The year is 2006, the month, October. On the 23rd, just over a week shy of Halloween, My Chemical Romance dropped The Black Parade and changed my life forever.
The Black Parade is a cinematic aural masterpiece. Right in the middle of my preteen (and ongoing) infatuation with Gerard Way, came this blond-haired, uniform-wearing, four-day-bender-smudged eyeliner angel offering me his sooty hand.
Made up of 13 songs, and a 14th hidden track (only available on specific copies), the album tells the story of the illness, death, and afterlife of a man known only as The Patient.
The Black Parade is undeniably a grim piece of artwork, not obsessed with death, but rather resigned to acknowledging the omnipresence of human mortality. It does, however, offer shimmering moments of human vitality. While wholly a concept album about a dying and dead man, it simultaneously functions as a call to arms for the living; it seethes with life, teems with an almost rabid obsession with staggering on. The boys sing, “I am not afraid to keep on living, I am not afraid to walk this world alone,” in the final track of the album.
We have always used art as a way by which we can grapple with unknowable death, The Black Parade is merely one more shout into that great void. “Awake and unafraid,” we continue, ten years on.
Photo courtesy.