Alex: A sprig in a barrel-organ.
Teenagers
‘WELCOME TO THE Black Parade’ is something new in the world of rock and roll. There have been songs that angrily demand that the kids be granted the right to party, and there have been songs where the singer says he won’t go to the party with all the other kids because he’s too full of despair. But there’s never been a song that angrily demands that the kids be granted the right to be full of despair. This is what the army of the black parade wants as it rattles the gates of the crystal palace. Here is the underground uprising Dostoyevsky imagined, thousands of human individuals who insist on being useless — broken, beaten and damned — in a utilitarian world. Their slogans are carefully calculated to annoy positivists and empiricists: ‘We’re all gonna die’, ‘I think I’m gonna burn in hell’, ‘What’s in is despair’.
But the right to be sad is one that the modern world can’t allow, and as the black parade began its march around the world in 2007, the media began a severe crackdown on sadness. The word ‘cult’ began to be thrown around. Old folk devils were revived: The Black Parade contained suicidal messages; the singer was using his shows and web forums to encourage his impressionable young fans to dive, lemming-like, into oblivion with him; links were implied between emo (the band members gritted their teeth) and recent high school shootings. The quiet, lonely kid with the overactive imagination, the notebook full of visions of impending doom, the black clothes and the long fringe. ‘If you think your child might be at risk, go to our website…’
Way, understandably, was spooked by this media panic, which had in fact been building since the release of My Chemical Romance’s second album. The huge spike in the band’s sales and concert attendances after Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge was largely due to an influx of very young fans, and Gerard felt an enormous sense of responsibility to them. But the singer could see through the fear-mongering of the news networks and the tabloids to a much more serious malaise lying beneath. On tour, he poured his frustration into a song — a Bon Jovi-ish anthem recorded for The Black Parade, in which middle-America, picking up the tune laid down for them by Fox News, bawls out the refrain, ‘Teenagers scare the livin’ shit outta me!’ This song, ‘Teenagers’, warns us of the lengths the state may go to in order to pursue its war on sadness.
‘They’ve got methods of keeping you clean,’ sings Gerard Way, hinting at more sinister procedures to come — drugs, surveillance and mind control. Why would they go to all this trouble? Because they’re scared of you! If those underground types keep talking, word will get around that the limits imposed on human desire by the state are arbitrary and false, and people will start demanding all kinds of things that modern society is in no position to offer them. Dostoyevsky’s underground man warned that happiness is not synonymous with wellbeing. A complete list of the ridiculous activities that make human beings feel good would have to include sulking, stealing and ‘smashing things’ which, the underground man insists, can sometimes be ‘very pleasant’.
Alex, the protagonist of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, would agree with this. Burgess’s 1962 novel accelerates teenage delinquency into a nightmare future, where Alex and his gang of beautiful young men in eye make-up and bowler hats terrorise the city’s streets with ‘ultraviolence’. Alex is not interested in the greater good — but he knows what he likes: rape, ultraviolence and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. These things make him happy — isn’t that what life is all about? Of course, that’s not how the state sees it. After a night of ultraviolence gone horribly wrong, Alex is thrown in prison, and soon becomes a candidate for a very promising new rehabilitation technique. When the underground man argued in 1864 that the state could only stop him from wanting the things he wants by altering his nature, he didn’t believe for a second that this might be a possibility. But perhaps he should have — de Condorcet, in his sketch for a mathematically perfectible utopia, had already suggested that careful breeding might, given time, eventually iron out some of the kinks in the human organism.2 Now, in Alex’s time, science has progressed to the point where unreasonable individuals can be ‘perfected’ more or less on the spot.
But making a citizen out of Alex comes at a terrible cost. Dr Ludovico’s brutal aversion therapy and high-powered drug injections rip up Alex’s head and rob him of his free will. He can’t be ‘bad’ anymore, and while the government might herald this as a great leap forward, the true meaning is not lost on Alex. He finally realises that, in his society’s crystal palace, flipping the bird is not allowed. ‘They of the government and the judges cannot allow the bad, because they cannot allow the self,’ Alex muses. ‘And is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of brave malenky selves fighting these big machines?’3
Alex is a nasty piece of work, but he’s no dummy — and he knows his history. The big machines have been a problem for romantic individuals since William Blake wrote his preface to Milton: A Poem in 1804. Blake gave the nineteenth century one of its most indelible images when he described ‘dark Satanic mills’ rising over ‘England’s green and pleasant land’.4In 1811 one of these bleak-looking intrusions on the landscape erupted in violence: textile workers in Nottingham, angry about the introduction of a new stocking weaving frame that would, it was said, speed up production and reduce the number of workers needed in the factories, took up arms against the new frames. Many of them found themselves sentenced to death (or worse, sent to Australia) as a result.
But the frame-breakers — or Luddites as they became known — found themselves with an unexpected champion in Lord Byron, who argued passionately in the House of Lords against the introduction of the new laws, and later took the case to the streets with an article in The Morning Chronicle. This, at first, seems a little out of character for the poet, who had little love for the common man. But a letter to his mother, written around the time of the dispute, reveals the source of his sympathy for the Luddites:
If I could by my own efforts inculcate the truth, that a man is not intended for a despot or a machine, but as an individual of a community… I might attempt to found a new Utopia.5
Here Byron is making a case for the dignity of the solitary citizen over the interests of states or systems. People want more and cheaper stockings, so it makes good rational sense to install machines that will make more stockings more quickly — more people will get what they want. But here we have already lost sight of the individual human being, and individuality is everything to Byron. This helps unravel the paradox behind Byron’s support of the Luddites — how he could despise the mob, and yet stick his neck out to help a mob. The former is an individualised mass, the latter is a mass of individuals.
England embraced industry more quickly and effectively than any other nation in the nineteenth century, which is why the image of nature opposed to the rise of the machine, and the individual man opposed to totalitarian systems, became such a hallmark of romantic poetry in that country. It’s a vein of imagery that can be traced all the way from Blake to Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites to Tolkien — whom they inspired — through to the strain of medievalism that runs through the hippy movement and right up to Pink Floyd.
Animals, Pink Floyd’s eleventh studio album, released in 1977, painted a bleak portrait of English life after two centuries of progress and industry — from the dark Satanic mills on the album’s cover, to the dog-eat-dog world described within. The album begins by wondering what would happen ‘if you didn’t care what happened to me and I didn’t care for you’, and quickly gets worse.6 Later that year, while touring the album, songwriter Roger Waters discovered that he was far from immune to the social collapse he’d just described when he spat on a fan at a show in Montreal.7 Much soul-searching followed, which eventually lead to the band’s next project, 1979’s The Wall. Waters’ epic study in alienation traces the roots of his character’s soul sickness back to the public school system. In the classroom children are treated as though they are empty vessels, ready to be filled up with correct ideas which will equip them for the workforce. Of course, human children, Waters insists, are not empty vessels. They’re unique individuals with strange dreams and irrational urges. But since the behaviourist state cannot admit this even for a moment, they have to beat those dreams out of you. Producer Bob Ezrin, fresh from recording the kids choir on Alice Cooper’s ‘School’s Out’, assembled a gang of English school children in the studio to sing Waters’ immortal lines: ‘Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!’8
Though Waters, like Byron, is hardly a man of the people, he is a staunch individualist — so he will never accept the idea that human beings are merely part of a system. But this is exactly what modern government wants: another brick in the wall, a human being reduced to what Dostoyevsky calls a ‘sprig in a barrel-organ’ — or, as Gerard Way puts it in ‘Teenagers’, ‘another cog in the murder machine’.9
With this line, Gerard exposes the real irony in America’s War on Sadness. Society considers it dangerous for a band like My Chemical Romance to promote despair, because despair is a drag on productivity — it sends a bad message to the kids who are the workforce of the future. You can’t go around telling people life is pointless. It happens to be true, but how will we get anything done if people find that out? The valuelessness at the heart of modern society will be revealed for all to see, the jig will be up, the machine will be prevented from working.
But Gerard suspects, as Dostoyevsky did in his day, that the machine itself might be the real reason the kids are unhappy in the first place. By enshrining progress over real values, to the point where nobody knows what values are anymore, science and industry have created horrors that Rousseau, Wordsworth, Morris and Dostoyevsky could barely have imagined. How can we expect the workforce of the future to put on a happy face while contributing to a society that has produced the atomic bomb, missiles in space, the greenhouse effect and the War on Terror? The world produced by reason and commonsense is a nightmare. So, because utilitarianism has proved incompatible with real human happiness, the romantic artist, as Bertrand Russell has observed in his History of Western Philosophy, tends to replace utilitarian standards with aesthetic ones.
The earth-worm is useful, but not beautiful; the tiger is beautiful, but not useful. Darwin (who was not a Romantic) praised the earth-worm; Blake praised the tiger. The morals of the Romantics have primarily aesthetic motives.10
Byron will support the Luddites over the government; Morris the solitary artist over the big factory; Tolkein the hobbits over Saruman’s industry; Nick Cave the murderer over the state that wants to reform him; Morrissey the shoplifter over the cops; Jon Bon Jovi the outlaw over the sheriff; Tim Burton the monster over the suburban world that won’t accept him. The factory and the police force are useful, but not beautiful. The monster and the sulky teenager are beautiful, but not useful. In any contest between the big machine and Alex’s ‘brave malenky selves’, the romantic has to side with the ‘brave malenky selves’.