I was nine when The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance was released. Nineteen years later, I find myself fixated on the ending track, “Famous Last Words.”
The Black Parade is an album about death. The band is known for their storytelling, musing on a concept or a character arc. Some interpret this album as a conversation between Death and The Patient, The Patient and his lover, or a state and its rebels. I’m not overly familiar with most of this lore, but it’s largely agreed that the protagonist is The Patient, on the path to his demise.
The transitions between the songs are seamless, leading into one another without pretense: “The End” starts the album with a beeping heart monitor, “This Is How I Disappear” laments being forgotten, “Welcome to the Black Parade” reminisces, “Disenchanted” reflects, and so on. The lyrics never romanticize death. They emphasize that as much as there’s reprieve, there’s also sadness and loss. An air of regret, a sputtering of unspoken forgiveness.
The album’s culmination in “Famous Last Words” realizes that though this story is about death, it’s just as much about living as well. Death cannot be talked about without the acknowledgement of life and what it means to be alive. In the music video for the song, the band performs like it’s their last chance, as everything burns around them. During their recent concert tour, Long Live The Black Parade, the stage is similarly engulfed in flames.
Viewing the song from the perspective of The Patient, it’s about the acceptance of death, but also the possibility of living again. Whether that possibility comes from rebirth or escaping Death’s grip in his current life, that remains unclear. Regardless of the exact context, the lyrics are an understanding of a life lived, and a promise to live again.
One of the repeating verses is, “I see you lying next to me / With words I thought I'd never speak / Awake and unafraid / Asleep or dead.” The ‘you’ could be Death, signaling an acceptance of The Patient’s fate. But the ‘you’ could also be The Patient himself, and his future life. The unspoken words are an apology, a promise, a plea. It’s a deathbed epiphany that life is not to be wasted—and will not be wasted—even if it is painful.
The Black Parade is a sad, lonely, dark album. “Famous Last Words” was not the song I paid attention to when I was a teenager listening to the album for the first time (that would’ve been, unsurprisingly, “Welcome to the Black Parade”).
Seeing them live for the first time this year, my lasting memory is the sold-out stadium crowd screaming along to the last repeating refrain: “I am not afraid to keep on living / I am not afraid to walk this world alone / Honey, if you stay, I’ll be forgiven / Nothing you can say can stop me from going home.”
That moment felt like a reclamation of life, a mantra to keep existing.
Today, I’m 28. I think last year was hard. It always feels that way lately.
But with The Patient’s promise to live, even as everything burns, so I live.
Some recs:
The Black Parade, My Chemical Romance
“Life & Death: My Chemical Romance and 10 Years of ‘The Black Parade’” by Hanif Abdurraqib
You can read my previous post here: In the Heat of the Summer.
27’s post: Virgo Season Interlude.
26’s post: 26.
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