On August 29, 2025, New Jersey rock band and 2000s emo powerhouse My Chemical Romance (MCR) performed “‘Long Live’ the Black Parade” at Soldier Field in Chicago, Illinois, as part of an ongoing tour. The current tour is the resurrection of their 2006 album The Black Parade (TBP), which they declared “dead” following their album tour in 2007. While the album’s original interpretation was telling the story of a character dying of cancer, more recent interpretations (particularly as 2000s alt-rock is experiencing a revival in Gen Z queer audiences) were as an extended metaphor for topics such as gender dysphoria, homophobia, and transphobia. Other takes and perspectives on the album’s meaning have been offered over the years, though with the announcement of this new tour, the band themselves offered a new story for it: as an explicitly anti-fascist protest.
I am going to mostly be avoiding a review of the concert as the goal of this article. For that reason, I am not really going to be talking about the opener, Devo, or the insanely long “encore” that was really a second full set that MCR played after “‘Long Live’ the Black Parade”, or Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins making an unexpected appearance to play “Bullet with Butterfly Wings”. But, you know, there is all of that. So just know that this is a narrow discussion and not a full review.
Now, from the moment the tour was announced, it was obvious that “‘Long Live’ the Black Parade” was intending to take a more explicitly political stance. The story they seemed to be using for TBP this time was of a musician metaphorically “dying” as their art was co-opted to support a fictional fascist regime called the Draag empire (with some of the leaders of said regime being explicit parodies of the actual Nazis), even as they tried to fight back and reveal the truth of Draag’s atrocities and surveillance to the audience. This new interpretation of TBP not only injected political commentary into the forefront of the story, but it was also quickly interpreted as a commentary on how right-wing ideologues have attempted (with varying levels of success) to claim alternative music as their own (something MCR has had personal experience with).
There were a lot of well-done skits and other non-musical story elements that the band, and particularly lead singer Gerard Way, added to make the meaning of the story clear. Most of them were interactions that the band had onstage, such as when their Draag military “handler” appears to slap Way across the face when they try to walk out, or when Way reveals that the Draag empire (now a dictatorship) came to power recently after a major political movement based around the word “greatness” was elected to office. There is a very reasonable argument to be made that Draag is supposed to be America in the not-too-distant future.
That said, there were three moments I want to go into in more depth: the “vote” at the end of “Welcome to the Black Parade,” the display screens in “Teenagers” and “Disenchanted”, and the choice of what lines the audience was asked to sing for the band. These, to me, formed the backbone of why I can’t get this concert out of my head: live music as a way of engaging people in performance art. In particular, it can push people to think about topics in a different way as a method of protest.
After “Welcome to the Black Parade”, Way gestured to a secondary stage, where a series of cardboard cutouts were positioned. Several of them are referred to as prisoners, while the others are supposed to be soldiers. They narrated what was about to happen: The audience was given red signs that said “yea” and black signs that said “nay”. If the audience held up mostly red signs, the prisoners would be executed, and if they held up mostly black, they would be spared. (It’s also worth noting there was no trial – all we heard was Way saying they were enemies of the state, and then people were asked to vote.) But there were two issues with this. First, the majority of the signs handed out were red. Even if every person who had a red and a black sign chose to hold up the black signs, red signs would outnumber them. This was the illusion of choice. Second, these signs were only handed out to people in the pit or other extremely expensive ticket areas. Given how much attention to detail was paid elsewhere, I have to assume that there was intentionality to only those who could afford those tickets to partake in this experiment, especially when we live in a world where things like the Citizens United court decision give disproportionate influence to capital holders. In the end, a series of explosives burst out from the “guns” of the “soldiers”, and the “prisoners” fall to the ground, dead. Way closes the skit with “Thank you for participating in democracy”.
In “Mama” and “Sleep,” the band fully goes off-script, revealing how the Draag empire is surveilling everyone and forcing people to work. During the following songs, “Teenagers” and “Disenchanted”, all screens initially showing close-ups of the band performing started showing Draag propaganda. This was particularly poignant for these songs, given “Teenagers” is about how government propaganda turns teens into “another cog in the murder machine” (this song was released during the Iraq War), and “Disenchanted” is about realizing that what is on TV is propaganda and advocates for a French Revolution-style reorganization of society (“Bring out the old guillotine/We’ll show ‘em what we all mean”). Even in their original context, these songs were on the nose for discussions of political propaganda and brainwashing, making it incredibly poignant that (in the proposed storyline) the Draag empire was trying to paper over the dissenting voices and regain control over the minds of the audience.
Finally, like many singers performing live, Way dropped out for certain lines and would hold out the microphone towards the audience, signalling them to sing those lines for them. (The audience was singing anyway, but was noticeably louder for those moments.) We actually have a live concert video of the first time MCR toured for TBP in 2007, so we can compare the lyrics that were chosen for this. In the initial performance, there were more of these moments, and they typically were easy-to-understand lyrics, complete musical phrases, usually located in a chorus, and had relatively simple melodies. By contrast, there were fewer audience-sung lyrics in this new performance; they weren’t all as easy to understand, they often jumped into the middle of a musical phrase or stopped before completing it, were only found in verses, bridges, or other unrepeated sections, and had somewhat more complex or changing melodies. In all senses, these were non-obvious choices for the audience to sing. However, they had a clear intentionality. Two that stand out more clearly in my memory (“Defiant to the end we hear the call” from “Welcome to the Black Parade” and “Bring out the old guillotine/We will show ‘em what we all mean,” which I mentioned above) are lines that explicitly are about protesting and fighting back. That said, all had similar meaning and interpretation.
These moments, to me, highlight what it means to effectively engage in performance art as an act of protest. When the explosives representing the firing squad went off, people in my section jumped back and screamed in shock. For a moment, people thought it was real. Again, the band wasn’t glorifying this – the plot was about them being forced to take these actions, fighting back against it, and eventually getting killed for it. You were supposed to be horrified, and it worked. I knew that the videos they were showing during “Teenagers” and “Disenchanted were propaganda; it was immediately clear. But when one of them started showing how to do a fictional “traditional dance of the Draag empire”, I wanted to try it. And I was aware of that, and it made me conflicted on how to feel. This group is supposed to be the bad guys, but why am I falling for this? I know better than that. And the lyrics made you, as the audience, decide to engage in this protest and take a stand against it. You could’ve chosen not to sing when Way held the mic out to the audience, but instead, the voices of people rose. You were affirming your own beliefs in this, against what else you were experiencing.
A week after the show, the feeling in all these moments still sticks with me. And I do think that music, which has an inherent live aspect to it, is uniquely suited to this form of performance protest art. My Chemical Romance gave a masterclass in it during their “Long Live’ the Black Parade” tour.