Well researched stuff. "Although you're dead and gone, believe me your memory will go on" seems to be clinching the argument that MCR cause suicide. There is no possible alternative interpretation.

In the meantime, I'll start a campaign to blame Terry Jacks for causing suicides among middle-aged people. "Seasons In The Sun" is obviously a suicide note.

Is your child an 'Emo'? Use the Daily Mail's handy cut out and keep guide to find out!

QUOTE:
Emo fans wear dark clothes, practise self-harm and listen to "suicide cult" rock bands.

The Emo phenomenon began in the U.S. in the 1980s. It is a largely teenage trend and is characterised by depression, self-injury and suicide.

Followers wear tight jeans with studded belts and wristbands. Their hair is dyed black and worn in long fringes to obscure their faces.

If your child does not fit this description, congratulations. You can return to ignoring them and obsessing abuot house prices and immigrants.

Are Panic! At The Disco emo? I like them. Maybe I should tell my mum and dad.

The comments section of that article might surprise a few Mail writers who think their readers will swallow absolutely any old crap. Magnetic bracelets that cure leukemia? Sure. Shitty moping rock music causes suicide in 13 year olds? Getoutofhere.

Having said that, it must be terrible music to listen to if you're genuinely suicidal. I always thought that about Joy Division as well, and the Manics to some extent. Good catharsis if you're just wallowing for a while, and great if you're coping kind-of-OK at the moment, and you need to come to terms with the shit feelings in order to move on, or work something out. Better still as self-expression for the people making the music, listened to in that context. But if I'm really, dangerously low, I'm fucked if I'm going to listen to the most depressing music I can think of... OK, you don't want to stick on "Surfin' USA" or something, but there's plenty of music which acknowleges how shit the world can be and, crucially, meets it head on. Stooges, The Fall, Velvet Underground, loads of rap, loads of metal, even "John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band", which is a horribly self-pitying album, but has a sort of determination and grit about it. All of these also have the advantage of being several thousand times better than any old Emo bollocks. I made my own mistakes with this when I was younger, listening to too many dirges when I shouldn't have, and I'm still faintly bitter - certainly don't think it did me any good, even at the time, and I wasn't even interested in the "fashion" side of it, either. It was never cathartic, in all honesty, it just made me worse. Christ knows what it must be like now, in an even more hostile and alienating world, when you add the legitimising influence of peer pressure, and the fashion imperative.

I'd just hate to get rich by encouraging middle class kids to mope, like that My Chemical Romance bloke (and it always is middle class kids, you don't catch kids off the estates listening to that shit and taking it seriously, because their peers won't tolerate it and the environment doesn't indulge it... and there's something good about that). Not that Mr Chem-Rom should feel any personal responsibility for this horrible story here, of course, but even though he's not killing these kids off, he is encouraging them to utterly waste their youth and priming them very badly for the day when they actually have some real fucking problems to worry about. Seems like exploitation to me. At least there was something vaguely artistic about Joy Div and all that lot.

Worse still, the 13 year olds who aren't killing themselves are shuffling off to doctors, who are happily prescribing them potent brain medication at an extremely vulnerable age. You've got a portion of the audience who aren't depressed but start acting like they are, and a portion who are genuinely depressed and proceed to get worse. Whole thing is a disaster, really. Bands can do what they want, you know, but personally I'd be pretty uncomfortable if I was making a living out of this.

This is pretty close to the whole Judas Priest thing from the other thread, isn't it. Distressing that the Daily Mail think they can push such nonsense.

Her dad is a bit stupid. I don't think many parents would be convinced that slitting your wrists was the way to become some part of a fashion. Crazy.

"and is characterised by depression, self-injury and suicide."

Christ. He's taken Rod Hull's death badly, then.

Brilliant!

Mighty Mudhsuden wrote:

QUOTE:
Are Panic! At The Disco emo? I like them. Maybe I should tell my mum and dad.

Don't bother. They wouldn't understand anyway.

QUOTE:
The Black Parade is a nickname for the place where Emo fans believe they will go when they die.

Is Emo a religion then?

QUOTE:
The Emo phenomenon began in the U.S. in the 1980s. It is a largely teenage trend

Shit! You mean I've grown this fringe out for nothing?

Oh well, as long as we're all unhappy bubbles of anal wind popping and winking in the mortal bath, then of course there's no problem.

Is there any evidence to suggest that suicidal cases are more likely to listen to 'cheerful' music, in an attempt to snap out of it, rather than wallow in their own despair?

No love or respect for Panic! at the Shitsco, but massive respect and love for My Chem Romance.

Maybe something gets lost in translation overseas, but they're Jersey boys through and through and I can guarantee Taylor that not one ounce of cynicism or exploitation is in their act.

The singer's from Belleville, a really rough little shitnugget of a town outside of Newark. He grew up in the shadow of Morrisey, The Cure, Echo & The Bunneymen, etc. He's like any of the kids in drama club growing up, dressed in black and lurking in the shadows of class - not laughing at the lame jokes made by the lame jocks and cheerleaders.

Now in Jersey, there were pockets of whiteboys in every middleclass-wealthy town during the 80s that would dress in black, watch Jim Jarmusch films and write poetry in graveyards while listening to Joy Division.

The thing is they were all wiped out. Poof. Pfft. Gone. Just Like That. Was it grunge ? Was it techno ? Was it video games ? Was it Britney Spears ? Who knows, everyone just disappeared during the 90s.

Just as burnouts and metal-heads and the trailerparks were lost to hiphop, their polar opposite goths (said name for poetry-reciting Joy Division-listening kids) were sacrificed to...no one. They simply ceased to exist.

So this kid is stuck in his basement for the entire 90s, trying to be a comic book artist. He goes to SVA, he draws all day and night in his basement, year after year. Then 9/11 happens in 2001, and he decides he wants to be a singer.

Only he was the last of the goths, stuck in suspended animation, and the only music he knows was the good shit he listnened to in the 80s. He is so driven, that he releases all of his music for free in an effort to see if any of the goths who disappeared were also hibernating.

And then...the Goth signal went up in the sky, but goths now meant those Columbine idiots who took Christian Slater's character in Heathers in the wrong way, so everyone decides that all of these kids have to be called a name.

My point to all of this is that Gerald Way is real as real can get. He's the kids I went to school with. Just like N.E.R.D.s In Search Of was the quisessential music of lower-middle-class kids who grew up in projects next to trailer parks, My Chemical Romance is the quisessential music of white kids who wanted something deeper, something more meaningful, something that spoke to them being excluded from the football team and the in crowd. They're as authentic as it gets.

Excellent post, jv.

I can't see how MCR can be lumped together will all these other "feel-my-pain" assholes (those cunts who wallow in the fungus of Fred Durst's putrid footsteps).