It was going to be a preview of the future of ‘mainstream’ rock for those with any desire to witness such a thing. Between the pop punk reformists and revivalists, the nuance-heavy metallers, and steez-clinging oldies like Faith No More and Placebo, the Soundwave festival tour, which begins its national run this weekend, was going to give us a glimpse of what we can expect to see from arena rockers and would-be arena rockers in the coming years. But the one band name that was going to make that happen is now missing from the set times: My Chemical Romance.
The New Jersey band recently announced that their fourth album, due sometime this year, is to turn on the thinking that made them bare their conceptual dreams like a brown-eye and arrange them like drunken musical nudie runs, thus turning on the proverbial light for other bands to prove how giant their own rock-swords were. The Used proved they had a pretty sizeable one; 30 Seconds To Mars probably shouldn’t have revealed theirs. Arena rock’s latest saviours (whether we needed one or not is questionable, though I’ve always had a ‘soft spot’ for MCR) have gone as far as they can, MCR’s Gerard Way has been espousing to the press; Muse having the final word on pompous-arse-being with The Resistance means the only way for their peers to go is in the opposite direction: towards rougher, straighter garage rock sounds.
In a cover story in the NME a couple of weeks back, Way told that the band’s yet untitled fourth record would be a “punk” album. “I think it plugs into the fact that maybe people right now just simply want to have a good time, you know? Maybe they just want to feel free. Maybe they don’t want to rebel,” he said.
And so “punk” would be the gateway to that un-thinking, with new songs like Death Before Disco (viewable in pieces as live clips on YouTube) following the punk’d-up cover of Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row they recorded for Zack Snyder’s Watchmen film adaptation in ‘09. Death Before Disco’s lyrics sum up the ideology: “This ain’t a party!/Get off the dancefloor!/You wanna get down!/I want a gang war!”
While we won’t get to see this new direction onstage this month, and thus won’t get to have an honest debate about how many world-known bands have moved from pop rock towards punk rather than the other way around (can you think of any?), all this talk of leaving once rebellious emotional empathy/sympathy in the past is echoing another happening: that of the “Tea Party” movement, led by the biggest un-thinker of them all, Sarah Palin. (When typing that, I accidentally just wrote ‘of the mall’ instead of ‘of them all’ – and come to think of it, Palin probably wouldn’t be able to see the sail boat, either.)
Palin, working up to her position as a Fox News political analyst (gonna get some balanced analysis there), has been on the media trail riling up conservatives for the upcoming midterm elections for congress and, further ahead, the 2012 presidential campaign. By and large, Palin’s rhetoric has centred on deriding Barack Obama for being educated and emotional, and championed brash action led by ‘the people’, just as the original ‘Boston Tea Party’ did in 1773, when they boarded three ships and dumped the cargo of British-taxed tea that Boston officials had refused to send back to Britain in protest of paying a tax not decided by their own elected representatives.
The “Tea Party” is an anti-party movement with, seemingly, few plans other than to overthrow a government that hasn’t solved their financial problems or appeased their desire for xenophobic attacks. “We need a Commander-In-Chief, not a professor of law,” Palin told a Tea Party convention earlier this month. What she could have said instead was, “Get off the dancefloor! I want a gang war!”
So, where political conservatism is being cloaked in mutiny, could the mutinous, anti-pomp sounds of the newest incarnation of ‘punk’ be the musical equivalent; the soundtrack to rebellion rebellion? Or is it really just sword-swiping dudes zipping their flies back up? Either way, arena rock (and any last attempts at ‘emo’ labelling, though that’s another matter) is again coming to an end and we’ll all just have to get used to looking at Gerard Way with his, and our, pants on.
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