De Byron à My Chem

Un blog trés intéressant sur l'influence des penseurs/écrivains/poétes romantiques du 19ième siécle dans la musique d'aujourd'hui, notamment chez My Chemical Romance.

Citation :

FROM BYRON TO MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE

Rock bands dressed in black military jackets, pummeling drums, strumming guitars and belting their despair to heaving, adoring crowds–it’s not a scene one typically associates with Wordsworth, Goethe or Byron.

Yet there is a connection somewhere, argues Craig Schuftan, an Australian music writer who has spent years exploring the links between popular music and so-called "high" culture. For his second book, "Hey, Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone", he set out to find the lofty roots of rock music. In particular, Schuftan noticed a relationship between the 19th-century writers and thinkers of the romantic movement and the band My Chemical Romance.

Formed soon after the September 11th attacks, the New Jersey-based band mixed a neo-goth aesthetic (tight black clothes, died black hair) with sensitive, gloomy rock music. After the moderate success of their first two albums, they suddenly became teen idols with the release of "The Black Parade" in 2006. Schuftan was inspired by the album's lead single, "Welcome To The Black Parade", in which Gerard Way, the band's singer, laments the disillusionment of life. But true salvation, he then sings (as the music gallops to a victory march), can only be found in oneself.

“I realised that song is romantic philosophy in a nutshell,” says Schuftan to me. “It’s exactly the theme that poets like Wordsworth were picking up on at the time of the French Revolution, when the early romantics turned inward. They began to look for salvation in the world of their own dreams, hopes and emotions.”

Schuftan also noticed a tragic resonance in the death of Hannah Bond, a thirteen-year-old fan of My Chemical Romance who hanged herself in her Kent home in 2008. Many blamed Hannah’s death on the band's apparent glorification of suicide. When Goethe’s "The Sorrows of Young Werther" was published in 1774, it too inspired a cult following–and copycat suicides.

“When I look at the philosophy of people like Schopenhauer or the philosophy implicit in Byron (pictured right), Shelley or Keats, there’s something really doomed about it. Even in 'Tristan and Isolde', Richard Wagner uses the almost religious idea that there’s no meaning in the world, no order, nothing you can understand–but that you can find everything you need in another person. That’s why romantic love is always so tragic: because another human being is just another human being. They can never be the thing that romantic love wants them to be: the answer to everything.

“And yet we listen to that stuff every day. We identify with those feelings on the radio. That’s what’s interesting about romanticism and rock’n’roll to me: as crazy and unworkable as it is as a way to lead your life, we all seem to need it.”

As with romantic poetry, fans of popular music prefer when it comes from an emotionally raw place. Billy Corgan, the former frontman of the Smashing Pumpkins, has more or less said that his music is great because of its emotional intensity. "And the more intense it was, the better, and he would probably have to suffer for that," Schuftan says. The idea that artists must suffer for their art would have seemed ridiculous to anyone before Byron and the romantics came on the scene.

Byron could have even been a precursor to the modern rock star. As an artist who mined his own anguish for his art, he became a celebrity in his time (his wife called the phenomenon ‘Byromania’). “I was half-mad during the time of its composition,” said Byron of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, one of his most celebrated works, “between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love unextinguishable, thoughts unutterable, and the nightmare of my own delinquencies.”

How very rock’n’roll.

"Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone: The Romantic movement, rock and roll, and the end of civilisation as we know it", by Craig Schuftan, out now

~ DARRYN KING

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