of action, although no longer a regret. Now the inaction comes across as a positive effect of dying.
By track four, “the Sharpest Lives”, we are in the space of the Patient’s memories, and vivid ones at that. “If I crash on the couch, can I sleep in my clothes?” Gerard doesn’t take much space to paint a picture of a teenager’s life.
An accusation soon comes, “the sharpest lives are the deadliest to lead”, but in an album with a marching skeleton on the front cover, deadliness might be desired.
And who lives these lives of deadly sharpness? The only life developed throughout the lyrics, so far, is the Patient’s. In the Patient’s memories, they is the one living this deadlily sharp life. However, further lives are developed in the next verses, “where the animals go, you can take off your skin in the cannibal glow. Juliet loves the beat and the lust it commands, drop the dagger and lather the blood on your hands, Romeo.” Cannibals and animals, Juliet and Romeo, these characters also lead the sharpest of lives that are so deadly.
But what is the result of these these sharp, deadly lives? “you can take all the pain away from me… a light to burn all the empires, so bright, the sun is ashamed to rise”. Light is nominally a good thing, particularly when burning empires, and with all the pain taken away, deadly lives are, indeed, desired.
And the you pronoun returns, now as a lover, “your kiss and I will surrender”. The sentiment seems sweet, but we must ask, surrender to what? Surrender to Love? Surrender to Death? Only if we remove a line break and take Gerard’s lyric out of context with, “I will surrender the sharpest lives”, does an answer emerge. This is a complete sentence as it appears in the lyrics, and nothing is omitted, here, but it is out of context with the surrounding lines. Yet this method does yield constructive results: the good things that come with the sharpest lives, the removal of pain, the fall of empires, these will be surrendered if the loved one kisses the Patient.
Time for a music video— “Welcome to the Black Parade”, the album’s fulcrum, the point at its center around which the album spins.
The video opens with a camera’s circular fade-in, like in an old fashioned black-and-white movie. Here is our Patient from the album insert, complete with oxygen tube, pulsing oximeter, prone in a hospital bed. The classic film element is reinforced as Gerard— complete with black lipstick, and glorious eyeliner— appears in black and white on a TV screen.
As the Patient begins to seize and convulse, then lunges their hand up to snatch at something beyond reach, the circle fade-in and circle fade-out reoccur. The Patient suddenly appears with horrifying black eyeliner, and here, I argue, the memories and regrets end, replaced by the pineal chemical wash of death trip.
The parade appears. A mob of citizens, led by the band on a grizzly float, march through the wreckage of an all-expansive megatropolis— and front and center? An old lady wearing a gas mask. That this lady is emphasised in such a way, and since the only female guest vocal appears on the song titled, “Mama”, lead to one conclusion, this gas masked old lady is the Patient’s mother. Not a pleasant picture.
In the first lyrics after this death trip parade arrives, a father figure is developed, a parent who took the Patient to “the city, to see a marching band.” The father, a significantly more positive figure than mama, asks a question, “Will you be the savior of the beaten, the broken and the damned?”
In the background the oximeter maxes out. The Patient’s heart is exploding.
The tempo picks up, and the band begins to rock and or roll. “We’ll carry on,” repeats Gerard as snow falls on the destroyed city.
With the parade nowhere to be seen, the Patient ambles through this abandoned city— abandoned, except for the gas-masked mama, whose back is turned. Circling the mama, the Patient stares at her agape through the horrific eyeliner, then wanders away from her in a most poignant manner. They ambles back into the city, past strange totems, up to the top of a stairway leading nowhere, ultimately finding the black parade. At this point, a Brian May-esque sparkling guitar solo pinnacles. The Patient appears on the float, and is awarded a medal of honor. “We’ll carry on”, Gerard repeats.
So what does the title of this eponemous song mean, “Welcome to the Black Parade”, with my emphasis on welcome which does not occur in the title of the album, itself. In this track, the Patient has arrived at the Black Parade, and the remainder of the album is all death trip— not necessarily real memory, not necessarily unreal, but, as the Bard once said, such stuff dreams as are made of. It is not real. From henceforth, it is all a hallucination, all a dream. This becomes crucial to my analysis.
The following track, “I Don’t Love You”, develops as, “when you go, would you have the guts to say, ‘I don’t love you like I did yesterday’”. Deep in hallucination, the Patient has a vision of the loved character, the same you as in “the Sharpest Lives”. But does this character actually not love the Patient anymore? Not only is the song an unreal trip, not only is this dwindling love an emotional projection on the part of the Patient, but also this vision might be merely a soothing thing to say. The Patient is glad that they cannot hurt the loved character anymore, it would be a balm for this loved character to feel less love toward the Patient when they dies. So this you character does not necessarily love the Patient less. It is not real, but is not necessarily a bad trip. And it is free of judgement.
Ready to rock? The next track, “House of Wolves”, rocks, and rocks hard. And the lyrics are rich.
“I know a thing about contrition”, Gerard Way begins, still singing in the Patient’s narrative voice. We are back to repentance, back to the land of remorse.
In the same verse, “You haven’t got a prayer…I’m gonna… sing the praise… let the spirit come on through you, we got innocence for days”. You now seems to refer to a plural you, as in no one has a prayer, which the Patient praises, followed by a notion of innocence, an abundance of innocence, at that. Does this innocence result from penitence? Does atonement for sins result in a return to innocence? Let’s dive deeper into the etymology of the word innocence: from Latin innocentia– ‘not harming’. The answer is no; innocence means never harming, so innocence for days means never guilty, therefore never in need of remorse.
The most repeated lyrics in the chorus go, “tell me I’m an angel, take this to my grave”. Though there are many statements of negative judgment and sinning, the statement that the Patient takes to the grave is that they is an angel, free of sin. With that pleasant thought on the Patient’s mind, the next song cannot but be a good trip.
“Cancer” comes next. Though musically melancholy, it is not hellish.
Indeed, “Cancer” is, as Gerard sings it, a respite from pain and remorse. “If you could get me a drink of water… and bury me in all my favorite colors”. These are undeniably good things, and the plural colors must mean a change from all black, more colors than merely black.
And Gerard makes “the hardest part of this is leaving you”. It’s emotionally difficult, but there is no fear of death in that sentiment, no regrets of inaction, and no remorse at all.
The good trip doesn’t last long. Before even the first words, the following track, “Mama”, sets the scene immediately with bombs blasting out the city, ambulances a-wail.
Yet with the chorus comes a twist, “When we go, don’t blame us. We’ll let the fires just bathe us”. Blame again, a cause for remorse, but very specifically, don’t blame us— combine that with the soothing effect of a bath, granted a bath of fire, and we seem to have more innocence.
Again, Gerard shows his remarkable lyrical terseness: “you should’ve raised a baby girl, I should’ve been a better son”. With but two lines an entire family dynamic is exposed.
The Patient’s ownership of their disease is characterized as well, “if you could coddle the infection”. The you in this song refers to this terrible, gas-masked mama character, so coddling the infection is what she would do, therefore the opposite is desired by the Patient, coddling a disease is not a good thing. The Patient wants to face down the infection, wants to own their own disease.
The Liza Minnelli cameo comes in after a heavy breakdown, developing the mama as the Mother War of the liner notes, “‘if you would call me a sweetheart, I’d maybe then sing you a song’”, implying that mama does not sing the Patient lullabies, arguably the most hellish moment of the entire death trip.
This entire notion of hell is then turned around with a brief moment of tongue-in-cheek humor, “it’s really quite pleasant, except for the smell”.
The great motif of the album then returns, the cry of carrying on no matter what. Importantly, Liza Minnelli also sings this message. The message has been instilled in our Patient by both parents, the positive father figure, and this hellish mama. Make of that what you will.
“Sleep” comes next, and it is no la-la land. It begins with a voice that is also not Gerard’s: “as if like somebody was gripping my throat and squeezing, and I feel like I’m being choked, and I can’t breathe, and I shake, and I convulse, and sometimes when I’m trying to sleep, and I have these, these waking, uh, dreams”. Dreams, horrifying dreams.
So how does Gerard respond to these terrors? In his very next verse, “there ain’t no way that I’m sorry for what I did” In an album that is the from the very beginning about remorse and repentance, the Patient no longer feels remorse at all.
The hardest part of dying then evolves from what it was before. Although in the “Cancer” song, the hardest part was leaving you, in “Sleep” the “hardest part is letting go of your dreams”. Note how extremely similar the syntax is, leaving becomes letting go— both alliterating with the letter l— and you is expanded into your, then further expanded into your dreams. Whose dreams are hard to let go? Could the lover figure, this you, could it be but a dream?
We soon arrive at truly the most hellish moment of the album with, “Teenagers” and another music video.
The band is back on stage, but gone is the abandoned city, gone the black and white movie, gone the parade. We are, indeed, in a High School gymnasium, complete with cheerleaders and gaggles of rampaging teenagers. Hellish.
Gerard’s narrative voice abandons the Patient for the remainder of the album— except for a brief reprise on the second-to-last track— his voice returns to the lead singer of a popular band. But popularity is far from desired, “they’re gonna clean up your looks with all the lies in the books to make a citizen out of you”. This they pronoun is certainly the corporate record label, and a citizen is a condemnation of corporate society, wherein we are all nothing but slaving workers, making the rich richer off our labor.
And yet, when the cheerleaders suddenly don gas masks directly preceeding the lyric, “the boys and girls in the clique, the awful names that they stick, you’re never gonna fit in much, kid”, the unity of the Black Parade album is maintained. The cheerleaders are now associated with the Mother War character.
But Gerard has an answer to the cliques and the names— no, not sticks and stones (violence is entirely ineffective against such bullying, and only builds a cycle of further bullying)— “what you got under your shirt will make them pay for the things that they did”. What’s under the Patient’s shirt? His still beating, now surging in rigor mortis, heart.
With two tracks to go, plus a hidden track, we have “Disenchanted”, a self-professed “sad song with nothing to say”. Indeed, there is not much to analyze other than the continuing evolution of Gerard’s narrative voice, still firmly intrenched in his own self— the lead singer of an Emo band— and the lyrics speak mostly to his unpopular “high-school career” and the “roar of the crowd”.
The track is of lyrical consequence to the album, however. It takes a moment to step back and examine the artwork that My Chemical Romance has created. Though rife with self-doubt and dismissive of the masterpiece, engaging with this self-doubt is a common trope of Postmodernism and beyond.
Postmodernism, roughly, is about absurdism, a hollow laugh. By 2006, the Zeitgeist is no longer Postmodern, it is Post-Post-Modern— think of it as Postmodernism squared. Conscious Hip-Hop is Post-Post-Modern, graphic novels are Post-Post-Modern. I read this new Zeitgeist as more of a frown than a laugh.
“Famous Last Words” follows, and another music video featuring the marching band.
Gone the glorious eyeliner, the band members appear now in horrific makeup; gone the lightly falling snow, replaced now by spewing fire.
The lyrics remain in Gerard’s voice as he growls, “I know that I can’t make you stay”, returning to the trope of self-doubt, however, his earlier motif of a still beating heart reemerges with, “but where’s your heart?”
Yet, Gerard’s narrative voice shifts again with even greater complexity. After the lyric, “I can’t speak”, the voice clearly returns to the Patient, “I am not afraid to keep on living, I am not afraid to walk this world alone. Honey if you stay, I’ll be forgiven. Nothing you can say can stop me going home”.
Those are the final words sung by Gerard before a lengthy silence and a hidden track. Yet the insert of the vinyl insistently leaves out several stanzas of lyrics, ending with, “‘Cause I see you lying next to me with words I thought I’d never speak. Awake and unafraid, asleep or dead”. This omission can only be read as the Famous Last Words referred to in the song title. The loved one is finally lying next to the Patient, therefore the final words sung by Gerard are manifested, if you stay, I’ll be forgiven.
“Blood” is the title of the hidden track, driven by a jaunty piano melody, decidedly not Rock and or Roll, more like tinkly, Tin Pan Alley Ragtime music. The album is over, this is merely the curtain call. “They love me for it… I’ll be here for a while. So give them blood”, sings Gerard. He is back to contemplating his masterpiece, now without distain, but not with approval, either. That the kids listening love his work does not necessarily make Gerard Way feel loved, it does not really make things better, but his artwork will remain.
The blood is the sacrifice of creating, the emotional and psychological work the band poured into this album.
“The Black Parade” is frequently referred to as the “Sgt. Pepper’s” of the Millennial generation, referring to the Beatles concept album, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, released in 1967.
Similarities certainly abound. Both capture the spirit of their epoch— whether the Summer of Love, or the Emo movement on both sides of the 21st Century (for a 1985 Emo album from the Revolution Summer, look up the Rites of Spring self-titled). Both albums focus on an abstract, non-narrative concept— Sgt. Pepper’s centers around disguise, whether a carnival act, a child’s crayon drawing of a diamond sky, a meter maid’s uniform, or escape into heroin use, ultimately ending with a removal of the band’s disguises on the last song.
I would, however, align the work of Gerard Way and My Chemical Romance more closely with Emilie Autumn’s intertextual opus, Opheliac— discussed in a previous column of Concept Albums Explained. Both of these albums are released the same year— thus appeal to similar audiences. Both address similar themes— though Emilie’s Opheliac character grapples with suicide, not terminal illness.
Both of these 21st century artists have gone on to make more albums with less ambitious lyrics, but their careers continue, both will be here for a while.
I can barely wait to hear what their future contributions to High Literature in lyrical form will turn out to be.
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