"My Chemical Romance is this generation's Nirvana"

Completely true and OTM, but then someone says something like this --

some dumbass group that does not cut the mustard just like the rest of 'em, not

-- which doesn't fly for me. The issue isn't this group in particular; it's a lot of groups like this, and the fact that they're actual formative favorite-band material for lots of kids. It's a whole musical worldview and grounding that a sizeable number of people are going to have. Casting any one band as not-cutting-mustard is fair enough and often accurate, but insufficient to really understand the gaps between those different musical worldviews.

"MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE
Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge
(Warner Bros.)

Now that after-school programs and arts funding are being excised from our public schools thanks to the Bush tax cut and the states' subsequent budget rejiggering, music has become the latchkey baby-sitter, educator, and supporter of our world-weary teens. Guess what, Mom and Pop, you'd best be keeping tabs on your children's favorite bands, since they'll likely have as big an effect on the kids' worldview as you will. And if your kids have any sort of taste, New Jersey newcomers My Chemical Romance's "I'm Not Okay (I Promise)" rocks their Discmans regularly. The MTV-ready single—featuring a playful, Rushmore-lite video—puts some pump in the slump of many a tragi-lescent with its peppy, let's-group-hug-the-pain-away chorus and all-inclusive sentimentality. The rest of the quintet's major-label debut similarly sandblasts dimples on middle-class ennui thanks to Gerard Way's hyperactive, hiccupping vocals and guitarist Ray Toto's unabashed love for both the Fugazi and Guns N' Roses catalogs. Considering the smart, sensitive, and melodic pleas of "Helena," "Cemetery Drive," and "It's Not a Fashion Statement, It's a Death Wish," we could do worse than a generation hooked on emo. Sure, it sucks that there ain't much adult supervision or book learnin' going on, but why educate when the only goal of our education system is to raise more burger flippers, right? YANCEY STR1CKLER"

You really need excuses and pseudogrievances like these to justify the fact that one of the most affluent groups of people in history (middle-class Americans) are incredibly self-indulgent. What problems do emo and MCR fans have that need to be "hugged away"?

It's hard to symptathize with bands and audiences who whine and cry a lot unless you give them all sorts of big problems for which they are trying to cope with (real or not). They just look like brats without the grievances and so you can't make their crosses fast enough.

if MCR are her Sex Pistols, what will be her Bow Wow Wow? or duck rock, for that matter.

MCR looks like such a caricature of a "Hot Topic band" that I can't see them expanding their audience too much outside of that audience and the Arctic Monkeys seem a little too tied to British culture to have the kind of success Franz Ferdind had in America. We'll see though.

i could do a LOT better than a generation hooked on (m)emo.

OTM

A more important discussion is: why are the top three threads on ILM right now about a plagiarizing PFork 'journalist', whether SPIN is still relevant, and whether a band calling themselves 'My Chemical Romance' has any significant impact on music?
We've got bigger problems than this thread, people.

He's mentioned it before.

no way! Manson gives great interviews at least

I'll bet you any sum of money you like the bands that have success in MCR's wake, if any do, will be a hell of a lot more enjoyable than those that did in Nirvana's wake, too.

I put Nirvana in the '90s on footing with Elvis of the '50s, The Beatles of the '60s and the Sex Pistols in the '70s in that their influence was felt beyond record collections, beyond simply influencing other bands. Call it the "Life Magazine" factor. (Or the "People Magazine" factor, if you prefer.)

Call it a "before/after" effect: Nirvana is one of a handful of bands whom you can point to their emergence and draw a line that everything was different after their arrival.

Has My Chemical Romance helped spur the worlds of fashion, the media, other forms of artistic expression? I don't think it's debatable.

If Ultragrrl is equating how the lyrics of MCR are just as poignant to this generation as Cobain's was to his, that is a little less cut and dried and frankly, kind of silly to debate. I would at least concede this point because I don't begrudge any generation for grasping onto music. (My biggest fear is be a generation that doesn't.)

So yeah, if she means their lyrics are as inspiring to a new generation of kids, fine. I'll have to mention a dozen other groups that can probably claim at least as much of an impact in this regard, however, whereas Nirvana seemed head and shoulders among their peers at the time and even in retrospect, but otherwise, I could care less.

But equating MCR's impact on pop culture as a whole to Nirvana is kind of silly.

I read a SPIN article a few years back where they said that 2004 was going to be the year they tried to market mallpunk as the new grunge (meaning the genre that would get kids excited about "real" rock music again) with MCR as the new Nirvana (meaning the band launched the genre into the mainstream), and "I'm Not Okay" being the "Teen Spirit" of 2004 (meaning that both songs and videos explored similar themes and targeted the same demographics). However, Ultragrrrl or any other critic could have been said about Green Day's "Longview" in 1994, Korn's "Got The Life" in 1998, or The Strokes' "Last Night" in 2001.

It's gotten to the point where there are too many alt-rock subgenres played on modern rock stations for there to be another Nirvana. What made Nirvana special was that they sparked the concept of the modern rock format, and anyone who says that MCR wouldn't have blown up without Nirvana is 100% correct. There is no "modern day Nirvana" right now. If you want to believe that MRC is the closest thing to it, go right ahead, but their impact is nowhere near what Nirvana achieved.

Also I still hate every Nirvana thread ever. It's when ILM sounds the most ignorant to me.

Brian, I still don't buy this for a second. And never have. Haircuts changed, I guess.

This is about the 80th time I'll be saying this on ILM, but it's still incredible to me that people trot stuff like this out, stuff that suggests they have never before interacted with human beings. It turns out -- this will shock you, I know -- that middle-class American people die, too. Middle-class people get sick and hurt one another's feelings and fuck up and do hard stupid things. Middle class people are sometimes dumb and ugly and nobody likes them. They may have a whole lot less to complain about, on balance, than most of the other people on this earth, but I can't see that that's ever stopped anyone from feeling like shit all the same. The fact that a lot of this music stretches that little-to-complain about into something unreasonably grand -- the fact that it sells back to plenty of kids who don't have much to feel bad about but would really like to feel that they do -- is so so not an excuse for pretending that there are people of every sort who have genuine-ass Problems. Even worse, intellectually: wanting to cast an entire race or class or social group as one that has no problems is such a deep anti-human affront to the fact that, duh, things still happen to individuals.

The last time I got pissed off about that was when someone said something stupid about how Columbia students have "never known problems" about a week after a Columbia friend had a family member kill himself. Same thing just happened to another one this week. Shock, horror: doing okay in one single sense does not insulate people from the basic problems of being a human being!

anyways, go on calling them a Hot Topic band. kids who listen to MCR and shop at Hot Topic are clearly a bunch of worthless MTV-nursed conformists, right? not like you when you were fifteen with your brand new, freshly ripped grunge jeans and flannel you bought at K-Mart. (cue choruses of "i never" and "i was into Whitehouse and Anal Cunt!") i mean really, what is wrong with these incredibly stupid young people and their awful music?????

What made Nirvana special was that they sparked the concept of the modern rock format

Survey says... I find it difficult to believe that anyone who paid attention to music in the late 80s would say that.

(...and it goes without saying that there are totally genres I love and am extremely engaged with that I don't think every music critic, or even most music critics, should engage with!)

it's like saying old country is great and new country is dumb music for hicks -- you don't have to love new country as a whole, but if you like old country and you can't find anything at all to appreciate in new country, i find it hard to believe that you're not in some way falling back on prejudices that have little to do with music, and not being honest with yourself. this is bad generally, though somewhat forgivable when the guy on the street does it, but particularly for a critic, falling back on your prejudices when listening to music seems like a very bad idea.

Back to the original point: High schoolers rarely have a sense of music history, especially compared to music journos (even ones just starting out). That's the big difference when it comes to a lot of music. That's why Clap Your Hands Say Yeah sounds new and fresh enough to garner 'shins will change your life' hype. Journalism, especially soft journalism, is incredibly bound to history and chronology. That doesn't necessarily make it more or less conservative, but it does increase the tension between the competing interests of the novel and the temporal context.

As for "new Nirvanas," there's not going to be one, at least for a long time. The market is just too fractured for an album to feel like such a rallying point anymore. The diffusion of modernism into a million subgenres means that each clique will have its own new Nirvana, but there won't be one for the greater culture. On one level, that's a little sad, thinking that there won't be a level of unity. On the level I prefer to think about it, it's great because it means that there will be thousands upon thousands of bands that can exist on their own without having to worry about playing to everyone. And that's good. More for anyone who's interested in looking for more music.

OTM. Rock critics live in a myopic world where just because something existed it was important. If a groundbreaking album falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Nobody doubts that Nirvana was hardly innovative. They were essentially the Pixies meets The Wipers. The issue is that Greg Sage and Frank Black never had any meaningful kind of an impact on pop culture. Nirvana did. This should be pretty obvious to anyone who was there for it, who saw it happen. Unless you're a kid, you really have no excuse to not acknowledge this. You don't have to like it, but as much as I think GWB is a moron, he's still our President.

You can kick and scream that they were the most overrated band in the world but that doesn't change the fact that they did influence pop culture and that influence has had a ripple effect that continues today.

...Even worse, intellectually: wanting to cast an entire race or class or social group as one that has no problems is such a deep anti-human affront to the fact that, duh, things still happen to individuals.

What kind of person would think that nobody in a given social group is free of any problems? (answer: A strawman!)

People have serious problems (!) I am aware of this.

As you said, middle-class Americans have less to complain about on "net balance". It should stop a lot of people from wanting to feel like shit and actively looking for grievances when they have that much more to be thankful for, though. When most black Americans had some "genuine-ass problems" they sang the blues and gospel music. They knew they couldn't afford to constantly throw all-day pity parties as it's costly in more ways than one. Only people up the economic ladder can afford to actually want to feel like shit. Hence my attitude towards these mope orgies.

Why were blacks more thankful than most kids today despite an immediate history of slavery? Did they not see death and tragedy? Were they being chumps for not just concentrating on that?

But anyway, even if it were an all-day pity party (which, again, I don't think it is, especially compared to a lot of music that is beloved by critics), it's just one album. There's nothing that says that its fans don't put on happy music some of the time as well. This would be the equivalent of criticizing a blues artist (though I know they usually have a lot of emotional range as well) for being miserable without taking into account that sometimes his or her listeners sing gospel tunes as well.