#mcr documentary

Gerard is basically the only band member that’s talked about (shocker) and they’re painted as a tortured, mentally unstable genius and nothing else. One of the interviewees admitted to -punching Gerard in the face- to get them to calm down and seemed? Proud of it? And they called Gerard’s abscessed tooth an “overblown toothache” and said it caused them a lot of drama and hardship because they were in so much pain that it was making it hard to record and the interviewees were -annoyed- about it..

Mikey was mentioned as “Gerard’s brother, so I guess he HAD to be there, he was awful at bass, didn’t know how to play bass at all.” And then later in the documentary “Mikey saved the recording session from all of Gerard’s drama by being calm and just playing bass”.

Ray wasn’t mentioned significantly, but there -were- recordings of him talking about the beginnings of the band. Edit: I thought this was uncredited, but it was just really hard to tell through the captioning. It was credited, it was just his voice though? Like it was taken from a separate interview?

Frank was surprisingly mentioned almost not at all, his enthusiasm for the band, his scorpion tattoo, how his connections in the scene really helped with promotion, etc. none of that was mentioned. Basically nothing about the music itself was mentioned.

The owner of Eyeball Records called My Chem a nerdy band (confusing; they are, but that’s not their sound) and then said that once nerds started doing school shootings, we as a culture were forced to pay more attention to them so it didn’t happen again. And that My Chem seemed like the school shooting types of nerds??? Coldest take in the universe, what the fuck are you talking about.

Another interviewee (I can’t remember them all, sorry, they also look really similar) called their music ‘emo’ which is one of my biggest fucking pet peeves. Emo is not! 👏🏻 A! 👏🏻 Music! 👏🏻 Genre! 👏🏻 The bands that have been labeled as such do not sound similar at all, try again! Also My Chem have explicitly said, early on even, that that is not a word they associate with their music. They’ve used ‘violent pop’ and ‘rock’ as categories in interviews.

Also the documentary starts and is intermittently punctuated by a lilting, extremely posh-sounding English person that makes the whole thing feel like a David Attenborough nature documentary. Their perspective is very detached and it sounds like they’re writing an article based off secondhand knowledge, it’s very fucking weird.

The interviewees also talk about the band leaving Eyeball Records and signing to a major label and the vibe is ‘sad bitter exes’. The documentary feels like Divorce Court at this point. Not an actual quote but it was like “My Chem did what they had to do in order to break out and be bigger, and it stung. It was devastating, I cried about it, but I’m happy for them!! If I’m not what they need that’s fine! It’s….fine.”

And obviously the funniest part was everyone saying that they don’t know how the band are going to top themselves, and they’d better not overthink it or they’re going to crash and burn. This came out shortly before Black Parade, so RIP to these men’s egos.