MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE ALLSTATE ARENA, 3/1
My Chemical Romance front man Gerard Way is the best spokesperson skinny, sensitive white guys have had in mainstream music since Kurt Cobain–he passionately embraces the role of the outcast who got his ass kicked by football players all through high school. But though there were more than a few punks, freaks, and true believers in raccoon makeup scattered around, given the number of meatheads in attendance either the jocks in the class of ’08 have missed the pro-faggot signifiers Way slips into almost every song–the girly giggle in “You Know What They Do to Guys Like Us in Prison” is a prime example–or they’ve decided to ignore them. Two girls in front of me were aghast about a woman they’d seen with a Mohawk, and one wondered aloud how she could do that to herself. And onstage–well, early in their set MCR gave a shout-out to a guy in the pit helping up fallen moshers, but beyond that they hardly showed their roots at all.
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After MCR finished The Black Parade, they retreated backstage and the curtain fell again while the album’s bonus track played over the PA. A couple minutes later the curtain opened on a transformed stage and a transformed band. The keyboard player was gone, and the rest of the guys had exchanged their marching-band outfits for street clothes. The star-flecked amp decorations had been taken down, and in place of the spooky backdrop was one with 16 pistols encircling the word REVENGE. Either as an addendum to their Black Parade set or as an apology to anyone whose patience had been tested by it, they played an encore of nothing but old songs–the cheekily gothic stuff that had earned them their dedicated cult in the first place. After the overwrought theatrics of the main set, it was refreshing. But if it was supposed to make an artistic statement more profound than “We’re out of new material,” I didn’t catch it. Maybe it was just another example of the ever shortening cycle between an event and nostalgia for an event. The encore did sound exactly like Warped Tour ’05–that is, it sounded great. But exactly like at Warped Tour ’05, everybody I was with wanted to leave early to avoid the rush.
