My Chemical Knees Up – Get This
One of the most terrible things about the English education system in Ireland is its ruthlessness. I know no image for that ruthlessness in the natural order. The ruthlessness of a wild beast has in it a certain mercy—it slays. It has in it a certain grandeur of animal force. But this ruthlessness is literally without pity and without passion. It is cold and mechanical, like the ruthlessness of an immensely powerful engine. A machine vast, complicated, with a multitude of far-reaching arms, with many ponderous presses, carrying out mysterious and long-drawn processes of shaping and moulding, is the true image of the Irish education system. It grinds night and day; it obeys immutable and predetermined laws; it is as devoid of understanding, of sympathy, of imagination, as is any other piece of machinery that performs an appointed task. Into it is fed all the raw human material in Ireland; it seizes upon it inexorably and rends and compresses and re-moulds; and what it cannot refashion after the regulation pattern it ejects with all likeness of its former self crushed from it, a bruised and shapeless thing, thereafter accounted waste.
My Chemical Romance have spoken out about teenage gun crime in this week’s issue of NME, calling it “a really big problem”.
This week’s cover stars, who released new album ’The Black Parade’ on Monday (October 23), were discussing the album track ’Teenagers’ which tackles the issue head on.
Singer Gerard Way said: “That song almost didn’t fit on the record but it’s a topic that’s so important to our culture. It’s about a really big problem in America where kids are killing kids.The only think I learnt in high school is that people are very violent and territorial.”
Way talked about the relevance of The Smiths to the situation.
He said: “I heard ’The Headmaster Ritual’ by The Smiths and I think that song is as important to the social situation in America right now as it was to school in Britain in the ‘80s.”
I was completely unable to adjust to living a normal life and the neighbourhood was rife with teenagers, which put me on edge. I had started to feel old. I started to feel like I couldn’t connect with anyone. Riding the subway into the city, I would often find myself nervous and paranoid, especially when school let out. It was pretty comical. One day while riding the train, the subway car filled with tons of school kids, I started to have a straight up panic attack. To deal with this I hid under my notebook and just started to write lyrics…
Gerard Way, The Black Parade Special Edition