Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
In a world being overtaken by soulless AI images and summarizations, My Chemical Romance is showing everyone you can still create art beyond the confines of a machine. With every day feeling more insane than the last, we feel we need to ask: is everyone okay? Because the constant onslaught of bad news is understandably wearing everyone out. Every coin has two sides and the flip side means that with every clickbait headline we feel an increasing need to disconnect and find our community outside of our phone screens. My Chemical Romance is helping everyone do just that.
The renowned emo band could have lived off royalties from the 2000s for the rest of their lives and focused solely on their new projects. Instead they decided to breathe new life into their classic album, The Black Parade. Unlike other bands that were mildly interesting two decades ago that have beat the “emo nite” horse into oblivion, My Chemical Romance are professionals, delivering a performance to remember. The entirety of the Lansdowne was a wave of dyed hair, white face paint, and black shirts that made nearby blue collar workers question what was happening. It’s rare to see a band conjure up a fanbase dedicated to looking the part and Fenway Park’s 60,000 person capacity was about to be overtaken.
Pre-show warnings about “MANDATORY FUN” displayed in English and the newly made up Keposhka language. “Remember: you’ve seen nothing” flashed repeatedly after images of dead Draag authority figures were cast on the screen. My Chemical Romance began their theatrical performance not long after the crowd was warned of necessary compliance. The commitment to their world building has no bounds, and they opened the show with the Draag national anthem sung on the B-Stage while the members piled on stage and (literally) clocked into their shift.
The backbone of the show was My Chemical Romance playing their universally acclaimed album The Black Parade in full, but it wasn’t the most interesting part of the show. Between each song we saw His Grand Immortal Dictator and his henchmen judge the band members on their performance and anything but excellence or snide comments led to a swift beating in front of the sold out stadium. Some of these merciless goons who fell out of order were sent to the firing squad on the B-Stage where the audience held up a YEA or NAY to publicly vote on their execution in what feels like a lawless future we might not be far away from. The crowd overwhelmingly voted YEA.
Gerard Way learned mid set through a hidden pamphlet tucked into his state censored reading material that not everything is what he’s been led to believe in the land of Draag. His great awakening gets him executed–but not before firing off missiles by crawling to Frank Iero’s pedalboard. The rest of the band was violently gagged and dragged off stage, crushing the remaining willpower of their resistance. The lights cut and a cello player appeared on the B stage for intermission while the band changed and got ready for an entire second set.
When we said My Chemical Romance is helping people ditch their phones and reconnect with the outside, it’s almost serendipitous that the show in Fenway was under a full moon (the second one of this tour). The experience of hearing live music with 60,000 other people during a lunar event is not a feeling you can replicate through a phone. The second setlist pulled out every hit still left after performing The Black Parade, a slew of Danger Days tracks that finally get airtime post hiatus, and in the words of Gerard Way, “double vampires” before playing “Vampires Will Never Hurt You” and “Vampire Money.” This was all while they played on a circular stage set in the middle of general admissions so even those farther away from the stage could feel included in the night. It was a crowning moment for the band that is over two decades deep into their career. It is proof that creating meaningful art instead of giving in to technological convenience is the key to longevity.
_
Kyle Musser//