2004: My Chemical Romance, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge
By ManDy Shunnarah
*CW: suicidal ideation and mental health issues like depression and anxiety
The Best Revenge is Living Well: An Ode to My Chemical Romance and Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge
The day I cranked up the volume on my lime green boom box so loud that I couldn’t hear the garage door open over Gerard Way’s screams of “I’m not okay, I’m not o-fucking-kay” was also the day my mother broke my Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge CD in half for the third time.
The garage door signaled my mother’s return from work, the end of two precious hours to myself each weekday when I was a latchkey kid. Before the fateful day a few weeks before, when I saw My Chemical Romance on Total Request Live for the first time, I had no reason to test the bounds of my stereo’s volume. I played Michael Bublé, a quiet, sultry crooner my mother deemed “classy,” like a young Sinatra. She could even understand my affinity for 50 Cent, which I played at a modest decibel level––herself having fallen in love with The Jackson 5. She followed Michael and Janet’s careers like a devotee, even caping for Michael when the sexual assault allegations became public. She understood the hold a Black man’s music could have on me; that, she could make sense of.
But a white boy wearing smudged black eyeliner and too-pale foundation, screaming with anguish into the musical void? That was too much. She stopped My Chemical Romance’s sophomore album with a slap to the knob.
“What did I say?” she hissed, taking the CD from the boom box and grasping its rainbow beams, and breaking them into shards. This was a burned copy. Being 14 in 2004 when the album was released, I had no money of my own, so I did chores for a few weeks in exchange for one CD when we went to the K-Mart off Old Highway 31 in Gardendale, Alabama. Last time we were there I’d taken Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge into my hands, staring as longingly at the illustration of the blood-spattered man and woman as they stared at one another. I wanted someone to look at me like that.
I laid the CD on the conveyor belt, already anxious to rip into the plastic film separating me from the rest of the songs I hadn’t heard on MTV. Then the price scanner struck a sour note.
“This CD has a parental advisory warning, so you have to be 18 to purchase it,” the cashier said, looking at me. “Do you still want it?” she added, asking my mother.
“Of course not,” my mother replied, exasperated. Then to me, “What’s wrong with you?”
Heat rose to my cheeks, as bright and red as Gerard’s skinny tie and eyeshadow. “But I did my chores! I earned it!”
“You should’ve picked something appropriate.”
“You never cared what I listened to before…”
“Maybe I should.”
I watched as the cashier slid the album into a bin under the register, to be returned to the music department. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, as does the thrill of the illicit. I only wanted My Chemical Romance more.
Unable to get my hands on a legal, store-bought copy of the album, my friend Shelby burned me one. And another. And yet another. After my mother broke the third burned copy, I called Shelby from the clear plastic, spiral-corded phone in my room.
“Jesus Christ, again? Write that it’s a Reba CD or Shania Twain. Hell, say it’s a Yanni CD if you have to,” she said. “Write ‘Casting Crowns’ in permanent marker and she won’t think twice.”
“Okay, okay, lesson learned.”
“I’ll bring you another copy to school tomorrow. At least try to get better at hiding it, please?”
The idea of most teenage rebellion exhausted me. The lying, the sneaking out, the remembering to leave the bedroom window open and gum stuck in the door lock––and who could be so quiet? But boycotting chores was easy. It didn’t require me to put any effort in, which was the point, because all I wanted to do was lay in bed, buried in my comforter, spontaneously crying, and making a litany of everything I’d ever done wrong, why I was a doomed failure, and all the reasons I’d never be loved. They call this depression.
My mental health issues started long before I found My Chemical Romance in 2004, but the day I turned on TRL and heard “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” was the first time I realized I wasn’t alone in my anguish. The music video opens with Gerard Way and Ray Toro wearing prep school uniforms and sitting on a set of concrete stairs.
“You like D&D, Audrey Hepburn, Fangoria, Harry Houdini, and croquet. You can’t swim, you can’t dance, and you don’t know karate. Face it, you’re never going to make it,” Toro said.
“I don’t wanna make it,” Way replied. “I just wanna…”
He’s cut off by the searing upbeat electric guitar opening as a montage of phrases where only the last word changes appear in white on a black screen: If you ever felt alone. If you ever felt rejected. If you ever felt confused. Lost. Anxious. Wrong. Wronged. Unclean. Angry. Ashamed. Curious. Used.
I watched, eyes wide and mouth open because I felt all those things. In between the quick-changing phrases documenting feelings I hadn’t realized up til then I was even allowed to have, much less express, there are scenes of the band members being cast as outsiders in their high school. Gerard, in his full prep school uniform, stands on the diving board as the swim team dives into the pool while he remains still, hands on his hips. Frank is having lunch alone as the popular kids lob a sandwich at him. One of the members, whose face isn’t shown, is presumably having sex with a female classmate in the bathroom, though all you can see is their feet. An actor in the video opens his locker to a cascade of pill bottles––whether the drugs were for physical illness, mental health, or pure ecstasy, the viewer can only guess. Two actors, shirtless in a locker room, one gazing over his shoulder at the off-camera waist of the other––my first memory of queer desire on television.
Then the music video takes a turn and the guys of My Chemical Romance are no longer the victims. Frank leans in for a kiss with a cheerleader, only to rebuff her with, “You have something in your eye,” and reaching to pluck the debris out before her lips can touch his. The band members tackle the school’s dog mascot while cheerleaders continue practice in the foreground, unaware of the chaos the school pariahs have caused. Then in an act of revenge harking to the breakout album’s title, one of the band members peed into a jock’s football helmet. And in the final scene, the jocks with their hockey sticks and My Chemical Romance with their croquet mallets raised like swords in an epic clash.
More phrases flash on screen. Be prepared to feel Revenge. Feel the romance. My brutal romance. My beautiful romance. My miserable romance. My x-rated romance. My harlequin romance. My innocent romance. My scandalous romance. My selfish romance. My pathetic romance. My childish romance. My water cooler romance. My Chemical Romance.
The revenge in the music video suited my ethos. The switch halfway through the narrative where the members of MCR go from being the maligned freaks to giving the preps a taste of their own medicine appealed to me. What bullied outcast hasn’t dreamed of getting back at the people who made their schooldays hell? What artsy, anxious, depressed kid hasn’t fantasized about making it so big that those who ridiculed them would be forced to admit how talented––and rich and famous––they are? Who hasn’t imagined the sweet, sweet satisfaction of denying their bullies a chance to say they knew you way back when because they’d be forced to admit the wrongs they committed against you? Who wouldn’t give three cheers (and more) for that?
I’d heard the old saying “living well is the best revenge,” but I’d never seen it done until that moment. The weirdos made it on MTV, an undeniable marker of having won the old social class wars of middle and high school. And since I was a weirdo, maybe I would one day too.
Gerard Way reflected my schoolyard anguish back to me like a mirror, except he could do something I couldn’t: scream. At least not in the presence of those who made me need to scream.
So Gerard screamed for me. My throat straining vicariously in his neck, all sinew and angst. My Chemical Romance gave me a voice when I didn’t yet know how to speak with my own mouth. I imagined the intended audience of the songs Gerard sang––not the fans, but the people who actually inspired the songs; whom he thought of when he sang. Maybe he and the other band members had been counted out, told they were too much and simultaneously not enough, ridiculed for feeling too much. It was impossible to watch the music video for “I’m Not Okay” and think otherwise. Maybe the sweet revenge they cheered thrice for was making it out alive and with enough of their artistic sensibilities intact to create resonant music.
My mother hated Gerard and the band for all the reasons she was exasperated by me. I was “dramatic,” and felt too much and too deeply; a coal dust-covered canary stuck in the depths of a mine, unable to sing. It would be more than a decade after Three Cheers released that I started therapy and more years after that before I finally agreed to take anti-anxiety/anti-depressant medication. The intervening years would be marked by multiple suicide attempts, depression so debilitating that my jaw tightened until I couldn’t speak for days, fatigue so deep I was neither able to sleep nor stay awake, migraines that lasted weeks at a time, and fear of leaving my room. People frightened me, the world terrified me, and if I had to engage beyond my four walls I wanted to do so with as much invisibility as it’s possible to muster. I developed coping mechanisms that wouldn’t serve me in the long term, but allowed me to survive in the moment.
This is to say, I got better at hiding my burned CDs.
As lonely as I was disengaging from the world and dissociating from my thoughts, I never felt alone when Three Cheers played. I sang along, I wailed, and made my throat sore from the raw, animal sounds of my body. I could mask my howls under the cover of Gerard’s screams; I could shriek without being perceived. His emotions were an outlet for my own. Before hearing My Chemical Romance, I thought I was the only depressed and anxious person in the world, and if I was the only one, there had to be something wrong with me. I thought the failure to be happy and functional was mine alone.
But as the ranks of the MCRmy rose and grew, more and more of us found each other. While the outside world saw the band as a satanic suicide cult, I wished everyone could see MCR’s music as I did then and still do today: a life-saving affirmation better than any calligraphy-scripted motivational poster.
In 2004, when the album debuted, I was a queer, depressed, and anxious teenager with an eating disorder and an abusive family, forced to live under the pressing thumb of evangelicalism. Even as the songs centered on death, listening to Three Cheers made me want to live. I’m still queer, depressed, and anxious, but I’m an adult who’s been in eating disorder recovery for a decade, I prioritize my mental health, I’ve set strict boundaries with my abusive family, and I’ve renounced the cult of evangelicalism. I’m healthier and happier now than I’ve ever been and if I trace the thread from where I am now to when I began this becoming, I find MCR is the seed.
Not only did Gerard Way give us permission to emote our angst, but he also assured us that by our very nature of not being o-fucking-kay, we’re actually more okay than we think. Or at least we will be.
On August 24, 2022, I traveled to Cincinnati to see My Chemical Romance perform live on their reunion tour, a dream I’d been waiting more than 16 years to see realized. Hearing my favorite songs from Three Cheers was even more surreal than I could have imagined and all too soon, their set was finished and the band left the stage.
“They didn’t play ‘I’m Not Okay,’” I said to my friend Nichole, who accompanied me to the concert.
“I think they took it out of rotation,” she said as the fans around us yelled for an encore. “They’re all in such better places now that I think it depresses them to play it.”
Acquiescing to the demand for an encore, the band returned and Gerard told a story about a young photographer and graphic designer who’d been a friend of the band since their earliest days. He spoke of running the set list by her in preparation for the tour.
“...I mean, some of our songs have some really dark lyrics. That last song we just played was dark as fuck,” he said, referencing the song “Headfirst for Halos” from their first album, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to play those songs on the tour but then she said, ‘Gerard, when you sing those songs, we sing them back to you with joy because we made it through that shit.’ So I asked her what her favorite song was and this is what she said…
Then they played “I’m Not Okay” and tears pricked my eyes, making my caked on black eyeliner and glittery red mascara run.
MCR changed the bass drumhead art for each show on the reunion tour and that night it said “smile with your eyes.” I don’t think I did when I was a teenager first encountering MCR––I hadn’t yet developed coping mechanisms or gone to therapy or gotten anti-anxiety medication––but I do now.
A look at my life in 2022: I go to the skatepark regularly, I have attended multiple shows on MCR’s reunion tour, and MCR released a new song, “Foundations of Decay.” I’m estranged from my mother and living in a house of my own, so there’s no one telling me I can’t skate, can’t wear so much black, or breaking my non-pirated MCR CDs. I’m medicated for depression and anxiety and get medical marijuana from a local dispensary. I have the freedom to explore my gender expression and sexuality in a safe, supportive environment.
I’m living the life that I hoped for all those times I chose not to kill myself as a teenager.
The best revenge is living well and we both are, Gerard and I. Gerard had a gun put to his head execution-style during a robbery of the comic book store he worked at, witnessed the twin towers fall on 9/11, and battled addiction; I’d grown up in an abusive family and homophobic community, had my severe suicidal ideation and depression ignored, but now we can sing with joy. It was hard-won, but we made it through the shit.
Mandy Shunnarah is an Alabama-born, Palestinian-American writer who now calls Columbus, Ohio, home. Their essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and others. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skaters and Skateparks in Middle America, is forthcoming from Belt Publishing. Read more at mandyshunnarah.com.