Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone

by Craig Schuftan

  I am certain that underground people like me must be kept in check. Though we may be capable of sitting underground for forty years without saying a word, if we do come out into the world and burst out, we will talk and talk and talk…7

  Morrissey has always suspected as much. The Smiths’ 1987 single, ‘Shoplifters of the World Unite’, is a paean to human happiness in one of its most irrational manifestations, and a call to arms for the malcontents of modern society. The shoplifter just has this thing he likes doing — it hurts no-one, but because he stands in the way of money being made, the government says he must be stopped. This is the same government, he notes, that is busy figuring out how to put more missiles in space so as to be able to kill a few more million people in some future war. And they call him a criminal! His self-righteous proclamations are interrupted, he feels a ‘heartless hand’ on his shoulder, his happy dream shatters at the same moment as the alabaster vase he was busy lifting. The state tries to rehabilitate him, to teach him to accept a reasonable amount of happiness. ‘I was bored before I even began,’ sighs the singer.8 He’s not satisfied with what he’s been offered — and he knows he’s not the only one.

  The Broken, the Beaten and the Damned

  THE SMITHS’ albums were to the solitary young romantics of the 1980s what The Sorrows of Young Werther was to those of the 1780s — a friend to the friendless. In America they sustained many a lonely soul through the materialist wasteland of the late ’80s. And long after the band had broken up, The Smiths continued to speak for those who weren’t being spoken for elsewhere. By the ’90s, ‘alternative’ music was everywhere, and misery, alienation and disaffected rage flooded the radio and the mall in ways that would have seemed unthinkable five years earlier. Paradoxically the orgy of self-congratulation that surrounded Lollapalooza and the mainstream success of Nirvana alienated the very people alternative music was supposed to represent.

  The lonely and disaffected fled the suddenly exposed world of alterna-rock like vampires caught in a searchlight. They sought out the more rarefied pleasures of Pinkerton or Diary, hit ‘play’ on their copy of Siamese Dream for the hundredth time or turned — as Gerard Way did — to The Smiths. For a kid who wears black and feels different to everyone else, a song like The Smiths’ ‘Unloveable’ is a way of explaining yourself to yourself and maybe, one day, to the world that doesn’t understand you. ‘I wear black on the outside because black is how I feel on the inside,’ sings Morrissey, ‘and if I seem a little strange — well, that’s because I am.’1 For Way, Morrissey was more than just a human voice in an inhuman world, he was an inspiration — one of a few guiding lights he would later follow when he started a band of his own.

  I’ve always seen My Chemical Romance as the band that would have represented who me and my friends were in high school, and the band that we didn’t have to represent us — the kids that wore black — back then.2

  My Chemical Romance would take up Morrissey’s plea for acceptance and turn it into a battle cry. In ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’, the singer sees that, like himself, the kids who wear black are threatened on all sides by behaviourists and rationalists who are determined to rid them of their irrational desires for the sake of the greater good. The singer, still haunted by his father’s words — ‘will you be the saviour of the broken, the beaten and the damned’ — and determined to make good on his promise, leaps into the fray. ‘Let’s paint it black and take it back!’ he shouts.

  Gerard Way’s heroes — Morrissey, Robert Smith and Billy Corgan — all expressed dissatisfaction with modern life. But their protests mostly took on the form of a hunger strike — the singer would suffer publicly until the world recognised his needs. Unfortunately, outside the proscribed limits of indie rock, the world takes no notice of this kind of thing. So the singer in ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ has decided to try something new. He has decided to do the one thing the world will not expect from a gloomy young man with a sensitive temperament — to form an army and start marching. This, he has realised, is the only language the world understands. Pretty soon, he has a ragtag mob of fellow revolutionaries, an army of loners which he leads, Napoleon-like, to the gates of civilisation.

  The word ‘cult’ was often used by music journalists to describe the bands Gerard loved in high school. Singers that speak for those who don’t have a voice tend to attract committed followers, and sometimes slavish imitators. By standing up and saying ‘I don’t feel like everyone else’, Morrissey and Robert Smith became role models for anybody who ever felt like they weren’t like everybody else. And since this was the task Gerard Way set himself — to speak for those who are not like others — it was inevitable that My Chemical Romance would attract its own legion of devotees.

  But Gerard was never comfortable with the word cult — not because of its religious or pagan overtones, but because it seemed offensively small-minded. Cults meet in secret, communicate in code and die tragically in mass suicides. Gerard Way had a world to change, and he refused to see his fans’ energy and ambition curtailed by a word. ‘You should all know,’ he told his audience from the stage in 2006, ‘if you support us…you are not a cult; you are a fuckin’ ARMY!’3

  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’re gonna clean up your looks

  with all the lies in the books,

  to make a citizen out of you1

  ‘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 w
ill 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 sheri
ff; 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’.

  Gerard Way: Making a difference.

  I’ve Gotta Get Out of the Basement!

  IN AN INTERVIEW conducted shortly after the release of Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge the members of My Chemical Romance were asked about their goals as a band and whether they felt they had met them. Frank Iero had a detailed answer ready to go.

  When we started this band we set mini goals and then we had our ultimate goal… We met all our smaller goals…we’ve been able to reach an exorbitant amount of kids that we never thought we would reach. Our major goal was to make a difference, and I think we are on our way to that goal.1

  In the mythical universe of The Black Parade, this goal was entrusted to My Chemical Romance on that fateful day when the singer’s father took him to see the marching band. In the real world, the story gets a little more complicated. Gerard Way spent his formative years locked away in his bedroom, living in a make-believe world of comic book superheroes and Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Later, he discovered music — his first concert was Springsteen in New Jersey, followed by those other local heroes, Bon Jovi. As high school wore on, he moved on to darker, heavier stuff: The Smiths, The Cure, and other bands who spoke for the loners and losers. Way remembers making the hour-long round trip from his parents’ house in Belleville, New Jersey, to the nearest mall to buy The Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream on the day it came out.2