Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone

by Craig Schuftan

  As long as it was confined to the realm of music and art, Bowie’s philosophy was sound — nobody ever wrote a song like ‘Starman’ by ballot. When he started imagining his art turned into action, the rock star was on shakier moral ground, but Bowie had already decided morality was something he could do without. Now, there was nothing to stop him from making a flat-out admission that he admired fascism. With his highly aesthetic view of the world, the amoral rock star had found in Hitler a political figure he could relate to. ‘Rock stars are fascists too,’ he told Crowe. ‘Adolf Hitler was the first rock star.’

  Twenty years later, AFI showed us what Bowie’s rock-star-as-dictator might look like in their video for ‘Miss Murder’. While recording the song, AFI invited members of their fan community, the Despair Faction, to take part in the sessions. The Despair Faction’s ‘whoa-oh’s and ‘hey’s can be heard in the song’s chorus, suggesting a political rally, and the video expands on this idea. We see Davey Havok, his black fringe combed down over his face, singing in front of what looks like a Nazi rally at Nuremberg. Huge banners hang down in the background, and torches light up the faces of his fans, who raise their arms in salute to their leader.9 ‘Miss Murder’ is disturbing, and arguably in poor taste. But Havok at least deserves points for honesty, for being bold enough to follow the implications of his art to their conclusion. Thousands of people, attuned to his thoughts, singing his words. If this weren’t just a recording studio or a rock concert, if this were the real world, imagine what we could do…

  The Black Parade Is Dead

  FOR MY CHEMICAL Romance, The Black Parade was a conscious attempt to embrace the dynamics of large-scale stadium rock. Gerard Way, as a confirmed Freddie fan, had doubtless watched Queen’s performance at Live Aid many times and wondered — as any performer would — what it would be like to do that. To stand on stage in front of thousands of people and hold every single one of them in the palm of your hand, to have them hanging on every word you sing, every gesture you make. At the famous benefit concert in 1985, Freddie Mercury lead the audience in a vocal warm-up. ‘Ay-o!’ he sang. Seventy-two thousand people sang ‘Ay-o!’ back.1 Mercury went on to sustain this for about ten times as long as anyone would have thought possible, his confidence was supreme, his manipulation of the crowd was breathtaking. Later, he had seventy-two thousand people clapping in unison to Radio Ga Ga — just like the worker drones in the song’s Metropolis-inspired video. Watching it on DVD is a thrill, being there would have been incredible. But to be the singer, to be Freddie Mercury on that day in front of that crowd, would be to feel superhuman, to feel that anything was possible.

  At the Hammersmith Palais, at Mexico’s Palacio de los Deportes, and at the final show of the tour on 9 May 2008 at Madison Square Garden, Gerard Way must have known something of what it was like to be Freddie at Live Aid — to wield that power, to stand in front of tens of thousands of people and have them say, ‘you express us better than we can express ourselves, we surrender to you.’ But Way is not exactly like Freddie. He won’t be satisfied by the knowledge that he’s united his audience in a collective feeling. He wants to take that feeling and do something with it — and not just vocal warm-ups. He wants to make a difference. And on the Black Parade tour it must have felt to him as though this might really happen. He’d created an army — an army that he would have to lead. It was, after all, his unique insight, his extraordinary ability to identify what was wrong with their world and how to make it right, that had brought them together in the first place. Thousands of kids, a secret army of the broken, beaten and damned ready to follow them anywhere, do anything.

  Fascism, as Herbert Read has observed, turns on a subtle combination of sadism and masochism. After any revolution, there is an opportunity for freedom — old institutions have been trashed, the field is open, anything is possible. Ideally, Read says that the outcome of this should be a form of communism — people co-operating with one another to build the kind of world they want to live in. But since this is so difficult to do, in most cases people will settle for the far easier option of being lead. They start looking around for a strong leader. Lo and behold, the people’s masochistic desire to be bossed around finds its ideal companion in the leader, whose sadistic desire to impose his will on others makes him the logical choice.

  The problem, in the case of The Black Parade, is that Gerard Way is not a sadist — he just doesn’t have the stomach for it. The line ‘teenagers scare the living shit out of me’ is only partly delivered in character. It’s also a sincere statement on Gerard’s part, an admission that he realises his audience virtually demands of him that he tell them what to do, and that this terrifies him to his soul. The band aren’t cut out to be sadists either — they can play at being ‘a little shittier to the audience’ as guitarist Ray Toro puts it; but like Roger Waters after the famous spitting incident, they’re too sensitive to keep it up.

  But as Toro later admitted, the Black Parade got out of control. Having set the thing in motion, the band members felt compelled to act out the roles required of them. They’d created a monster, dreamed a comic-book army of the undead into existence. Now, like Frankenstein, they found this thing knocking on their door every night, demanding that its parents recognise their demon offspring. The pressure was intense, the sense of responsibility enormous. Somewhere in South America, Ray Toro said to himself, ‘Fuck, this shit is trying to kill us!’2

  At this point, rock history began to repeat itself. The Black Parade is in many ways a twenty-first century retelling of Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Both are loosely structured concept albums which end with the tragic and symbolic death of the hero. And both required a change of identity for the performers themselves in bringing it to life. The Ziggy Stardust concerts were Ziggy concerts, not Bowie concerts — he played a role on stage, a role that allowed him to be ‘a little shittier to the audience’. For My Chemical Romance it was the same. They didn’t just perform The Black Parade, they became The Black Parade.

  If there was any problem with Ziggy Stardust it was that it worked too well. By presenting the Passion of Ziggy onstage, Bowie created a cult, a religion with devotees who proclaimed the resurrected Ziggy their leader. ‘I began to think he was a new kind of messiah,’ recalled one teenage Bowie fan in 1976. ‘I really thought he had some kind of infinite wisdom.’ ‘Julie’, speaking to Fred and Judy Vermorel for their book of fan fantasies, Starlust, went on. ‘Bowie was magic and he was supreme. He had the qualities of a type of ruler.’3

  Bowie had always perceived these qualities in himself, and would admit to them again in the future. But sometime in 1973 his megalomania had been fatally undermined by his drug use and his low self-esteem. He was too much of a nervous wreck to lead anybody anywhere, and the thought of all those grabbing hands reaching out to him filled him with horror. Life seemed to be imitating art. At this point Bowie realised he’d written an escape clause into his new religion. His fans wanted Ziggy, and he was Ziggy. But since Ziggy was just a character, it would be easy enough for Bowie to kill Ziggy (for real this time) and escape through the back door to live another day. This is exactly what he did at the Hammersmith Odeon on 3 July 1973. ‘Not only is it the last show of the tour,’ he said, looking down at his devotees from the stage, ‘but it’s the last show we’ll ever do.’ ‘Noooooo!’ screamed the kids.4

  Sometime in 2008, the members of My Chemical Romance realised that, just as Bowie had done thirty-five years earlier, they had to kill the monster they’d created — their army of the undead had to die. Onstage at Mexico’s Palacio de los Deportes, Gerard Way roared, ‘the Black Parade…is dead!’5 ‘Noooooo!’ screamed the kids. Then, after playing the last show of the tour, the band packed up their floats and banners and threw Colleen Atwood’s uniforms in the laundry basket; perhaps hoping — like Spider Man ridding himself of the black suit — that the evil fascist impulses that had come over them on tour were somehow contained in its fabric an
d would simply come out in the wash. (Ray Toro’s is still in the garage — ‘I don’t want to bring it into the house!’ he said.) My Chemical Romance looked forward to being an ordinary rock band again, and playing ordinary rock shows in front of relatively small groups of fans. The army of the broken, the beaten and the damned that Gerard had called into existence, which now seemed to be massing its ranks in every city in the world, would have to lead itself.

  To imagine Gerard Way in this moment is to imagine two great romantic heroes in one person. Gerard was both Napoleon Bonaparte declaring himself emperor, and Ludwig van Beethoven, tearing up his manuscript in disgust at his own violation of ‘the rights of man’. The truth was that Gerard — as much as he liked the idea of having his own army — could not be the leader of a mass movement. The cult of leadership is nice for politicians and leaders of military coups, but not much good for people, and no good at all for artists. Leadership implies a mass who must be lead, and a mass denies individuals their right to be solitary. An artist like Gerard can’t accept this, since solitude is what got him the gig in the first place.

  Rivers Cuomo: Emotion recollected in tranquillity.

  Insulation and Disaffection

  IN HIS 1964 book, To Hell With Culture, the English art critic Herbert Read tackled a question which is central to any understanding of romantic poetry — or any other kind of emotional art. That is, Read asked himself: what good is self-expression? By the late twentieth century, the importance of self-expression was almost taken for granted by the artistic avant-garde. Read himself, in one of his many long-running arguments with his friend, the sculptor and typographer Eric Gill, had been bold enough to suggest that it might be the sole purpose of art. But searching himself, Read realised that it didn’t make sense. Artists would not be tolerated in society if they didn’t contribute something useful to it — and what use could society have for self-expression? By simply expressing themselves while everybody else was working, artists would effectively be saying: ‘I am more important than everybody else’. Society should, in theory, have no reason to put up with such behaviour.1

  And yet we can’t quite tell these selfish individuals to get lost. On The Red Album, Rivers Cuomo’s stance is exactly the one described above. In fact, he’s gone further. He insisted that he be allowed to express himself and told us in no uncertain terms that this makes him better than you and me — ‘the greatest man that ever lived’. Then he dared us to look him in the eye and tell him we don’t like it. We have to admit we cannot. How did he get away with this blatantly antisocial self-expression? The story of Pinkerton provides a clue. In 1995, Rivers Cuomo had gone deep into his own emotional world. He came back with an album of pure self-expression, an album so completely driven by the need for self-revelation that, to many listeners, it barely seemed to have songs. It should, in theory, have been as useful to society as a brick thrown out of a window into a crowd. Who would want a thing like that? Surprisingly, quite a lot of people wanted it. Weezer’s difficult second album became, over the next decade, a sort of secret road map with which the lonely and alienated could find one another. It identified something many people had in common — something which was emotional, irrational and deeply disturbing — but instantly familiar to those concerned. Listening to Pinkerton, these individuals began to understand that the strange, unnameable things that nagged at them as they did their jobs or went to school were not delusions, but secret truths. There were others, they realised, who felt alienated from society, who felt like life might be a struggle for which there is no reward, who felt like screaming for no reason at all. Realising this, they no longer felt alone.

  Read would say that what Cuomo did with Pinkerton was to reveal ‘the collective instincts which underlie the brittle surface of convention and normality.’ This kind of thing, he argued, is very, very useful to society. ‘It is the artist’s business,’ he wrote in To Hell With Culture, ‘to make the group aware of its unity, its community.’2 Artists, he reasoned, only think they’re expressing themselves. What they’re in fact doing is expressing life — the secret life of their society. With the artist’s map of this invisible country in their hands, individuals become connected to one another in ways that a society based on money and production can neither predict nor replicate. The alienating effects of modern life are reversed, a fragmented world is put back together again for the length of a song. The artist’s real job, Read insisted, is not self-expression, but life-expression.3

  Having figured out what society could expect from modern artists, Herbert Read next asked himself what modern artists could expect from society, what conditions they required in order to be able to do what they do. In Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and in Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads — two documents which neatly bookend the romantic movement — he discovered the answer. ‘Poetry,’ wrote Wordsworth in 1800, ‘takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ Here, Wordsworth, like Rilke, seemed to be saying that the poet’s insights about the nature of life could only be attained by his remaining at one remove from that life. Therefore the artist’s job description, Read concluded, could be said to be:

  To communicate something as essential as bread, yet to be able to do so only from a position of insulation and disaffection.4

  Rivers Cuomo knows instinctively that this ‘position of insulation and disaffection’ is the first requirement of his work. He created a cure for loneliness by identifying and isolating certain emotional tendencies in certain people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one. But he didn’t find out what those things were by studying demographics or doing surveys or talking to teenagers in focus groups. He didn’t ask his fans what they wanted either (if he had, you can bet they wouldn’t have asked for anything like Pinkerton). In fact, he didn’t really talk to anyone in the period when he was making Weezer’s second album. He discovered the things that would later bind Pinkerton’s community together by studying the lessons of his dreams. And to do that, he had to be alone.

  Cuomo’s art — like Wordsworth’s — comes from emotion recollected in tranquillity. ‘Probably most anyone doesn’t go through a week without getting upset about something,’ he explained to Jenny Eliscu in 2002, ‘and that’s what I do. I wait for those moments, and then I pounce.’5 But while emotions might be a dime a dozen, tranquillity — the contemplative calm required to identify those emotions and catch them before they melt away into the air — is not easy to come by in the modern world. In Los Angeles, it’s almost impossible. But Cuomo has always found a way. Locking himself in the garage, breaking his own leg, taking a vow of celibacy, ‘partying by himself’, blacking out the windows in his apartment — all of these, for the Weezer singer, were simply ways of maintaining the position of insulation and disaffection his job requires.

  The irony in all this for the rock and roll poet is that the isolation he needs to do his job is constantly threatened by the community his poetry has created. As the cult of Pinkerton grew during the late 1990s, the group sought to elect a leader — and naturally they turned to the genius who had made the group aware of its unity. Cuomo ‘expressed the group’, therefore he ought to be at its head. He ought to, at the very least, acknowledge his constituents by tossing them a bone every now and then. But Cuomo did not accept this role. He hadn’t accepted it the first time around, when the success of The Blue Album had required of him that he be the spokesperson for ‘geek-rock’ (whatever that was); and he wouldn’t accept it this time around either. He went to extraordinary lengths to alienate his new fans, to make it clear he would not, under any circumstances, be the godfather of emo.

  Cuomo was not just being perverse. He refused to be a part of the group he’d created because he saw that if he did, his alone-ness would be compromised. But by refusing to give up his solitary status, Cuomo struck a blow for solitude, not just for himself, but for everyone. Because in those moments when a group forms and the group wants to be lead, it’s not just the artist’s indepen
dence that’s at risk, but the independence of his fans as well. Pinkerton created a community of people who did not feel at home in society. It would make no sense to then turn those people into a ‘mass’ — since it was everything ‘mass’ that they revolted against in the first place. They had rejected the world of the average, the reasonable, the world of ‘what’s best for everyone’; and attached themselves to this strange, particular sense of truth that the artist had revealed. Now they were banding together, organising, massing. The world of ‘what’s best for everyone’ would be the logical outcome of this process, the Pinkerton fans would become more like each other. Cuomo, who had already seen this three years earlier — when he’d looked out into the crowd and seen thousands of kids wearing his glasses — could see where things were headed.

  Gerard Way: The saviour of the broken, the beaten and the damned.

  Leave Them Kids Alone.

  BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN HAD the best possible training for a rock and roll poet. Because he was painfully shy and socially awkward as a young man, he went into himself. Here, he found words — floods of words — endless poems about youth, freedom, landscape, faith and love. He thought he was expressing himself, if he thought about it at all. It was only later, when people started to hear those songs, that he understood what he was really doing. Talking to Springsteen in 1999, Mojo’s Mark Hagen remarked, ‘I’ve never been to one of your shows or listened to one of your LPs, without it connecting with something in me I didn’t know I felt.’ Springsteen replied: