My Chemical Romance and the adult ghosts of the emo generation

“Come on, Dad, let’s go round the back.” Marco is seven years old, wearing a pair of enormous grey noise-cancelling headphones and clutching a corner of his father’s sweaty T-shirt in his left fist. He tugs at it firmly, whilst with his other hand he seeks a secure grip on his mother’s trousers. With the sheer force of that tug, he manages to pull the whole family back a few dozen metres, away from the crush at the front of the pit, where the dust and heat of the Visarno Arena make the air almost unbreathable. His parents, who have braved the traffic and the exorbitant ticket prices just to be here in the Florentine heatwave, huff: “It’s clear Marco wasn’t feeling well today; no wonder he couldn’t stay out there in the middle of it all.” In reality, he’s perfectly fine; he’s simply realised that this isn’t a children’s playground. It’s the My Chemical Romance concert, a gathering of a generation who, on the cusp of their forties and with children of their own, refuse to consign the eyeliner-wearing ghosts of their adolescence to the attic.

The arena at Parco delle Cascine resembles a large residents’ meeting disguised as a Gothic sabbath. There are the over-30s who have rummaged through the deepest recesses of their wardrobes to dust off relics from a bygone era. On display are frayed fishnet tights, black and red babydolls unearthed from the alternative shops of the early 2000s, Dr Martens and dark eyeshadow applied over the first expression lines.

They are the survivors of a generation that, twenty years ago, had no algorithms to suggest what to listen to but bought and collected CDs by their favourite bands. Even before it became a musical taste, ‘emo’ was a way of identifying with one another. In Rome, they’d meet on the steps of the Church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, in Piazza del Popolo, where young men with slicked-back quiffs and black eyeliner learnt to defend themselves against the insults of the ‘truzzi’. In Milan, they would gather around the low wall and the fountain at San Babila. These were meeting places and bastions of teenage defiance, where a hairstyle or a T-shirt could be a declaration of belonging even before it was an aesthetic choice.

Today, twenty years on, that trench has taken the form of a sheet of paper on which to jot down one’s holiday plans. Amongst the crowd waiting for the show to start, a father wearing a Within Temptation T-shirt is desperately trying to work out how to fit in some sleep and his morning shift the next day. A little further on, another man wanders about in search of a signal, holding his smartphone aloft to send a WhatsApp message to his partner or the babysitter. There’s also Pablo Trincia, wandering around backstage with the air of an anthropologist observing a generation gathered for one evening around what remains of their adolescence.

At the entrance to the arena, the T-shirts worn by those present tell the story of a collective ritual. Linkin Park dominate (fresh from the massive crowd they played to just a few weeks earlier on the very same lawn), along with Green Day and Bring Me The Horizon. The twenty-something university students are sporting purple and black striped gloves and small black lace parasols to shield themselves from the sun. For them, ‘emo’ is not a poorly healed wound of youth or the memory of being bullied at school because of a black pencil line under their eyes, as it was for others twenty years ago. It is a faded snapshot of an era that, for them, has never truly been lost.

Then, finally, the lights go down and the show begins. And it’s not just a concert: over the years, My Chemical Romance have crafted a theatrical spectacle in which the music is inseparable from the narrative. For the first hour and a half, the band performs “The Black Parade” in its entirety. On stage, Gerard Way and his bandmates once again don the ‘military death parade’ uniforms that made that era iconic. But this time, the set design transforms into a contemporary nightmare. A huge, high-tech eye constantly watches the band, whilst on the LED walls a digital Big Brother monitors their every move. It is a scene that seems to reflect the present rather than 2006. Twenty years ago, those teenagers sought refuge from the gaze of others, in forums, chat rooms and small local gatherings. Today, that same generation lives within a screen that records, catalogues and displays images of itself.

But true liberation comes when this construct crumbles. After “Famous Last Words”, the stage seems to go up in flames. The special effects slowly consume the parade set, and what remains is a band freed from costumes, uniforms and the weight of the persona they have built for themselves. There is no longer a funeral for adolescence; there is simply a rock band returning to play. The circle is complete with “The Ghost of You”, “Ambulance”, “Helena” and, above all, the collective roar of “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)”, the phrase that twenty years ago became the rallying cry of millions of teenagers convinced, at least for a few minutes, that they didn’t belong where they were.

It is the same young people from back then who are singing it today, just a few years older. Fathers with aching knees after hours on their feet, mothers glancing at their watches as they think of the babysitter, families making their way away from the crowd. For some, it is a homecoming; for others, their first encounter with a world that seemed long forgotten. The pain of adolescence hasn’t gone away: it has simply changed form, becoming work, deadlines, children, and the feeling of never quite having made it. When the lights come back on at the Visarno Arena, all that remains are the black T-shirts, phones full of notifications, and the feeling that growing up doesn’t necessarily mean leaving behind who you once were.