Emo’s Seminal Concept Album: A Retrospective on ‘The Black Parade’

You know how listening to My Chemical Romance has become a measure for how bad your taste is? To many, they’ve become whiny angst personified, immortalized by the black, skeleton-like marching band uniforms from their “Welcome to the Black Parade” music video. But this wasn’t always the case. In 2006, coming off the moderate success of their previous album, “Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge,” My Chemical Romance wanted to record a classic album, something for which they would be remembered. As a result, they wound up taking a lot of influence from Pink Floyd, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Queen—the last of which is most notable throughout the album. They then took the idea of a concept album, made fresh again with Green Day’s “American Idiot” after more or less dying out after the ’70s, and wrote an album about a patient with cancer who finds out he has two weeks to live and proceeds to reflect on his life.

The album, backed by singles like “Welcome to the Black Parade” and “Teenagers,” was a hit, going double platinum in the U.S. and achieving widespread critical acclaim. It was thought to be an immense improvement for a decent but angsty band and that the album would set the stage for similarly great work to come. Of course, critics also said the same thing about Rick Ross’ 2010 album “Teflon Don,” and he’s spent the last six years mired in work ranging from mediocre to horrible. “The Black Parade” gave My Chemical Romance a similar fate; they released another album in a similar style that was a critical flop and disbanded three years later. In the end, critics vastly overestimated how classic this album was.

Despite being a concept album, the narrative of “The Black Parade” is somewhat muddled, with very little consensus on what the actual story is. For example, one could interpret that the first song, “The End.,” features the protagonist dying, and the rest of the album is just a reflection on his life (supported by the sound of the flatlining heart monitor in the outro). Other interpretations are that the story is about a cancer patient seeking meaning.

The album begins with a general prelude before transitioning to the main story with “Dead!”, where the protagonist finds out he has cancer and has two weeks to live. The next few songs revolve around his reconciliation with an ex-lover. Meanwhile, the protagonist grows more anxious, culminating in the best song on the album, “Welcome to the Black Parade”—a sonic vision of death as a parade. The next several songs feature the protagonist ending his relationship with his ex-lover and reconciling with his mother before resigning himself to death.

After “Sleep,” the narrative is hard to follow. It could be that the protagonist dies at the end of “Sleep,” and everything after is just his reflection from the grave. This would make sense given the sequence of the songs. “Sleep” could also be a setup for the narrator thinking about his life before he dies (“Now will it matter after I’m gone?”). However, it is possible to think of the last track, “Famous Last Words,” as an ending that is open to interpretation (read: the protagonist didn’t die). This may be in large part because lead singer Gerard Way wrote the song to help his brother Mikey Way, My Chemical Romance’s bassist, who was dealing with severe anxiety at the time. “Famous Last Words” has a more hopeful tone that does not necessarily fit the rest of the album due to the intent with which it was created; lines like “I am not afraid to keep on living” demonstrate the positivity of the song.

The album itself is incredibly angsty with moments of poignant emotional vulnerability. The songs themselves are for the most part high-quality, affecting, and catchy. It’s a good album that flows well with the sole exception of “Teenagers.” The song is probably the largest issue in terms of the album’s quality—it jarringly follows the most trying moment on the album, in which the protagonist comes to peace with his impending death (“Sleep”), and rants about the way adults treat teenagers. It sounds like it would be clever if it were poking fun at tropes in the emo genre, until you realize that it’s not ironic in the slightest. It’s so whiny that it’s hard to get through without cringing at least once. More importantly, it disrupts the flow of the album because of how overdone it is compared to the songs around it.

Emotionally, too, the album is lacking. An album about a cancer patient has the potential to evoke more than only angst, love, and despair. While these sentiments capture some of what this sort of experience is like, they are fairly limited and more just a product of the emo genre.

“Teenagers,” the lack of emotional range, and the confusing narrative are some of the reasons “The Black Parade” hasn’t been remembered well. The narrative serves to work against the album’s legacy by making the story too confusing to firmly grasp. And while My Chemical Romance was lauded at the time for their bold use of the concept album, “The Black Parade” took them in a direction that wasn’t sustainable.

So was “The Black Parade” a good album? It was a great album that really should have been done by a band that could cover the range of emotions involved in this sort of concept better than My Chemical Romance. As far as concept albums about dying go, The Antlers’ “Hospice” is probably better. While the band’s natural style proved to be its own undoing, “The Black Parade” stands as an excellent but flawed album in its own right.