I was listening to Spotify’s Emo Forever playlist, partly to celebrate MCR’s impending return and partly out of pure nostalgia. There’s a lot of good music on there, and the emo era produced a lot of great bands and singles. But something struck me about the content: a good many of the songs included were love songs.
This really isn’t surprising, honestly—probably at least 75 percent of all music produced is about romantic love. I’m not sure how religious songs and hymns would affect that statistic I just pulled out of thin air, so we’ll stick with non-religious music for now. Suffice it to say, romantic love is a popular song topic. It’s been popular in every era and genre—cue up any All Out [Insert Decade Here] playlist on Spotify and love songs will dominate—and emo music is no exception. From early hits about lost love (All-American Rejects’ “Swing Swing”) to peak emo ballads about enforced separation (Paramore’s “crushcrushcrush” or We The Kings’ “Check Yes Juliet”) it’s clear romance was on the minds of many emo bands.
They did write songs about romance, don’t get me wrong. It’s hard to argue that “I Don’t Love You” or “The Ghost of You” are about anything but. And yet they’re not really love songs. “I Don’t Love You” puts the spotlight on a troubled and unhealthy relationship (though whether there’s hope for reconciliation is up for interpretation) while “The Ghost of You” takes us deep into the heartbreak of someone who has lost their partner. Even their more straightforwardly romantic songs contain cracks in that sweet and shiny veneer; “I’ve got a bulletproof heart, you’ve got a hollow-point smile” hints at defensiveness that’s come up against the one person able to crack it in a world demanding you live for the moment because you might not get too many more of them.
But those songs are just blips on the radar. MCR’s real interest lay in other aspects of the human experience—the darker aspects, yes, but often not related to romance. The Black Parade gives us “I Don’t Love You,” but it’s presented alongside songs about self-loathing (“Dead!”, “House of Wolves”) self-destruction and destructive relationships (“The Sharpest Lives”) war (“Mama”) PTSD (“Sleep”) death (“Cancer”) fear that the next generation will self-destruct (“Teenagers”) nihilistic despair (“Disenchanted”) and—finally—acknowledgment that with all its pain and horror and heartache, life is worth continuing (“Famous Last Words”). Even on Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, where two lovers are shot to death and one returns for vengeance, romance takes a backseat to the all-consuming fury of the main character.
And honestly, I think that’s part of why My Chemical Romance is rightly considered a musical legend.
That isn’t to say I don’t like romance in my fiction, or that I think all stories would work better without it. I love romance, when it’s done well. Big Eden is, at its core, a queer romantic dramedy, and it’s one of my favorite movies. The romances between Klaus and Dave and Hazel and Agnes were high points of the first season of The Umbrella Academy for me. I’m not opposed to romance, and I’m not opposed to a focus on it.
But there’s so much more to life than just romance, and there’s so much more to MCR’s music than romantic songs, tragic or no. Hell, one of their most tragic love songs, “The Light Behind Your Eyes” is about a love that’s completely platonic (“So long to all my friends/Every one of them met tragic ends”). MCR didn’t just write songs about love, or lost love, or unrequited love. They wrote songs about life. They wrote about the darkest aspects of life, the darkest moments of being, and they turned those moments into something magnificent and stark and life-affirming.
The emo era gave us a lot of great songs, and a lot of fantastic bands. But many of them were just that—bands. My Chemical Romance was a phenomenon.
There’s a reason for that.
