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So, I decided to go to the My Chemical Romance concert at William & Mary Hall, two blocks from my house. I'm not sure why this seemed like a good idea. I suppose it was a combination of morbid curiosity and the fact that, hell, if it's that close to home and I can walk there and back, why not? xp

Though I'd been considering attending ever since the concert was first announced, it was still a last-minute decision, so I hadn't bought a ticket in advance. I'd seen a story in the local paper that only 6,000 tickets had been sold, and I figured there wouldn't be any trouble obtaining one. But when I arrived, I found that I no longer remembered where the box office was located. That's what I get for not going to any shows at that venue for, oh, about a decade. As I wandered around the perimeter of the building, I noticed signs on several doors that said the box office was open on Monday through Friday from 9 to 5. I was about to give up on the whole enterprise and go home when I saw a girl trying to sell off her ticket for $15. Since the original price was $30.25, that sounded like a good deal to me, and I bought it.

From there, I went inside and had to show the security guard the crap in my jacket pockets. It didn't take much to convince him I wasn't a terrorist threat. He would be the last black person I'd see the rest of the evening-- the audience was exclusively white, which I suppose isn't surprising considering how listening habits are so often guided (consciously or not) by racial stereotypes, but is still kind of depressing. I'd expected to be the oldest person in the room, but I promptly spotted a guy who looked exactly like Larry David, along with a few random dads accompanying their kids. But there were very few young kids, and even fewer audience members with the stereotypical MCR fan appearance-- mostly, it was college kids, all very plain and ordinary, but unfortunately still prone to eardrum-splitting screams at every available opportunity.

I bought a pretzel and a Diet Coke at the concessions stand, and settled in for Muse's opening set. My first concern was how the notoriously fickle sound at the Hall would affect the show-- would it be like Nirvana's concert in '93, where the sound was excellent, or like the terrible R.E.M./10,000 Maniacs show in '87, where the sound was so muddy and indecipherable the performance actually got mentioned in a Rolling Stone article about R.E.M. as the low point of that tour? The answer: somewhere in between. It proved to be fine for loud, stomping guitar workouts, and the bass was so vivid I could feel it pulsing through my stomach. Similarly, the drums blared at headache-inducing volume. But the vocals were so overwhelmed by feedback it was difficult to make out any words (for Muse, at least-- not so much for MCR), and any attempts at subtlety fell flat in this context. Fortunately, Muse is not an especially subtle band, and most of their songs resembled a surprisingly melodic brontosaurus blithely stomping over everything in its path. Since I've only heard their most recent album, I can't offer much in the way of deep analysis, but I found their set enjoyable enough.

I took some time during Muse's set to look around and observe the audience in greater depth. I was amazed at how many people were not only using their cell phone cameras, but were actually text messaging other people from the concert. Maybe I'm just an old fart, but this doesn't seem right to me somehow. If you're there to hear the music, why the hell are you sending text messages instead of actually paying attention and listening to the ******** music? This is also the first time I've observed the phenomenon of people waving their phones in the air instead of cigarette lighters, though at least half the audience still waved lighters anyway, creating a weird sort of limbo state somewhere between parodic nostalgia and clueless modernity. I found it really disorienting.

Muse finished in a tight 45 minutes, and that gave me time to find the men's room. Even after a trek halfway around the building and waiting in a line of about twenty people, I got back in plenty of time, because MCR didn't come on until 45 minutes after the end of Muse's set. That's when the loud screaming started, and a few songs into the set, my general indifference turned to outright hatred of Gerard Way's rock-star poses. I started with indifference because MCR presented their material in the most boring way imaginable-- they played The Black Parade, in its entirety, with no variations in song order or arrangements. Apart from Gerard's annoying commands to the audience to jump or wave their hands, the songs sounded exactly the same as on the CD. I suppose that's what his audience wants, but it's not what I want from a concert-- I'd like to see some sort of imagination, some kind of expansion on or creative alteration of the originals, not just rote replication.

But it was those rock star clichés that sent me over the edge. Before "The Sharpest Lives", Way dedicated the band's performance to the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings and their families, and it was as hollow and insincere a dedication as I've ever heard in my life. It felt obligatory, not heartfelt, and even an audience clearly overloaded with dedicated fans could only muster polite applause in response. Later, he prefaced "Teenagers" with a rambling introduction about being an outsider and seeking help for your problems, and about how violence is never a solution; it felt like the gesture of a man fearful of being stigmatized for allegedly endorsing youth violence, rather than anything sincere or profound.

And then there's the part that really annoys me: the commands to the audience, and the way so many in the crowd respond like sheep. This is nothing new, of course-- it's what sparked Roger Waters to write The Wall all those years ago, which now seems kind of ironic since MCR ripped off so much of that record wholesale for The Black Parade. But somehow, I resented Gerard's exhortations to "jump higher than you've ever jumped before!" even more than I've resented similar statements in the past. The nadir was in "Welcome To The Black Parade", where he started thrusting his arm diagonally into the air in an echo of Fascist salutes that would be obvious to anyone with any sense of history; but that sense of history is clearly lacking in both Way and his audience, because nearly half the auditorium repeated the gesture, in unison, several times before the song reached its second, faster section. There are a couple of reasons why this scene disturbed me. First, ripping such a loaded gesture from its original context and dropping it into a pop-rock band's performance strips it of all meaning, transforming it into an empty signifier. Second, the mindless way so many in the audience simply repeated it, as they obeyed Way's stupid orders to jump, reminded me how easy it is to manipulate people given the right circumstances.

After they finished the album, the band came back in plain black shirts and pants (as opposed to the marching-band uniforms of their "Black Parade" persona) to play a few of their older songs. The show mercifully ended with no encores, and as I staggered out of the arena, my hearing shot and my nerves rattled by all those sudden popping noises at the end of their songs, I saw two guys trying to resell MCR T-shirts at inflated prices. It was no more of a scam than the concert itself, and a vastly more entertaining one.