[tps_header]
Source: Promo Image
If you were a teenager in the mid-noughties chances are you came across My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade. In fact, chances are you were one of the thousands that catapulted this theatrical band from New Jersey to stratospheric heights.
By the time The Black Parade came around, My Chemical Romance were already figureheads of millennial ’emo’. I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love and Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge built the hype, but The Black Parade was when the band’s popularity peaked. Now ten (yes, ten) years old, we take a look back at what made The Black Parade so revolutionary. [/tps_header]
It took the ‘concept album’ to a new level
The Black Parade is an album deeply engrossed with death. It centers around The Patient: a dying man whose end comes in the form of a parade. Vocalist Gerard Way’s belief that death ultimately appears as an image of a beloved memory birthed this idea. For The Patient, this is summed up best in ‘Welcome To The Black Parade’: “When I was a young boy my father took me into the city to see a marching band.”
But the album never really endeavors to make death seem comforting. The ‘Welcome To The Black Parade’ video might, in theory, be an adaptation of Way’s initial theory, but there’s no escaping the grim, gothic, and dreary backdrop. The Black Parade makes every effort to be merciless and honest, injecting it’s concept into every crevice of the album. The band’s deep preoccupation with death was something not many bands had the guts to explore in 2006. For many of their fans, this honesty was comforting.
The Black Parade is intricate to its very core. The videos, lyrics, live shows and even merchandise of the era proudly carried the base imagery the album was built on.
