I'm sorry I was such an obnoxious rockist when I was a kid.
I thought I was a serious musician when I was a kid. Like everyone else at my school, I got shuttled into band in fourth grade, and from the moment I picked up a clarinet for the first time, I was really good at it. My parents got me private lessons, and I made honors bands, got put in the top level of band at my high school (which had one of the best music programs in the area) as a freshman. From there, I started picking up other instruments--guitar, saxophone, bass, mandolin, ukelele--and taking music theory classes. I took wind ensemble and marching band as seriously as I took my little three-piece high school garage band, and because I was a smart white boy, I thought I was hot shit.
This left me open to getting owned.
So when I was 16, a veteran of my school's music program (Paul Oehlers--the own was so bad I'll never forget his name as long as I live) came back to talk to the wind ensemble about research he'd done (I believe for his doctoral dissertation) on the Golden Ratio and musical composition. He'd discovered that if you divide certain songs on the line dictated by the Golden Ratio, you'll find--to use two of his examples--the drum entrance in Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight" or the bridge in Avril Lavigne's "Sk8er Boi," which was all the rage in pop at the time.
And so, sitting in the front row, and with all the confidence of an entitled 16-year-old white boy with just enough education to present a danger to himself and others, I mad a comment about how "In the Air Tonight" was better than "Sk8er Boi." That was my mistake--not "I like it more," but that it's "better."
"Why?" Dr. Oehlers asked.
"Because 'Sk8er Boi' is just four power chords," I said. The subtext being that while "In the Air Tonight" is a classic, "Sk8er Boi" was cheap, commercial and insipid, or worse, for children. Or worse yet, for girls.
To which Dr. Oehlers said, "But so is 'In the Air Tonight,' " and went over to the piano and banged out the four chords that make up that song. It was humiliating, and probably why I couldn't get a girlfriend.
What compelled me to make such a preposterous comment? Rockism. I thought that only a certain kind of popular music--mostly masculine and guitar-driven--was superior to other kinds of popular music. The lines were blurred sometimes, because Brand New was permitted, but Good Charlotte was not. For instance.
And neither was My Chemical Romance, whose album The Black Parade, seemed to me--as a 19-year-old college sophomore working like crazy on my own band's album, later to be titled "My Cellphone Doesn't Get Reception at the Gates of Hell"--as lacking the maturity to back up its own pretension. And so you can see that rockism is not only stupid for blocking off part of the popular musical experience as being not good enough, it's so often catastrophically hypocritical.
You could argue that because of where rockism sets up its goalposts--blues- and punk-derived male-fronted guitar rock--that it also provides cover for racist critiques of rap and R&B, sexist critiques of pop and chick-rock, and classist critiques of country and blues. And it's telling that what rockism is--a nebulous but totally certain assertion of subjective aesthetic certainty--would only occur to the people who are most guilty of perpetrating it.
I am deeply ashamed for having taken part in rockism when I was younger. My youth and naivete are not sufficient excuses to absolve me of guilt, and so I have endeavored to make amends.
Which brings us back to you, My Chemical Romance, to whom this open letter is addressed, and to the song--"Teenagers"--onto which I did not heap sufficient praise when it was new, because I was blinded by my pretentious rockism.
"Teenagers" is at once glib and deeply disturbing, because while it's only one of about 150,000 songs in punk-adjacent idioms to express frustration at not fitting in, as well as contempt for its parents' generation, it co-opts eight-bar blues to do so, in sneering, pitch-perfect parody.
With the first line of the chorus--"Teenagers scare the living shit out of me"--My Chemical Romance sums up the current generational conflict between technology-obsessed, optimistic young people and the people who think that their inability to cope with the future is the future's fault.
And even though "Teenagers" came out before the financial crisis that brought the Millennial Thinkpiece Armageddon upon us, it states the problems and anxieties of being an American born after 1980--which is to say, people who were teenagers then but twentysomethings now--in chilling terms:
"They're gonna clean up your looks
With all the lies in the books
To make a citizen out of you
Because they sleep with a gun
And keep an eye on you, son
So they can watch all the things you do
Because the drugs never work
They're gonna give you a smirk
'Cause they got methods of keeping you clean
They're gonna rip up your heads,
Your aspirations to shreds
Another cog in the murder machine"
Everything this generation has to overcome--parents who pulled up the ladder and blame us for not climbing the wall, violence, late capitalism, depression, hopelessness, war--is in these two verses. It's a nearly perfect piece of political commentary, without being explicitly liberal or conservative, that resonates more and more the further removed we are from its publication. Plus it's catchy as fuck. It could've been our generation's "This Land is Your Land."
But I--and God knows how many others--never gave it that chance, because My Chemical Romance isn't cool. This is to our eternal detriment, and the shame will follow us like a dog, or VD, until we're old enough to have children of our own to demean and scorn.
I'm sorry I was a rockist, My Chemical Romance, because you, and this brilliant song, deserved better.
Love always,
Baumann
