Dear readers, we’re very pleased to kick off 2020MG’s monthly guest issue with a piece by our friend, Brittany Spanos.
Brittany Spanos is a Brooklyn-based pop music journalist who writes the newsletter BRIT POP on Substack. She has written profiles for Rolling Stone, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Nylon and more.
My Chemical Romance - “The Jetset Life Is Gonna Kill You”
I’ve been thinking about my younger self. I picture how naive, wholesome and sheltered she was and feel protective and reverent. At a recent My Chemical Romance show, I could almost see her in front of me, an opportunity she would’ve loved but never had the chance to witness in the heyday of her fandom.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve considered how nostalgia can be a trap. There’s a cynical cycle of believing that art was better in a bygone era, and while I’ve been careful to not fall prey to the notion I still wonder how much I’m skirting the edge when I slip into a former self. But as I watched a band I adored when I was a pre-teen recreate their former selves on stage, slipping into the dystopian theatrics of The Black Parade, I felt a deep connection to how detached the present day band is from their own former selves.
Returning to the band’s breakthrough album Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge in recent weeks reminded me of how anachronistic the music already was for my life when I listened to it. I was a deeply wholesome, rule-following child living in pink and purple bedrooms who quickly replaced the unicorn posters on the wall with those of eyeliner-wearing rock stars at the dawn of puberty. My life was sweet and easy by extreme standards but there was an escapism in the pop-goth archetypes and songs by tortured, depressed white guys whose post-punk and new wave heroes I would come to love on my own terms in high school.
The song I loved the most was “The Jetset Life Is Gonna Kill You,” a western-inflected, cha-cha riff with a rollicking drum beat that explodes into Hot Topic fury on the chorus as Gerard Way sings about his struggles with his addiction. It’s funny to recall the romance I projected on the lyrics, a metaphorical love story that now reads so literal. I’ve been wondering if the words I would scream along to in cars and friends’ basements meant anything to me then and why I felt so connected to them then. But when the adrenaline rush I still feel from the song kicks in, provoked by the sense memory still attached to it, questioning the why feels just as funny.