Monday Melodies: My Chemical Romance – “Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys” (2010)

Nowadays when you think of Gerard Way, you think of a comic book artist. He has always been one, but it feels abundantly clear in a time where his “The Umbrella Academy” series has been adapted to Netflix and become (allegedly) one of the most popular shows on the streaming service. You get a lot of the pop art sensibility mixing with the stories of outcasts looking to belong. It’s a theme that has informed all of his work going back to the beginning, but here is presented in his own quasi-X-Men-style world where a guy can wear a giant cartoon bear head and not look out of place.

While I haven’t been keeping as much up to date with his comic book adventures, I do always find myself enthused when I hear that he’s had some success. To get the true answer, you’ll have to go back about 15 years, when I was in high school. It’s strange to think that ambitious rock bands would stand a chance on the radio, but there was Green Day bringing back the concept album with “American Idiot,” or Fall Out Boy pushing the word count limits of a song title on “From Under the Cork Tree.” It could largely be nostalgia, but it was bands like these that made everything that we knew into an art project.

Then there was My Chemical Romance. If you thought that the accomplishment of the other bands was impressive, then wait until you listen to “Welcome to the Black Parade”: a concept album about death that managed to feature Liza Minnelli. To most audiences, this was the peak of their powers, where they evolved from whatever emo tag they had been labeled and were preparing for an arena-rock approach not unlike Queen. You heard it in the guitars or the way that everything just sounded loud. I would go so far as to say it’s one of the most 2000s records ever made, especially since half of the lyrics turned into Myspace names anyways. 

But then there’s “Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys.” If you thought that “Welcome to the Black Parade” was a high concept, then you haven’t listened to this album. Everything that made the 2006 predecessor great was contained within those tracks. There was no need to consume other media in order to appreciate the bigger picture. Much like Way’s comic book career later, he painted a picture within the frame that was dazzling, leaving you entertained and even fulfilled.

Then again, there is often a trend especially in pop-punk where the bigger your sound gets, the more that you just want to rip everything apart and return to your core. I think especially of Green Day following their second concept album “21st Century Breakdown” with “Uno!” Trying to make everything bigger is the equivalent of filling up a balloon. At some point, it’s just going to pop and you’re going to be left creatively unfulfilled, isolated from the audience who helped make you legends.

That is why “Danger Days” is arguably their most brilliant album that they ever released. It may not come across as their most personal, their lyrics not quite pulling from the levels of despair and anguish that their previous work did. However, it found the band entering the 2010s with a loud, triumphant bang. Where Green Day would abandon the concept album entirely, My Chemical Romance simply tweaked it into something new, more chaotic. They wanted to find a way to recall what it was to be a rock band, playing loud and fast without care for high-level orchestration. 

I can’t exactly explain why I didn’t love “Danger Days” when it first came out. In 2010, I was 21 and wasn’t as indebted to music as I used to be. I remember listening to this album soon after its release, but I wasn’t able to appreciate what it was achieving in its swirl of creative madness. Maybe I was just tired of hearing “SING” on the radio (though I can't not hear him sing "sing it from the heart/sing it to your nuts"). I can’t really answer. However, listening to it again for the first time in a little over nine years, I found myself fascinated by every song, packed with so much vibrant detail and personality that this wasn’t the mope-rock sound I knew, but something more antagonistic and playful. 

I could spend the rest of this simply breaking down every song and discussing how “Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)” may be one of the greatest rock singles of the decade. However, that would be of great disservice to the bigger picture. This isn’t just an album full of songs. It’s one telling a complete story. Much like Nine Inch Nails a few years prior with “Year Zero,” this was rock’s move into exploring the post-apocalyptic theme. The major difference was that My Chemical Romance was going to have fun on its corpse.

As in keeping with the previous albums, Gerard Way did the art design for the album. He was also working on a comic at the time that evolved into The Killjoys. The title “Danger Days” was in reference to how he perceived the band’s relationship with their fans. From there it became layered with a whole series of self-mythologizing elements. To quote Wikipedia:

The album follows the group as they fight against the evil corporation Better Living Industries (BL/ind.) and its various "Draculoids" and exterminators, such as Korse from the S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W Unit.

While a comic book series would follow, the album marked a shift in the band’s sound and image, moving away from the operatic and into something more reminiscent of dystopian works like Mad Max: Fury Road (2014), but covered in dayglow. Their sound was also moving more towards psychedelic and protopunk. It revived the group and made them something more exciting and vital. 

From the moment that they launched the promotional video “Art is a Weapon,” there was an understanding that things weren’t going to be the same. They were going to have goofy imagery like motorcycles and ray guns running around in the desert. While there was still this emotional complexity to their sound, their style was going to turn into a comic that Way would become known for in the years following their break-up. The fact that they even got comic book writer Grant Morrison on board with the project showed how bizarre this vision would become.

The album itself sounds like it’s coming from a radio signal. It’s all presented by “DJ Dr. Death Defying” (voiced by Steve Montano of Mindless Self-Indulgence) and presents the audience into this world in a palatable way. If you look closely, you’ll see the story unfold over the course of the album, especially as the rebellious Killjoys take on S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W and restore order to their journey. There’s time for a traffic report, and the penultimate song “Goodnite, Dr. Death” plays like a radio signal coming to an end as the national anthem plays. 

This is their most anarchic album, and it’s easy to see why Way claims that it helped save the band’s career. This was especially true of “Na Na Na,” which wasn’t intended to be a single at first but eventually became one after positive reception. Then again, it’s the last possible song that you’d expect from them following “Welcome to the Black Parade.” It was bawdy, fast, and a staple for movie trailers from the early 2010s featuring bad boys. After all, their last album had a cohesion where every line had this deeper meaning. To have a flippant phrase servicing more as harmony to lay out the welcome mat for “Danger Days” is quite exciting.

The anti-consumerism song also has some of their most creative and provocative lyrics in their career. It’s hard not to get pumped up hearing them have such a sadistic use of wordplay where you can “blow an artery.” Of course, there’s this masterful exchange:

Oh, let me tell you about the sad man
Shut up and let me see your jazz hands
Remember when you were a madman
Thought you was Batman and hit the party with a gas can

It may mean nothing. It could mean everything, but with that extra interior rhyme, it showed just how stealthy the lyrics would be. This was an album designed to have fun, taking the listener on a journey through this wasteland of 2019, where rebels took on corporations and brought with them this new sound. It’s full of wit and urgency that the band was known for. Better yet, it was jam-packed with several great songs, whether it be the energetic “Planetary (Go!)” or their first adult contemporary hit “SING,” which was popular enough to be covered on Glee. Other songs would be featured everywhere from Super Bowl advertisements to video games and even the WWE. For a minute, music was about to get a whole lot more interesting.

Meanwhile, the music videos borrowed a page from “American Idiot” and made their videos tell a singular story. It’s here that everything begins to click, especially when looking at the marketing around it. Usually, when you release an album, there is a scant amount of reason to look into the artwork, but here you saw an extension that was majestic. We saw every band member get their own fictional biography for their characters. Their names were equally crazy: Party Poison, Jet-Star, Fun Ghoul, and The Kobra Kid. Their wardrobe often featured colorful, 80s-style b-movie designs that included motorcycle helmets flashing the phrase “Good Luck.” In other places, they were creating a madcap sense of violence that wasn’t like anything else in the music sphere.

Unfortunately, it was equally the end of an era. While they had success with The World Contamination Tour, the band was only a few years off from a hiatus that lasted up until the real 2019. Many began to see the song “The Kids From Yesterday” as a song alluding to their own demise. It would be, especially considering that it seems unlikely now that a band like My Chemical Romance could release an album like “Danger Days” and sell a million copies in its first year. It would be too weird to have a fast and loose high concept album like this tearing apart the radio.

This may not be their most nuanced album, at least lyrically, but what it presented was the band in their true form. Way was always an artist who mostly started the band to cope with his own experiences with depression and addiction. By allowing himself to not revel in just writing the same sad song over and over, he managed to grow into something more personable. There was an outreach of optimism that grew with every song, asking the weirdos who loved them to follow their own dreams. For Way, that was making comic books and using its artistry to make music into something more conceptual and fun. 

There is a lot that can be explored with “Danger Days,” which isn’t even including a look into The Killjoys comics that proceeded this. Much like Angels & Airwaves, it’s the type of music that rewards a deeper commitment, even if there’s a lot that is inherently goofy about it. There’s even an EP called “The Mad Gear and Missile Kid” which focused on the music that The Killjoys probably would’ve listened to. This world is so realized that you’d think this was a different band. Who would put so much time and effort into not only making one of the catchiest records of 2010 but one of the most involved iconographies for a Top 40 band of the time? 

It’s the type of work that obviously separates egos and likely is responsible for the band breaking up. Still, you can’t help but love the decision to have characters like DJ Dr. Death Defying narrate an album that features song titles like “Jet-Star and the Koba Kid/Traffic Report” or “Party Poison,” or have the closer be a big middle finger to the Twilight (2009) franchise – which feels ironic given that My Chemical Romance wasn’t above having “The Only Hope For Me Is You” featured in Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011).

Part of me wants to believe that a band like this would exist in 2020, whose constant reinvention parallels David Bowie or Madonna to reflect the different periods of a person’s life. I know that we have Lady Gaga, but in the world of rock, it’s something that is largely abandoned. We’re living in an era where everything needs to be bite-sized and direct. In that way “Na Na Na” is perfect. However, it sounds nothing like Imagine Dragons or Mumford & Sons. It’s too loud and angry. For a creative project that made great bold decisions, the only thing that I wish they predicted was that music in 2019 had this abstract imagery to project their own deeper messages into. I don’t know if all of “Danger Days” makes sense, but it’s an essential injection for anyone wanting to see the best creative way to evolve your image over time.