Spinal Tap meets Gen Y

Or is it Z at this point? My youth pastor was unclear.

Now I've never been a big fan of musical comedy. I mean Barenaked Ladies were cool for a bit (yes they were!) because their humour was silly and their music folky, but now they're some rock-pop band that sing about absurd chimpanzees. And then song parodies. Ugh. Worse is a comedian with a guitar and comedy songs! When I see a comedian grab a guitar I immediately have my finger over whatever button will silence his/her tired bit. There are of course exceptions to every rule. Demetri Martin uses a guitar in his act and is consistently hilarious, but he's really punctuating jokes with the guitar rather than composing funny songs.

But My Chemical Romance, they shatter all my preconceptions.

MCR (yes I'm hip) is musical comedy at its best. Instead of trying to make jokes in song, their entire body of work and personas are the joke. Irony is the strangest thing, you can take garbage and bring it up to a level of appreciable quality by simply placing your tongue firmly in cheek. MCR does this to a tee.

I was confused at first with MCR. I'll embarrassingly admit I didn't get it. I just thought they were lousy. But when their sophomore album, The Black Parade, came out I finally "got it." Their video for the title track is what swung me. Watch it not as a pretentious emo video but as a group of self-aware guys making a pretentious emo video. Then you have a comedy masterpiece. The song brilliantly starts off with soft/sad piano music, then after the mention of a "marching band" a snare march beat is added. This all occurs underneath Gerard Way singing about pseudo-christ imagery. Then there's an obvious Queen-stealing ramp-up with Way singing his heart out and finally, at like a minute and a half, we get the fast emo-punk business. And that's just the song. The video has black and white cinematogrophy, circle wipes, futuristic macabre imagery, dramatic slow-motion band performance, and my favourite--hand reaches to the sky.

Of course for this sort of thing to work the acting has to be impeccable. And it is. Not once do I see the ounce of self-awareness that would ruin the entire joke--the only thing you see in Way's eyes are a dude desperately trying to project overwrought emotion. Check out the video for Famous Last Words. This video really features Way's ability. He spends the entire video an inch away from the screen screaming his heart out ("I am not afraid to keep on living / I am not afraid to walk this world alone"), tearing at his face, and smashing his mic stand to the sand. The rest of the band does a great job too, being way too into the music, swinging their guitars around or flipping their hair dramatically as they hit the crash. Also!, there is fire everywhere. It's a metaphor for the fire raging inside their heart sleeves.

Despite what the critics said, MCR really evolved on their second album. They grabbed a hold of their silliness and took it to a new level of pretencion--the concept album. You can't get more pretentious than concept albums. (Okay you can, if you're already a prog-metal band. I'm looking at you Dream Theatre!) And further, it's a concept album about death. You might judge them for being obvious with their choices. Yes it's easy to do a sophomore concept album about death as a ironic emo band, but since when would an emo band not be obvious? These guys have to keep up with actual emo bands, like The Used, that are taking this shit to unprecedented levels of pretentiousness.

Pick up/download their albums and hit up all their videos on youtube. They're full of laughs by some of the smartest comedy musicians of our generation. I'm interested to see where these guys go when this whole emo fad sputters out. I'm hoping for overproduced mega-indie-bands. These guys need to be taken down a few notches.