On Shapeshifters

Originally published in SWARM: Answering the Call, November 2023

In 2018, Bruce Springsteen’s one-man Broadway show hit the internet. Gruff and kind, between strums on his acoustic, he describes his early days on the boardwalks of Jersey, a rockstar-superhero origin story for the ages. But despite the confessional atmosphere of the solo stage, he’s not telling truths so much as he is affirming lies: he wants his audience to know that his working-class gravitas were stolen, not earned. Springsteen himself is suburban-born and can barely change a tire. The picture he paints of himself is that of a trickster, a shapeshifter. 

“I come from a town where everything is tinged with just a hint of fraud,” he says with a smirk. “So am I.” 

Born to Run was one of the first records I ever fell in love with. Back when my dad didn’t allow us to play music aloud in the house, I had to settle for whichever of my mom’s CDs I could rip onto my Mp3 player, and Springsteen’s 1975 masterpiece was one of the best. I watched Bruce confess to shapeshifting back in 2018, but deep down, I’d known it for years. Raised on a diet of glam, theatrics, and general stage-strutting, I concluded that the kind of rock and roll that truly spoke to me had to create a suspension of disbelief, the type of good will that lets a funny little boardwalk man camp it up as a blue collar hero and sell it. Importantly, it’s not that we don’t know a performance has occured. It’s that we don’t care. Like a movie screen, the thing in front of us is so big and beautiful we’re swept up in it. Bruce is real. The Boss is real. And it’s all definitely fake.

That type of ambiguity is tough to pull off in the social media age. Most of what we see is being sold to us, and sales are risk-averse and thrive on categories. We don’t follow our idols because we love them; we consume our idols because we are confident that we know what we’re getting from them. Not to say there are never controversies–in fact, outrage is part of the cycle. But deep down, aren’t we also expecting to be disappointed? We can all name musicians who, in the last 10 years, offended or upset us. Harder to identify are ones who have truly surprised us. 

I had all this kicking around in my head when I sat down to write about My Chemical Romance, and in particular when I tried to write about what makes them special. Because here’s the thing: on paper, they aren’t special. Or at least not any more special than all the other genuinely special acts out there, many of whom were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Loving MCR is easy, but if you want to say they’re the greatest band in the world, you have to ignore reality a little.

It was only when I thought back to Springsteen, his admission of fraud, that I realized that reality wasn’t the point. I’m not talking about guilty-pleasure bullshit. If something is bad art, it’s bad art. But I think rock music sometimes gets into bed with bigness and badness in order to attain greatness, and in particular, to create those intangible emotional undercurrents that make our hearts beat fast in a stadium. Mythology. Desire. Devotion. The problem is, the more cynical we become, the more we fracture, fold in on ourselves, subvert the subversions, the harder it is to make that devotion happen organically.  We’ve become, collectively, hard to fool. 

I think MCR understands this intimately. But they figured it out. They got us with this one, this tour. If the SWARM era proves anything, it’s that, while their musical skill is the real deal, MCR’s true talent lies in explosive self-creation at undeniably cynical cultural moments. Without sitting a single interview, without so much as a scrap of clarification–perhaps without a plan at all–they convinced their fans to embrace the mythos they’d meticulously crafted over the years, and then to go along for the ride as they tore it down and became something new. And just when we thought it we’d figured it out–surely this costume, or this performance, or this years-buried reference given new life was the grand finale–they kept pushing until the only thing we were sure of was that nothing was for sure. “We love you, so take a guess,” the band seemed to say, night after night. “But watch out.” 

I saw My Chemical Romance for the second time in Alpharetta, Georgia, 24 hours after being pummeled against the barricade at Riot Fest in Chicago. We’d gasped then, and gasped now as Gerard came into view, visible from a distance on the jumbotron, all slender arms and sweaty hair, so different from the Jackie O garb he’d donned the night before. He tugged down his bright red shirt, regarded the audience from behind bug-eyed glasses.

“I didn’t know who I was for a second, when I got up here,” he breathes.

I grin to myself, because I didn’t, either. 

Thank fuck for shapeshifters. ☼