Standing under the big orange sign of Oracle Park among a mass of spike-adorned, fish-netted, eyeliner’d young adults was like a homecoming.
I became a fan of My Chemical Romance in 2013. My timing could not have been worse, as that year, the band announced its breakup. Still, I loved MCR through my teens and now into my 20s. Like many fans my age, I resigned myself to never seeing them live, living vicariously through blurrily recorded concert footage.
About three years ago, the band’s YouTube channel released a video out of the blue with a list of tour dates at the end, completely breaking my side of the internet. The dramatic, cryptic and gothic video was of a marble statue of The Angel of Death falling to the ground and shattering, ending with tour dates. The six-minute song “The Foundations of Decay” and international tour that followed once COVID-19 restrictions loosened in 2022 also carried similar themes of undeath, rebirth and decay throughout. It commented on the band’s own reunion as a return from the dead with characteristic theatrics to the delight of audiences. All this to say, when they came back two-and-a-half years later with a series of videos set in a world under a Soviet Union-inspired dictatorship to announce a tour based on their most famous album, The Black Parade, the expectations were high. After all, we’ve seen too much of our favorite media get ruined by uninspired remakes; to impress, MCR really had to bring it.
Folks, they absolutely brought it.
Throughout the night, the band electrified the stadium with a 25-song setlist. The concert itself was distinctly divided into two parts: the first half was a musical-esque performance of the entire The Black Parade album, in-character as The Black Parade, a band touring under a USSR-inspired fictional dictatorship. The second half was a journey through the rest of MCR’s discography — plus a Smashing Pumpkins cover — performed out-of-character on a smaller B-stage. The show opened as fog started rolling into the San Francisco Bay; the opera singer character, Marianne, requested that the audience rise for the national anthem of Draag, the name of the fictional nation under dictatorship rule (“Over Fields”). While concept albums and storytelling are nothing new to MCR, this opener established that this show was going to be straight-up theater.
Originally, The Black Parade was a concept album based on a patient with terminal cancer coming to terms with his mortality, with every song representing a different emotional state. The existing narrative format made the album’s adaptation into a whole new story much smoother. Throughout the first half of the night, MCR guides us through the decline and eventual nuclear wipeout of Draag, with lead singer Gerard Way playing a naively loyal but gradually radicalized citizen of Draag.
The show featured several pointed political messages, involving the audience in the commentary through emotions and reactions linked to the songs. “Welcome to the Black Parade,” one of the most famous anthems of the 2000s, is recontextualized as a speech of nationalist fervor, delivered by Way to the crowd on a podium. Surrounding screens projected fake propaganda footage, mimicking old footage of Soviet speeches. If there was a song to unify a crowd at an MCR concert, it’s this one. This recontextualization asks the audience to reflect on our own role as both spectators and participants in an increasingly authoritarian and decreasingly democratic state, and how easily nationalism can obscure the degradation of democracy until it’s too late.
The song hypes up the audience for a scene where four elected officials and dissenters of the Dictator are marched onto stage with sacks over their heads and executed. The band asks the audience to vote with signs handed out before the show on whether to “keep them in office” or not — rather, to shoot or not to shoot the four prisoners. Their crime? Questioning the longevity of the “Grand Immortal Dictator.” In the previous Seattle show, the crowd had voted them out, and all the hostages were “shot” by pop-up soldier silhouettes. Way humorously quipped that he “misspoke” in Seattle, and that he had meant to say “execution” rather than “election.” In San Francisco, the crowd primarily voted “yay” to keep them alive, and Way relented before receiving a phone call from higher-ups ordering the execution to happen anyway. All the hostages are inevitably shot in the end. The execution serves as a turning point for both the band in-character and the audience as they realize the farce of the vote.
Asking the audience to vote for the execution of strangers under the guise of democracy sent a clear message that is uncomfortably relevant in today’s increasingly authoritarian United States. It doesn’t actually matter what the audience votes. In a state with a sole figure of power, he makes the final call on life and death and backs it with military force. Against the real-life backdrop of Immigration and Customs Enforcement sending Black and Brown individuals back to places they were trying to seek asylum from, the massive cuts to life-saving public services like Medicaid or the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the systematic replacement of leadership with the current administration’s yes-men, the display definitely hit closer to home than it should have.
Throughout the show, a pinstriped man, implied to be the band’s manager or the Dictator’s handler, periodically came on stage to hand Way paper scripts to read, which he did with growing reluctance. The script before “Cancer” was the first time Way refused to read it, and the man immediately slapped him for insubordination. The paper turned out to be an ad for some kind of foodstuff/alternative medicine, which Way delivers with the enthusiasm of someone intimately aware that they’re being held at gunpoint.
The placement of the advert felt especially pertinent when contrasted with the themes and musical tone of the following song, “Cancer,” which is about a cancer patient’s last requests to their loved ones, one of the most sorrowful of MCR’s discography. The advert for a weird state-sponsored alternative medicine also felt deliberate, given the subject of the song. Here, the band is commenting on the ways that authoritarians manipulate the fear of death by promising a solution. Beyond being a fitting emotional low point in the story, listeners often interpret “Cancer” in a more metaphorical way about coping with decline and endings in general. In the context of this performance, Draag is a body dying from within, and the song is a lament from a citizen of a doomed nation. However, despite the decay all around, a facade of strength must be kept up, much like the patient in the song.
After “Cancer”, the stage darkened, with a mournful violin solo opening the next segment of the concert. “Mama” was the high point of the night — the pyrotechnics were scalding enough to be felt from my seat, and Frank Iero’s and Ray Toro’s guitar tracks combined with Way’s metal screaming created an appropriately hellish and off-balance atmosphere. This live version of “Mama” also included an additional verse, reminiscent of a nursery rhyme, which detailed the band’s plan to assassinate the Dictator with a dagger. “Mama” — accompanied in concert by guitar distortion and a general air of unease in a minor key — is about the panic, resignation and regret of a soldier who knows that they’re likely going to hell for the things they did in service of apathetic leaders. The role of “Mother War,” who sings “and if you would call me your sweetheart / I’d maybe then sing you a song,” was filled by Marianne, the operatic representative of Draag. It’s easy to see exactly where this song fits within the narrative of the show.
The Black Parade’s final song, “Famous Last Words,” was sung as flame and smoke engulfed the stage. As the song ended and a red countdown timer illuminated the stage, the guitars and bass mimicked air raid sirens following the earlier launch of missiles by Draag during “Sleep.” The band ended the story with a reprise of the first song of the album, “The End,” against a backdrop of explosions. This time, a clown from the original Black Parade joined the band on stage and stabbed Way in the finale notes, leaving him to crawl to a pre-marked white body outline on the ground. All the while, Draag soldiers kidnapped the rest of the band off stage, putting bags over their heads, much like the earlier execution.
“Blood,” a hidden encore track on the album, provided the most thought-provoking segment of the show. Following the kidnapping and implied death of The Black Parade, the clown came back to the stage, dancing around to the rhythmic tune and eventually revealed a suicide bomber vest. At the end of the song, he “blew himself up” on stage with sparklers igniting out of the vest. Alongside other songs on the album like “Teenagers” and “Disenchanted,” “Blood” takes on an anti-militarism theme, sung from the perspective of someone who gave gallons of blood for a cause with no returns. The band seems to be commenting on the role disillusionment plays in political radicalization and the inevitability of dictatorships to inspire political violence against the regime. While the rest of the show felt like an exaggerated commentary on the present, the last segment of the show was a chilling prediction of the future if authoritarianism and fascism continue to spread across the globe.
If the first half of the concert was a focused and involved story, the second half felt like a joyous afterparty that showed off MCR’s full creative and technical range. After a surprisingly short intermission played by cellist Clarice Jensen, the band entered a smaller stage on the floor as “My Chemical Romance, from New Jersey.” The B-stage setlist featured songs from their second and fourth albums, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge and Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, alongside “Boy Division” from an EP series and a cover of “Bullet With Butterfly Wings.”
The older songs like “Thank You for the Venom” and “Boy Division” have more hardcore elements in its crying guitar lines and rapid thumping bass, giving Toro and bassist Mikey Way the opportunity to flex. The “Venom” opening has a particularly impressive guitar riff that kicked the second part of the concert off with a high-energy start after intermission.
For fans of 90s rock, the cover of “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” was a welcome surprise. The Smashing Pumpkins was an early influence for MCR, reflected in Way’s vocals being very reminiscent of lead singer Billy Corgan’s. I was happy to see pockets of moshing on the floor throughout the show, but it felt especially apropos during this cover as a tribute to the ’90s band.
MCR also played some of their more obscure discography among more popular songs like “Helena” and “Na Na Na,” further setting their concert apart from criticism of bands that play nostalgia tours of only hits. The aforementioned “Boy Division” was met with massive enthusiasm from the more dedicated fans, and “Summertime,” a song that was heavily criticized for departing from their doom, gloom and blood branding, was a personal delight for me. In a music and rock atmosphere that increasingly encourages mass appeal, this was a reassurance to long-term fans that the band and the tour still kept them in mind, despite a more lukewarm reception than their bigger hits.
It’s rare to live up to astronomically high expectations and rarer still to absolutely smash them. I can say without a doubt that “Long Live the Black Parade” was the best concert I’ve been to. Rather than a nostalgia tour, it was its own experience and piece of art, crafted with purpose and poignancy. Given that I can’t cover the entire setlist here, I heavily encourage finding a recording online to watch at least the first half on your own. MCR is extremely versed in metacommentary, continuing their narratives through small changes between the Seattle and San Francisco shows. Having written this right after San Francisco, there’s still much to see in terms of how the messaging and events may change as the tour progresses. Among the Shein-ification of alternative subcultures and the corporatization of the rock genre, My Chemical Romance demonstrated their undying dedication towards the evocative and bold.
Daily Arts Writer Lin Yang can be reached at yanglinj@umich.edu.
