JOIN THE BLACK PARADE:
AN ABRIDGED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Between stretches of horror and flashes of beauty, this was the year I finally dared myself to step to the mic — not as a performer, but a cultural commentator, conversing with my peers and colleagues about music, film, art and how they all connect to that nagging, inconvenient but desperately important concept of identity.
I had fun and learned a great deal from Pop Culture Happy Hour, who gave my 2015 Leslie Odom Jr. interview a second life, then invited me back to hear my thoughts on supervillains, monsters and The First Wives Club. All Things Considered had me sift through the mind-throttling array of 2016 pop albums to find a unified field theory, which I presented to the amazing Audie Cornish on air.
But my favorite thing I worked on this year was a decade in the making, and grew from an idea I couldn’t have imagined sharing before now: namely, I’m a mostly brown person who’s spent his life in mostly white worlds, and over time that has probably had an immeasurable effect on how I think and see myself.
“Join the Black Parade: My Chemical Romance and the Politics of Taste” is an attempt to address that feeling in public, with a landmark album by a very uncool pop-punk band as its fulcrum. The centerpiece is a conversation with Tracy Clayton and Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, two black writer-thinkers who, in their work, are constantly finding ways to evoke the ineffable moments of discomfort and joy that can come from recognizing one’s difference. Appended to it is a short piece of writing, in which I outline as best I can how our conversation came to be.
What I wasn’t able to do back in October when this story ran, however, was throw a bone to folks who read and listened and wanted to know more. So for my last piece of public writing this year, enjoy a brief source list for “Join the Black Parade,” which I hope can serve as entry points to your own revelations on art, media and selfhood. Cheers.
1. “My Chemical Romance Wore Themselves Out, And It Was Glorious” by Brad Nelson. This 2013 essay, written as a sort of eulogy after the band announced its retirement, is so coolly and confidently argued, less a defense than an affirmation. It’s what first allowed me to admit to myself that I was a fan, and start to investigating what I’d missed by hiding that fandom for so long.
[The Atlantic, 2013]
2. “Lone Wolf Like Me” by Carvell Wallace. This interview with TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe is great — casual but professional, a lot of questions rarely asked of this kind of artist. But what takes it above and beyond is its preamble, in which Wallace reveals there’s a little backstory to his and Adebimpe’s relationship, one that unites them at a frustrated intersection of taste and race. Also recommended: “Being a Hipster Is Not Compatible with Being Black.”
[The Pitchfork Review, 2016 — print only]
3. “Ode to Pete Wentz, Ending In Tyler’s Funeral” by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib. Topically it would make more sense to refer you to Hanif’s own Black Parade essay, but I’d rather you experience him as I first did, through his poetry. In verse, pop culture and polemic are often speed bumps, well-meaning markers of currency that thud awkwardly against their surroundings. Hanif’s work takes as a given that there is no part of life unaffected by culture, politics or the laws that govern both.
[Published in The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, Button Poetry, 2016]
4. “100 Awesome Music Videos” blurb by Rob Mitchum. I remember being stunned to find "Helena” on this list, if only because for a time, Pitchfork’s existence seemed to me a collective reaction to the dominance of mass-market acts like MCR. What I didn’t know was that the barometers of indie cool and mainstream sheen were already rocketing toward one another in 2006, and within a few years they’d be near indistinguishable. The tone here is backhanded, but it’s still an endorsement — and it showed me there was a middle ground between ironic detachment and guileless adoration.
[Pitchfork, 2006]
5. “The Slippery Appeal of the Biggest New Band in America” by Jia Tolentino. Twenty One Pilots, another divisive group of makeup-smeared boys rebelling against genre, is unquestionably a spiritual heir of My Chemical Romance. More interesting to me, though, is how both found a kind of success inextricable from context: What 21P accomplished in the past year is a great model for understanding what MCR pulled off in 2006. See also: Jayson Greene’s “Stressed Out” write-up in The New York Times Magazine’s “25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music is going.”
[The New Yorker, 2016]
6. “Your Chemical Romance” by Nitsuh Abebe. Not really about My Chemical Romance either, except in that the band serves as a convenient shorthand for the kind of artist that is beloved by a certain demographic and indecipherable to that group’s parents. The moment that made me stop and literally stroke my chin: “People born during a dip in the birth rate grow up consuming a lot of culture that's aimed at someone older than them. People born during a boom do not do cultural apprenticeship, because everything is quickly aimed at them; they watch the things that appeal to their age group bloom and succeed, whether anyone else is interested in it or not.”
[Pitchfork, 2012]
7. “A Gumbo of Afrofuturism” episode of Another Round. Not the episode of this podcast that hooked me, but the one that demonstrated the extent of its power. I knew literally nothing about featured guest Vann Newkirk II, and left wanting to know everything about him and his work, so breezily appealing was his exchange with Heben and Tracy. Creating an environment this relaxed and having it yield a product this satisfying isn’t luck. It’s work.
[BuzzFeed, 2016]
8. Making the Video: “Famous Last Words.” MCR overachieved with its early music videos, so much so that this masterpiece barely squeaks into the top five. It’s a straightforward performance visual at first glance, and I never thought much of it until Hanif, just moments before we began taping our roundtable, casually dropped some behind-the-scenes knowledge about what it took to get these images on film (which we address in the last few minutes of our conversation). Here, after director Samuel Bayer says “Burn the float,” we get a little glimpse of the moment shit got real on set.
[MTV, 2006]
9. “Anne Arbour” by The Get Up Kids. The emo debate — what qualifies, what doesn’t, whether the label is a point of pride or shame — bores me. There are books about it; go read one if you must. But when you invoke the term, people have a right to ask what you mean, and I always point to this. I’m not calling it canonical or definitive — it’s just where I happened to start. “Mass Pike” was catchier, but this one felt like a codex of power-pop song structure, pinwheeling from ballad to prog jam to chest-thumping anthem. “I still wear your heart around my throat,” Matt Pryor sang, and I was never the same.
[Red Letter Day EP, Vagrant Records, 1999]
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