My Chemical Romance’s emo opus The Black Parade is ten years old this year, and inexplicably, they’ve chosen to “celebrate” this fact by offering up the sort-of-title-track “Welcome to the Black Parade” to Steve Aoki to remix.
Whatever your opinion on the merits of the original — I’ve always found its unashamed grandiosity to be strangely charming, and if you’re going to make something absurdly overblown, you could do worse than taking inspiration from Queen in doing so, which The Black Parade definitely does — the resultant remix is something straight out of the seventh circle of EDM hell, so much so that it’s almost a parody of bad dance remixes. Aoki replaces the song’s guitars with paint-by-numbers trance presets — including the dreaded farty synth — fannies about aimlessly with a sample of Way’s voice for a bit, and then builds up to, you’ll never guess… THE DROP.
You know things are bad when you feel outraged at the defilement of something you never especially liked in the first place, so I can only imagine how actual My Chemical Romance fans are feeling at this point. Or, in fact, I don’t have to imagine, because a quick look at Twitter suggests that my ears aren’t the only ones hurting:
As well as the premiere of the remix, Buzzfeed has a an interview with Aoki and Gerard Way, wherein Way waxes lyrical about Aoki’s work — “I loved it right away. I was like, this is really cool!” — while Aoki, asked to identify his favorite MCR song, selects two and gets both titles wrong. What a time to be alive.