We'd have to sort through piles of classic albums every week. An artist can't simply make up their mind that their new album is about to be a classic. But one thing that artists can do is try.
They can put everything out there, hammering away at their own biggest ideas with all the resources available to them. It doesn't work out often, and when it fails, the artist looks like a self-important fool. The conditions have to be exactly right.
The artist has to be in the right place, mentally and temporally, to make something that will resonate and endure. In 2006, My Chemical Romance had the opportunity and the motive. They went for it, and they made it happen.
I didn't think that My Chemical Romance's third and best album was a classic when it first came out. The Black Parade, which turns 20 on Saturday, came with a whole lot of advance hype. There would be strings on this album.
A grand, pretentious overarching storyline. The band invented whole new personas for themselves. They wore matching costumes and added theatrical props to their live show.
Every night on tour, they played the entire record in full before digging back into their previous hits. During the pre-release press cycle, Gerard Way even cut his hair short and bleached it to embody the cancer-patient alter ego that he'd conjured for the record. (He was really imitating past generations of rockers inventing new looks for new albums. To the best of my knowledge, chemotherapy doesn't shorten your hair or turn it blonde.) I was wrong about The Black Parade, and in the wake of the album's anniversary, I've caught myself wondering why.
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