Dedication
For Marissa and Shane,
and the new kid on the block.
Contents
Cover
Dedication
Thank You
Introduction
Emotional People
Buzzcocks
The Cure
Weezer
The Classics
Troublemaker
Wordsworth
Civilisation
The French Revolution
The Story is in the Soil
A Motion and a Spirit
Romantic
Disenchanted
Paint It Black and Take It Back
Napoleon
This Tragic Affair
Passion Incapable of Being Converted into Action
Sentimentalists
Across the Sea
Love Like Winter
Alone and Palely Loitering
A Forest
Lemonade
Anatomy of Mellon Collie
Rock and Roll Suicide
Screamin’ Lord Byron
Lord Byron
Give Them Blood
The Vampyre
Goths
Rocky Horror
Vincent
Frankenstein
Edward Scissorhands
The Dark Side of Human Things
Mystery
Utopia
Utopiate
The Degraded Present
Blasphemous Rumours
Paradise Lost
The Disappearing God
The Age of Simple Faith
Faith
World in My Eyes
We Can Be Heroes
Wagnerian
Born to Run
Pressure
Schopenhauer
Pinkerton
Butterfly
Satisfaction
Boredom
Notes from Underground
How Soon Is Now?
Why Bother?
The Crystal Palace
The Broken, the Beaten and the Damned
Teenagers
I’ve Gotta Get Out of the Basement!
Myths of the Near Future
Gustav Klimt
Nietzsche
A Night at the Opera
The Wisdom of the Woods
Personal Jesus
Stronger
Also Sprach Zarathustra
Homo Superior
Destroyer
Such a Special Guy
Expressionism
The Pain Threshold
Sprechstimme
Everything Collapses
Life Is a Cabaret
Mother War
Artists are Cleaners
Distress Cries Aloud
Rock Stars Are Fascists, Too
The Black Parade Is Dead
Insulation and Disaffection
Leave Them Kids Alone.
Notes
Searchable Terms
Copyright
Thank You
Hey, Nietzsche! first began to resemble a book in November last year. At that point, my wife and I had been travelling for almost nine months, and I had accumulated six notebooks full of ideas and an ipod full of emo. In Thailand, we met an Australian girl called Chrissie, and one night I tried (for the first time) to explain my idea for this book to her. When I’d finished my spiel, she thought for a moment and said, ‘You know, when you first told me you were writing a book, I thought, “What a waste of time”. But now that you’ve explained it, I reckon it might actually be really good.’ This was the second most valuable piece of encouragement I received while writing Hey! Nietzsche! — the first being something my father-in-law, Peter Lynch said to me twelve months later. I was, by this point, a little emo myself — the combination of the looming deadline and over a year’s worth of exposure to angst-y poetry was taking its toll. Was I, I wondered out loud, attempting too much? Pete told me that I was, but that he believed this was the secret to success. ‘Bite off more than you can chew’, he said, ‘and chew like fuck.’ (I think this is more or less what Rainer Maria Rilke was getting at in his Letters to a Young Poet.)
Along with Pete and Chrissie, I have a few other people to thank. Zan Rowe, Dan Buhagiar, Marc Fennell, Chris Scaddan and Linda Bracken at triple j; Wendy Were for having me to the Sydney Writer’s Festival; Jenny Valentish at Jmag; Keith Hurst for legal business; Jase Harty and Michael Agzarian for their continuing support; and the amazing Brad Cook for his portraits of ‘old dudes’ and guys with names nobody can pronounce. I’d also like to thank everybody who helped to make the Culture Club book launch such a roaring success — The Devoted Few, Dr Lindsay McDougall, Sam Simmons, Brendan Doyle, Nina Las Vegas, and the Pemmell Pad crew; and everybody at ABC Commercial for their hard work on Hey! Nietzsche!, including Louise Cornege, Jacquie Kent, Megan Johnston, and especially Susan Morris-Yates — for her unwavering support and saint-like patience.
Speaking of which, my friends and family — Michael ‘Timmy’ Rosenthal, Ben and Jess, the girls (and their boys), Pete and Lyn, Marissa and Shane and Mum and Dad — have been listening to me say ‘it’s nearly finished’ for over a year now. As I type this, I think I can safely say that this time I really mean it. Thank you all for putting up with me.
And thank you, Kirileigh Lynch. You have confounded my thesis by being the least emo person I know and the most romantic (in a good way). I promise to come out of the tower of doom and have some real fun.
And why are you so firmly and triumphantly certain that only what is normal and positive — in short, only well-being — is good for man? Is reason mistaken about what is good? After all, perhaps prosperity isn’t the only thing that pleases mankind, perhaps he is just as attracted to suffering…whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, smashing things is also sometimes very pleasant. I am not here standing up for suffering, or for well-being either. I am standing out for my own caprices and for having them guaranteed when necessary.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Notes From Underground
Introduction
I.
This book began with a song I heard on the radio about two years ago. It was a five-minute rock epic in three acts, a sincere denial of modern life, an affirmation of the power of dreams, and a conflation of corny melodrama and gut-wrenching personal confession the likes of which had not been heard since ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.
I ranted and raved about this song and how great it was to everyone I knew, and quickly discovered that nobody liked it as much as I did. Or they liked it, but were unwilling to make any greater claim for it than that. I, on the other hand, was full of great claims. I believed this song had the power to change the world. I leaped to its defence. I argued, in all sincerity, that it was one of the Greatest Songs of All Time.
I was becoming unreasonable — but I liked the feeling of being unreasonable. It was a feeling I remembered from when I was about fifteen years old, when I blundered into many similar arguments with my friends. I tried to convince them that Supertramp’s ‘The Logical Song’ was the Greatest Song of All Time. My proclamations were met with embarassed silence or outright scorn. I was an outcast — a heretic. But my almost religious devotion to Supertramp allowed me to weather this isolation — my faith would sustain me.
This was the irrational love I felt for my new favourite song, ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ by New Jersey five-piece My Chemical Romance. And this, I soon discovered is the love that My Chemical Romance’s fans feel for the band and their music. It’s how the band themselves would like to be loved, as singer Gerard Way once explained to his audience:
If for one minute you think you’
re better than a sixteen-year-old girl in a Green Day T-shirt, you are sorely mistaken. Remember the first time you went to a show and saw your favourite band. You wore their shirt and sang every word. You didn’t know anything about scene politics, haircuts or what was cool. All you knew was that this music made you feel different from anyone you ever shared a locker with. Someone finally understood you. This is what music is about.
This is one of the many Gerard Way quotes I began collecting around this time. I read every interview I could find. I listened to The Black Parade album over and over again, I studied the lyrics intently. I told people I was doing ‘research’ — but I wasn’t fooling anyone. I was collecting pictures of the band and gluing them in my notebooks. I had crossed over to the other side.
I was entering the advanced stages of pop obsession. ‘Gerard Way and I really do have a lot in common,’ I thought to myself. This is actually true. The bands Way talks about in interviews, the singers he says changed his life, are all the same ones I like. Queen, Bruce Springsteen, The Cure, The Smiths, and David Bowie. I realised that all of these artists share something in common — a quality that is present in ‘Born to Run’, ‘Heroes’, ‘How Soon is Now’ and ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ — but that I was hard pressed to say exactly what that was. I started making graphs and charts, looking for the missing link in all of this music. My notebooks started to accumulate more collaged fragments — Bowie, Bruce, and Morrissey shared space with Gerard and the band. I was preparing a case — a passionate defence of My Chemical Romance and their music — and I knew I would need evidence to back up my claims. But I was also trying to explain something to myself. I wanted to understand what it was in these songs that moved me so much, and where that something came from.
With my last book, I had attempted something similar. I had gone looking for the ideas that informed certain songs and albums of the last ten years, and had found them in the dimly lit corners of the twentieth-century avant-garde. I found Dada in Beck, Artaud in Gnarls Barkley, Walter Benjamin in The Scissor Sisters and Andre Breton in The Mars Volta. But I quickly realised that in this case, the twentieth century would be of no use to me. The ineffable something that connected the songs in my new lists could not be explained by any twentieth-century idea. So I took a leap back another hundred years — into the period bookended by the French Revolution in 1789 and the death of Friedrich Nietzsche in 1900. Here, I immediately found what I was looking for.
Self-expression, the rejection of institutions, individualism, questing spirituality, the desire to escape society, the strong identification with criminals and madmen, the divinity of sin, the tragic view of nature, ideal love, dying young, solitude, melancholy, medievalism and an unhealthy obsession with death. These were the ideas that connected the songs in my list to one another. But they’re also, I learned, the ideals and characteristics of romanticism, the artistic and philosophical movement that dominated much of the nineteenth century. As I learned more about the romantics, I began to realise how widespread their influence in rock and roll really was. Every poem I read reminded me of a song lyric, every letter of an interview with a musician. The collaged portraits in my notebooks became festooned with spidery lines. I began to see how Bowie was linked to Byron, what Freddie Mercury owed to Friedrich Nietzsche, and what put the romance in My Chemical Romance. For years I’d been reading that a singer’s looks are ‘Byronic’, that an album is ‘Wagnerian’, that the singer’s philosophy is ‘Nietzschean’, that the song’s mood is ‘gothic’ and that the band are hopelessly ‘romantic’. Behind these words I had always sensed a story that was not being told — now I realised I had an opportunity to tell it. My speech in defence of ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ had grown to the point where no-one would have time to listen to it all. I imagined myself calling up a radio request show:
‘And what do you like about this song, Craig?’
‘I’m glad you asked. See, about two hundred years ago…’
2.
One of the hurdles I knew I would have to face in presenting my argument was the Emo Factor. My Chemical Romance is considered emo. And emo is not considered acceptable. In fact, if you’re into indie rock and over the age of twenty-five, there are few things less cool on the planet than emo. It is, almost by definition, un-cool. Cool implies a certain amount of detachment, an ironic attitude to life, a refusal to show too much feeling, a preference for playing with signs and surfaces without becoming too attached to their meanings. Emo has no truck with cool. Emo is about private passion, and its success is judged on how much passion is produced and how nakedly it’s exposed. Emo wants avalanches of feeling, tragic romances, explosive rage, bottomless self-pity and gordian knots of self-absorption. Its symbols are fire, blood, churning thunderstorms, endless oceans and cold, dark earth. What do these symbols represent? Emotions — my emotions, not yours. Emo is first person — and for most of the songs the first person is the only person. Politics does not exist, society barely registers. In emo, the singer’s emotional world is the whole world — nothing else is as big, nothing else is as important.
Emo, I began to realise, is the most unashamedly romantic sub-culture in rock today. It represents the outer extreme of romanticism, its purest and most dangerous strain, the romanticism of Goethe’s young Werther, of Frankenstein, of Byron and Nietzsche — a philosophy which rejects the idea of the greater good, which says that what is good is simply what’s good for me. One of the extraordinary things about emo is the panic it’s created in the media and society at large. It’s been a long time since youth culture was this frightening to grown-ups. But behind the squawking over self-harm, ‘suicidal messages’ and school shootings is one, big dangerous idea — that emotions, my emotions, are the most important thing in the world, and the only justification I need for my actions, however extreme. Emo culture is a threat to society because it’s irrational — and it knows this, which is why it looks a bit like goth. Emo, like goth, has a preference for horror imagery — hence the fondness for Nightmare Before Christmas merchandise and Misfits T-shirts. This too, I discovered, leads back to romanticism. The romantics’ desire to escape from a de-valued, meaningless present frequently led them into the arms of the Gothic Revival, and the close kinship between these two early nineteenth-century ideas would eventually produce the founding work of the modern horror genre, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Shelley’s monster represents many things — but chief among them is the threat of romanticism in society, the havoc that could result if a philosophy of feeling is followed to its conclusion. In Shelley’s novel, the monster justifies his crimes by saying that he has been cast out of human society — why should he now be asked to obey its rules? This is exactly the threat implied by emo — that of a whole generation of kids so alienated from society that they no longer believe in society at all, and no longer care what happens to it. This, I’ve realised, is why people looked at me funny when I started speechifying about ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’. They were scared.
The relationship between My Chemical Romance and emo is complex, to say the least. The simplest way to put it would be to say that the band’s fans are, but that the band itself is not. Gerard Way has repeatedly insisted that this is the case, and I tend to agree with him — for reasons I hope to make clear in this book. Emo is characterised by a hopelessness that is not compatible with Gerard Way’s ambition. He is not content — as most emo bands are — to stir powerful emotions in his audience. He wants, as he has stated many times, to make a difference. He’s taken it upon himself to defend the rights of his community — more than that, to lead them in a pitched battle against the world that has rejected their ideals. My Chemical Romance’s nineteenth-century military jackets are not just for show. They’ve taken the romantics’ obsession with Napoleon to its logical conclusion, by forming a liberating army in the name of emotion, dreams and solitude, and fighting for your right to be alone at the party. ‘The Black Parade’ represents romanticism on the march.
&n
bsp; 3.
The fate of Gerard Way’s quest to liberate the broken, the beaten and the damned forms one narrative that runs through the book, along with other strands following the adventures of Bowie, The Cure, and Weezer — whose career is crucial to the history of emo, and in many ways represents the polar opposite of My Chemical Romance’s. But through it all, I’ve done my best to tell the story of the romantic movement in a fairly linear fashion — beginning with the last days of the Enlightenment and the formalism of Alexander Pope, moving through Rousseau, Goethe and Wordsworth and on to Byron, Keats, and Mary Shelley, then the Victorians — Matthew Arnold, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the late romanticism of Wagner, then Dostoyevsky, and finally, Nietzsche. I’ve then gone on to demonstrate how romantic ideas — Nietzsche’s in particular — played themselves out in the early twentieth century, in Expressionist music, art and theatre.
I’ve made no attempt to be definitive, but I have sought to bring history to life and, hopefully, to build a bridge (or several) between the history of the romantic movement and history of rock and roll. In the process I’ve learned new ways to love my record collection, thanks to (who knew?) poetry and philosophy. Having returned from my travels in the nineteenth century I’ve found (as travellers always do) that the world I thought I knew looks slightly different — and mostly better. I’ve heard new ideas and relationships jumping out of the speakers, a new sense of the history that informs a song like ‘Heroes’ or ‘Born to Run’ or ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, a new sense of excitement at the demands being made in an album like Faith, The Queen Is Dead, Violator or Siamese Dream. I’ve discovered why I was so moved by the song I heard on the radio that day — it is, in a sense, a song two hundred years in the making, and I was feeling the full force of those two centuries. I’ve realised that my irrational, unreasonable devotion to ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ was an entirely reasonable response; given that the song is a demand for the unreasonable and the irrational. In the following pages, I’ve tried to explain why the singer’s demands deserve our attention — in as reasonable and rational a manner as my subject matter will allow.
Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone Page 1