He said son when you grow up
Would you be
The saviour of the broken
The beaten and the damned2
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.
Paint It Black and Take It Back
TO GERARD WAY, the black parade is many things. It’s an alter-ego for his band, an image of death, a hope for salvation, and a way to describe his fans.1 It’s also a dream of society in reverse — a place where the broken, the beaten and the damned can be alone together. It’s a parallel universe where sorrow is sublime and the good guys wear black.
It’s fitting then, that the grand tableaux on the album’s inner sleeve looks like the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band printed in negative. In 1967, Peter Blake’s iconic pop collage hinted at a bright new world of colour and imagination, with The Beatles playing the national anthem. Mexican fashion designer Manuel fitted the band out in technicolour military jackets which neatly caught the spirit of the times. The Sgt Pepper uniform suggested a historical revolution, but a bloodless one, fought with flowers and buckets of Pop-art colour — nostalgia blended with optimism.
For the black parade’s uniforms, Gerard Way handed Hollywood costume designer Colleen Atwood a sketch for a Sgt Pepper outfit with all the colour drained out of it. With their fabric a uniform black and the gold details bleached bone white, the ribbing on the jackets had become ribs. The black parade uniform makes a clever visual pun on the cross-braids of a nineteenth-century military jacket by forcing them into a closer resemblance to the stripes of white corpse-paint worn on stage by Gerard Way’s heroes The Misfits in the early 1980s. In the sleeve photo, the five band members, now wearing Atwood’s creations, embody Gerard’s idea of the bl
ack parade perfectly — soldiers who are dead before they’ve even started marching. Atwood — who honed her craft working with director Tim Burton on films like Edward Scissorhands — was clearly the right artist for the job.
This image of the band as the black parade was inescapable in 2007 and 2008, as their gigantic tour wound its way around the globe. Then, just as the tour came to a halt, and Gerard, Mikey, Bob, Ray and Frank hung their uniforms up backstage for the last time, their look was stolen by (of all bands) Coldplay. Their costumes were a tad brighter than My Chem’s, and a little ‘deconstructed’ (although that could have been due to the fact that the band made them themselves and aren’t very good at sewing) — but the similarity was striking. Chris Martin appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone dressed in his new duds, looking like a doomed young freedom fighter, staring into the distance, hand on his heart.
The look he was aiming for was ‘Revolution’. With their new album, Viva La Vida or Death and all his Friends, Coldplay had wiped the slate clean — they’d thrown out the hit-making formula of the last two records, turned up their guitars, and were about to make what Martin called ‘a slightly angry restart. Or not angry, just passionate.’2 As part of this mini-revolution, the band selected a very telling image for the cover of Viva La Vida — Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People.
Delacroix’s painting is one of the most famous images of France in revolt — it’s very likely the first thing that comes into most people’s heads when they hear the words ‘French Revolution’. The painting shows an armed rabble surging toward the viewer out of a haze of gun smoke; a ragtag mob, students fighting alongside workers, a street kid waving pistols. At their head is Liberty herself — boldly stepping forward with a bayonet in one hand and the tricolour in the other. A popular ode of the nineteenth century described Liberty as ‘This strong woman with powerful breasts, rough voice and robust charm’.3 And this is exactly the figure Delacroix painted — liberty made flesh.
This is not the Revolution of 1789, it’s the Revolution of 1830. In July of that year, King Charles X had issued an unpopular decree that wound back a number of the hard-won freedoms of 1789 — including the freedom of the press. Several newspapers protested, police were sent in to subdue the rabblerousers, and outraged Parisians banded together to fight them off. ‘Paris streets,’ writes Tom Prideaux, ‘took on the look of the Revolution all over again.’4 Less than a week later, Charles had abdicated. Delacroix began working up his canvas as the smoke was still clearing and the new ‘Citizen-King’, Louis Philippe, was being installed. He wrote to his brother:
I have undertaken a modern subject, a barricade…and if I have not conquered for my country, at least I will paint for her.5
Delacroix’s painting — like Delacroix himself, was not especially political. The artist was bored by politics, but the uprising of 1830 had just enough sex and violence to appeal to the painter of kinky masterpieces like The Death of Sardanapalus. The finished painting, however, proved to have a little too much of both for his critics. They complained that the rabble was too dirty looking and that Liberty made flesh was a bit too…fleshy. Liberty, they felt, was all very well — but couldn’t she put her top back on?
Nevertheless, the new government bought Delacroix’s painting, with the idea that it would be hung in Louis-Philippe’s throne room ‘as a reminder to the new king of how he came to be sitting there’.6 But the king eventually decided that while he approved of the ‘people’ in principle, he would rather not look at armed workers and revolting peasants all day long. The painting was taken down, and Delacroix sent it to his Aunt Félicité’s for safekeeping. Now it hangs in the Louvre — or did, until Coldplay marched in with their spray cans and wrote ‘Viva La Vida’ all over it.
‘From very early on,’ says Coldplay’s Guy Berryman, ‘we had this painting in mind to show a slightly badly organised revolution — with everything a bit homemade and scrappy.’7 The painting, in turn, matches their homemade scrappy outfits; and the whole package combines to give the feeling of a passionate struggle for (artistic) freedom, and a new world about to be born.
In July 2008 the band presented their new music and new jackets for the first time in a live TV performance. MTV’s Buzzworthy, while noting that they seemed to have raided Gerard Way’s wardrobe, described their new look as ‘Napoleon meets American Apparel’.8 This was most likely the first time that any of the members of Britain’s nicest band had been compared to a would-be conqueror of the world. But it would probably have pleased them in a way that a comparison to, say, Hitler or Genghis Khan would not.
Napoleon: Always alone among people…
Napoleon
THE YEARS BETWEEN France’s first two revolutions were dominated, not only in that country, but across the whole of Europe, by the extraordinary figure of Napoleon Bonaparte. He first came to France from the island of Corsica in order to complete his military education. Having been made a general by the Revolution at the age of twenty-four, he then helped to put down the Royalist Uprising of 1795, was promoted to commander of the army of Italy in 1796, and became — in all but name — the dictator of France in 1799. Over the next fourteen years, his armies poured across Europe. By the time he was defeated and exiled in 1814, the map of the continent was completely redrawn, and thousands of Europeans had, as historian Norman Davies puts it, ‘a taste for something entirely different’.1
While the crowned heads of Europe were — justifiably — scared stiff by the seemingly unstoppable Corsican, many of their subjects eagerly anticipated his arrival — for exactly the same reasons. Napoleon came in the name of Liberty, bringing French-style freedom and democracy with him: oppressive monarchies would be toppled, serfdom abolished. He was, in Holland, for instance, exactly the sort of foreign invader you’d want to be conquered by.
He was also, as British historian Eric Hobsbawm puts it, Europe’s first secular myth.2 In 1804 Antoine-Jean Gros painted a large canvas recording Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. In 1798, Napoleon had been trying to establish a foothold for France in the Middle East when a large number of his soldiers were infected with plague. Partly as an act of mercy, and partly so as not to be held up, he ordered the stricken soldiers to be poisoned — but the mission proved to be a failure in any case. This less-than-glamorous story is not, however, the one Gros portrays in his ‘Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa’. Gros shows a resolute but compassionate Napoleon reaching out his hand to touch one of the plague victims in a symbolic gesture of healing. Gros’s painting, in which Napoleon has become a Christ-like figure, was dubious as history, but enormously seductive as propaganda. It was this image of Napoleon as part military genius, part supernatural redeemer that captured the popular imagination.
Ludwig van Beethoven was, at first, convinced that Napoleon was the real deal, the living embodiment of democracy and freedom. Having heard of the First Consul’s expedition to Egypt, he began dreaming up a symphonic tribute to the great man, which he sat down to compose in 1803. His friend Ferdinand Ries visited him around this time and saw, sitting on his work-table, the completed score for a new work with the word ‘Buonaparte’ written on the title page. But Ries had some bad news for the composer, which he did not take at all well:
I was the first person who brought him the news that [Napoleon] had declared himself Emperor. Thereupon, he flew into a rage and cried out, “He too is nothing but an ordinary man! Now he will trample underfoot all the Rights of Man and only indulge his ambition: he will now set himself on high, like all the others, and become a tyrant!” Beethoven went to the table, seized the title-page from the top, tore it up completely and threw it on the floor.3
Napoleon was, at this time, a highly contentious figure for the romantics. Blake and Wordsworth were opposed to him for much the same reasons as Beethoven, while others — like Delacroix, or the German philosopher Hegel, whose native Prussia had been completely crushed by Napoleon’s army at the Battle of Jena in 1806 — admired him.4 But
after his defeat and exile in 1814, Napoleon became one of the quintessential heroes of the second wave of the romantic movement. For artists of Wordsworth’s generation, who had lived through the Revolution, he was too problematic. But for those who came of age in the first decades of the new century, the exiled emperor seemed to embody the Revolution itself, with all its yet-to-be-fulfilled promise; ‘a semi-mythical phoenix and liberator’, as Eric Hobsbawm writes.5 To Lord Byron, born one year before the storming of the Bastille, Napoleon was a hero. When he heard of the emperor’s defeat at Waterloo, he said, ‘I’m damned sorry for it’.6
Napoleon’s defeat led to the restoration of France’s monarchy, and a slow but inevitable winding back of the Revolution’s reforms, which would eventually lead to the uprising of 1830. During this time a stifling conservatism overtook public life, not just in France, but across the whole of Europe. The feeling was that disaster had been only narrowly averted, and that peace and stability could only be maintained by a rigid adherence to the status quo.
Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone Page 6