THERE’S A CORPSE IN THIS BED
“Early Sunsets Over Monroeville” is the My Chemical Romance song I play for people who say they don’t like My Chemical Romance. It usually catches these people off guard: whatever they’re expecting, it isn’t this slow-burning contemplation on outrunning and outgunning the undead. Musically, it presents both a respite from the tortured thrashing of I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love and a fascinating but unfulfilled potential path for MCR. It’s more “true emo” than anything else they ever recorded, and I like to imagine that there’s an alternate universe out there in which My Chemical Romance carried the sound of this one song through the rest of their career, instead of mutating into the goth-punk-pop-freakout that came to define them.
“Early Sunsets” is an outlier for MCR not just musically, but also because it’s one of the few straightforward love songs in their catalog. MCR is a seriously emotional band, but for whatever reason love doesn’t pop up all that often in their endless tableau of feelings. You’d have more luck finding an MCR song about lust, or hatred, or jealousy mixed with self-loathing. But love is rare, and even more rare is love conveyed with the gentle sweetness of “Early Sunsets.” The affection in Gerard’s voice is audible, framed by delicate, cyclic guitar patterns that interlock and split apart like creeping vines. At first, the song almost seems like it’s going to be a ballad. But as I’ve mentioned before, MCR was always pushing the boundaries between the familiar and the strange, and behind the initial twinkle of this song lies its darker meaning.
As it stands, “Early Sunsets” tells at least a couple of stories: the musical story of the band that MCR never was, and the textual story contained within the lyrics. Gerard describes a zombie apocalypse with all the luminous detail and emotional drama of an Italian Baroque scene. Abandoned malls, broken escalators, and fountains full of pennies provide a backdrop for this pastoral nightmare, framing Gerard’s growing sense of dread that both he and the one he loves have been claimed by the undead. “I never thought they’d get me here,” he sings, his voice tender and fearful, witnessing the gradual yet terrible trajectory of his fate.
(Pictured: Caravaggio - Judith Beheading Holofernes)
It’s been well-documented that Gerard and Mikey Way grew up on a steady diet of horror movies, and the aesthetics they absorbed from these movies heavily informed the look and theme of MCR’s early career. What’s less examined is how much the Way brothers picked up on the social commentary embedded in the horror classics they loved. Night of the Living Dead is a terrifying tale of a rural town overrun by zombies, but it’s also a scathing look at American racism and the Vietnam war. Its sequel, Dawn of the Dead, the inspiration for “Early Sunsets,” skewers consumerism and mass-produced culture, notably by placing its band of survivors inside a mall. As Ross E. Lockhart writes,
[Director George A.] Romero takes full advantage of the opportunity provided by [the mall] to parody American consumer culture. In fact, much of the film’s black humor derives from “the idea of the dead returning robotically to a mall where they once spent many happy hours,” particularly when coupled with “scenes of the living dead falling into fountains, stumbling on escalators, and clamoring for admission to department stores” (McCarty 119).
Both Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead bathe their highly political messages in buckets of gore, using grisly situations to tell us stories that are all the more terrifying because they are very real. The pop cultural symbol of the zombie is steeped in a long tradition of social critique, particularly related to oppressed groups struggling with power, violence, and conformity.
(Video: Characters from Dawn of the Dead discover the Monroeville Mall)
In “Early Sunsets,” MCR tightens the focus of Dawn of the Dead, shrinking its cast down from a group of humans to two lone survivors. In doing this, the band also shifts the political thrust of their source material. The story Gerard tells with George A. Romero’s imagery is not one of capitalist complacency. Instead, it’s one of an unstoppable disease hitting an isolated community, making intimacy suddenly dangerous. Lovers are forced to watch each other turn to corpses in their beds, yet the people over the mountains - the inhabitants of the outside world - refuse to offer help. “But does anyone notice? But does anyone care?” Gerard asks, his words edged with accusation. “I fought them all off just to hold you close and tight” - does “them” refer to the decaying hordes, or to the people who look on as a place once full of life is torn apart? Push past the luridness that is MCR’s default mode of expression, and you’ll find real pain and real death behind these lyrics, a palpable sense of loss that reaches beyond fiction. The horror story that Gerard tells - intentionally or not - is one that actually happened, and it’s a story that makes a lot of sense coming from a young man who grew up in urban New Jersey and New York during the 80s and 90s.
Things start to get dire towards the end of “Early Sunsets.” The narrative falls away, the guitars get twistier and moodier, and Gerard begins to spiral into ever more frantic despair. He gets trapped in a loop, singing the same lines over and over, louder and louder, pushing his voice until it breaks and turns raw. This is all he can do to stave off the inevitable, to fill up the dead space, to remind himself that he is still alive: keep singing. “These words changing nothing,” he shrieks desperately, but at this point it is no longer about the words - it is about making any kind of noise. It is as if, on some instinctive level, Gerard knows what they say about silence.
(Pictured: Silence = Death)
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