Gerard Way: A world that sends you reeling.
Disenchanted
MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE front man, Gerard Way, has only just turned thirty, but we get the feeling he’s already seen more of the world and what it can do than he’d care to, as he steps up to the microphone to introduce the next number. ‘This is a song about dreams’, he tells the audience. ‘It’s called “Disenchanted”.’1
The occasion is a sold-out concert at Mexico’s Palacio de los Deportes on 7 October 2007. My Chemical Romance has been on the road for over a year, playing to hundreds of thousands of fans all over the world. During that time, the band’s most recent album, The Black Parade, has never stopped selling — gathering rave reviews and topping readers’ polls as it goes. Before the inevitable world tour had even hit the road, Gerard Way was well on the way to the upper echelons of rockstardom. Now, he treads the stage as though he’s never been anything less than a glam-rock superhero. He dips a shoulder, and thousands of girls scream. He shares his pain and millions of kids adore him for it. All of which begs the question: what does Gerard Way have to be disenchanted about? All his dreams would appear to have come true — and then some. So what exactly is the problem? A closer listen to The Black Parade uncovers the malaise at the heart of Gerard Way’s emotional world, and — more importantly — reveals the means by which he hopes to transcend it. The album is a loosely structured rock opera in the vein of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, and the star of the show is a little guy called ‘the patient’ — a shell of a human being, eaten away from the inside by disease, connected by wires and tubes to obscure machinery, counting out his last days staring at the blank walls of a hospital ward. The album’s centrepiece is a song called ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’, in which death finally comes for our hero, in the shape of an undead marching band. Death, Way insists, arrives in the form of our most treasured childhood memory. For the patient, this was the day his father took him into town to see a parade. On that day, he recalls — as he lies in his hospital bed and the machines count out what’s left of his life in metrical beeps — his father said something to him that would stay with him forever:
The song starts out reflectively, as the patient describes the day he spent with his father all those years ago, and the promise he made. Then he starts to think about the world as it revealed itself to him in his teens and twenties, those years when, one by one, we are systematically disavowed of the simple dreams of our childhood. The singer’s not reflecting anymore — he’s snapping and snarling about decimated dreams and bodies in the streets. But this bitter mood is not the one he closes his song with. For the final section of their rock epic, My Chemical Romance shift gears from breakneck punk to anthemic glory. The last sixty seconds of ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ are pitched somewhere between the epic grandeur of ‘We Are the Champions’ and Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound as played by the E Street Band on ‘Born To Run’, and the singer’s tone is doomed but defiant. He realises that through it all, no matter how much misery and pain life threw at him, there was one thing that he never let go of — his dream.
‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ is a story about a vision, glimpsed during the singer’s childhood, of a better world. It’s a story about how that vision was then betrayed by the failure of the real world to live up to the singer’s hopes. And it ends with the singer realising that he couldn’t care less what the real world does or says or will or won’t let him do. He discovers, at the end of the song, that all he needs is himself:
Take a look at me
’cause I could not care at all
do or die
you’ll never make me
because the world
will never take my heart3
Gerard Way has found that society, the real world, adult life — whatever you want to call it — cannot provide him with happiness or satisfaction. So he’s moved the search for happiness from outside to inside, and has found it, deep within himself, in his own dreams, his own imagination. This is what puts the romance in My Chemical Romance — the rejection of society in favour of the individual.
The philosophers call this solipsism — a system of thought that insists that the self is the only possible area of knowledge — and up until the nineteenth century it was regarded as mostly a bad thing. But the romantics, as Oxford professor Alex de Jonge notes in Dostoyevsky and the Age of Intensity, flipped the script:
Whereas most philosophies seek to avoid solipsism…the Romantics positively embraced it. They did so because they found themselves in a world in which the self alone seemed to offer a measure of certainty…4
This was the world Wordsworth found himself living in. In the hundred years before he was born, the Enlightenment had systematically picked apart every mystery of life until it seemed there was nothing left to dismantle but the Enlightenment itself. This was somehow foreseen by Rousseau and achieved by the Revolution — but at a terrible cost. Post-revolutionary Europe now had to live every day with the awful knowledge that nothing — not even such previously rock-solid ideas as king and country, not even God himself, certainly not the widely discredited god of Reason — was a permanent fixture.
Wordsworth, having placed his faith in several of these phantoms only to have them melt away into the air, turned his gaze inward. In his rural retreat at Alfoxden, he found his thoughts drifting toward his childhood, which had also been spent in the country. In The Prelude, Wordsworth describes the vivid scenes that were recalled to his mind, a stormy day just before Christmas when he had run up to the top of a hill and sat by an old stone wall:
Upon my right hand was a single sheep,
A whistling hawthorn on my left, and there,
With those companions at my side, I watch’d,
Straining my eyes intensely, as the mist
Gave intermitting prospect of the wood5
Visions such as these restored his faith. Exclaims the poet:
Oh! Mystery of Man
From what a depth proceed thy honours! I am lost, but see
In simple childhood something of the base
On which thy greatness stands6
The Prelude, is a rejection of Empiricism, a popular philosophical doctrine of the eighteenth century which maintains that all knowledge is derived from experience, and that the mind is, at birth, a blank slate. Empiricism played a key role in the Enlightenment’s belief in the perfectibility of human beings. It also influenced the criticism and teaching of art to an extraordinary degree. The president of London’s Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds, taught that excellence in art could, and must be learned. ‘Our minds,’ he wrote, ‘should be habituated to the contemplation of excellence.’ But Wordsworth’s contemporary, the poet and engraver William Blake, was having none of it. ‘This man,’ said Blake of Reynolds, ‘was fired by Satan to depress art.’7 In the margin of his copy of Reynolds’ Discourses, next to the sentence just quoted, Blake scribbled furiously:
Reynolds thinks that Man Learns all that he knows. I say on the Contrary that Man Brings All that he can have Into the World with him.8
For Blake the poet or artist is not, and never was, a blank slate — his unique visions come from within, not from without. Wordsworth, too, rejected Empiricism. Like Rousseau, he believed in a sort of original human soul, connected to nature, which has been corrupted and distorted — not improved — by society. That’s why his epiphany took place in the countryside, which in turn stirred memories of his childhood — both were a way back to this original state. Having reacquainted himself with it, this original self would become his guide in the wilderness, the one fixed point in a chaotic and unfriendly world.
It’s this same self-reliance that allows Gerard Way, in ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’, to look back at the rise and fall, the bodies in the streets, and the world that disappointed him at every turn, and say, as though he really means it, ‘I, don’t, CARE!’ The source of the singer’s faith, the one thing he could hang on to in an unstable world, turned out to be hiding somewhere in the depths of his original self. Here, he found dreams and ideals formed long before society, with its books and rules, taught him how to think — and how not to feel. The world can go on being the world — he has his heart — his unique feeling for what is true and right. It’s this brave heart that he holds aloft during the final section of the song, as he falls in line with the black parade, and the rat-a-tat sound of their skeletal drum major disappears over the hill.