James Bolton - Summer Music Video Analysis



Band: My Chemical Romance

Part One: Genre

            In the band’s latest album, it has a narrative which is where the band members are living on planet Earth in the future, in a sort of dystopian way of life. Each band member has their own comic book style character, name and outfit, which helps to identify not only the band from other bands, but the members within the band.

            When My Chemical Romance released their first album I Brought You My Bullets and You Brought Me Your Love in 2002, the band weren’t massively well known. But after their second studio album Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge, which was released in 2004, it reached number 34 in the UK album chart, compared to 129 on their first album. There hasn’t been huge change between these two albums. The musical genre of Emo Rock remained the same, while the bands dark and “gothic” image of black clothing remained. The bands logo was often black, and the two album covers portrayed depressing and violent images, often relating to suffering. The artwork contains the band name, album title, parental advisory warning where appropriate as well as the releavant iconography.

The band’s third studio album The Black Parade, released in 2006, was a lot more popular and showed the ever changing image of the band, portraying the members as “The Black Parade”, a group of almost undertaker like characters. This album showed continuity in the bands dark music and lyrics, as well as their image, which changed to black civil war style military clothing, shown in the screenshot from their music video for the single Welcome to the Black Parade. This image, while not necessarily appealing in a mainstream point of view, and almost certainly off putting for many people, fits clearly with Emo Rock genre conventions of a dark band image to match the emotional and shadowy lyrics.

For the bands fourth and most recent album, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, the bands image went through a massive transition, from the dark stereotypical “gothic”, to a lively, bright comic book style set of characters. The band said this was an attempt to move away from what they had been used, and if they were to be inspired to write a fourth album, they needed a whole new concept, and, from looking at the image, they have achieved that.

Part Two: Visual Style and Image

            In previous music videos, as seen earlier with the screenshot from the Welcome to the Black Parade video, the bands common iconography and mise-en-scene was military clothing, dark colours and things like skulls. However, with the fourth album, there is much brighter props, such as masks and ray guns, that link in to the bands album concept of rebelling, which is often the view of rock music as a genre. The screenshot below comes from the band’s first single (Na Na Na) from the fourth album, and shows the new comic book image, as well as the new typical iconography. The album launch was so anticipated among fans, the band sold a Deluxe Edition of the album, which included a replica mask and ray gun.

            In their recent music videos, the band has used quick cuts in terms of editing, to fit with the quick tempo of the song as well as their new lively image. The text and titles are bright, in block font, and appear with the onomatopoeic sounds often found in comic books like “bash” and “boom”. The video also adopts, in places, such as below, a panel style, often seen in comic books.