Rebirth of the Pop-Punk Golden Era
And how the Foundations of Decay tour serves as the foundation for the second coming of the Emo Era
For those familiar with the pop-punk music genre, it’s almost impossible to ignore this current resurgence of the genre with classics such as Pierce the Veil, Paramore, and others reuniting, releasing new music, and returning on tour. However, one cannot help but ask what exactly began this renaissance era of music. While looking at the Wikipedia data regarding some of these infamous emo groups, one group certainly stands out above all, and this group is none other than My Chemical Romance.
My Chemical Romance had initially split up in 2013 due to some personal conflict within the band, and each respective musician had begun creating their own music. However, in 2016 had released a teaser regarding one of their albums “Welcome To The Black Parade”, which left fans believing the group might tour together once more. For years, there was some radio silence until on October 31st, 2019 the band announced one final reunion tour, leaving long-time devotees elated. This was huge for the community as so many, myself included, had always been too young to be able to see these groups live themselves. However, this victory at the moment felt short-lived as the group performed once in Las Vegas on December 20th of that same year before having to postpone the tour due to the rise of the Covid Pandemic. This tour specifically was postponed for over two years, leaving fans wondering what was going on exactly. However, in this time closer to 2022 it was rumored that the group had accepted a headlining spot at the “When We Were Young” festival in Las Vegas leaving fans once again optimistic. They would be headlining with Paramore, another very well-known and beloved band on October 22nd, 2022.
Before delving into the raw numbers themselves it is important to answer the question “Why Wikipedia?”. Wikipedia is a large digital space containing information surrounding a profound amount of topics that are most notably run by the community and those who care to edit those spaces. Wikipedia is a website so many go to for surface-level information surrounding a topic, and allows the data to actually be retrieved regarding page views, how many editors there are for a page, and page edits. This is a way to essentially track interest in a certain topic if one pulls the page view data and analyzes those numbers because the more page views there are in a day the more individuals are looking the same thing up thus accumulating interest. By comparing the page view statistics per day over the last six years its thus possible to gauge a large-scale interest from the community, especially combining data from a number of different groups that are also seemingly regaining a second wind such as Blink-192, Pierce the Veil, Paramore, Arctic Monkeys, and Evanescence.
The most notable portion of the presented data is the absolute spike in search queries once My Chemical Romance resumed their reunion tour on May 16th, 2022 only days after they released their single “The Foundations of Decay” on May 12th, 2022. Naturally, the group posted a large amount of content on their social media profiles promoting the shows they had been doing, and the data spike following the rest of these groups demonstrates that this group in particular left fans of other bands wondering where their long-time musical heroes had gone, sparking interest once again in the emo community. Looking at the data after May 12th, 2022 there is a notable increase overall in search queries from these bands, essentially during the time period when My Chemical Romance is on tour in both Europe and the US. The markers on each chart are also temporal indications regarding the rest of the groups and when they announced their own respective tour dates, all following the announcement of My Chemical Romance’s tour and the majority of said announcements occurring during the US leg of the MCR tour.
Comparing the data above and the notable dates listed in regard to the other tour announcements, it’s hard to deny the social-cultural impact My Chemical Romance has, and how their actions have influenced those in other similarly themed groups. The data was collected from each respective group’s Wikipedia pages while the dates themselves were individually researched and marked. Naturally, groups such as Blink-182 and others with a historically more significant following may not naturally adhere to the same search query curve as some other groups. However, even they still fall in line with these trends as noted by their own tour announcement date. This study could have been more expansive if the dates circulated all the way back to 2013 when My Chemical Romance first split, however it still captures the wholistic timeline encapsulating this pop-punk resurgence. It’s difficult to say My Chemical Romance single-handedly inspired this current pop-punk renaissance period. However, what can be said definitively is their own actions as a band have certainly led other groups to act accordingly while also accumulating interest from their loyal followers. My Chemical Romance has had a sturdy fanbase since the band’s formation in 2001 following the aftermath of 9/11 and has only grown with time while the band themselves have also grown. However, how are the fans reacting to this musical resurgence of the group? This was something I wanted to expand upon due to both how active and passionate the fanbase is.
With their first album “I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love” in 2002, their musical style has shifted since as the group went on to produce a number of songs and albums, each with their own unique feel. With these albums, it’s only natural that fans prefer some songs that the band produces over others. It can also depend on when one actually starts to be a fan of the group as well as what songs they were introduced to in even what context. For example, their song “Teenagers” has always been vastly popular with those that don’t really know the group, meanwhile, those who have been long-time fans actually dislike that song due to how overrated it is in their eyes, there are so many better options. This is only natural though regarding people’s feelings toward their music and artistry. However, I wanted to first see if the group going on tour or even the announcement of the tour increased any of the pageviews regarding all of the songs the band had put out. I hypothesized their newest single would probably have a lot of attention on that page since it was the first music to be released by the group in years. However, I was surprised by these visuals and results.
Granted, there are a plethora of songs on the entire Wikipedia My Chemical Romance category page, but it looked like there was a spike in pageviews specifically in late 2022, which is when the US portion of the Foundations of Decay tour began. This can be cross-referenced to one of the above charts with the time stamps showing near the start of the US portion. I was pleasantly surprised to see their song “Teenagers” as their top searched song, but instead seemed to be one of the pink songs. After further research, I found their top viewed page was not a song of their own but instead a cover of the song “Under Pressure” by the used. This was interesting to me because I hadn’t heard of it until this project. Some of their other top songs that were viewed were songs such as “Teenagers”, “Welcome to the Black Parade” and “Helena”. There was a noticeable spike in page views for their most recent single “Foundations of Decay” as seen by the late 2022 spike in views and interest peaked. This shows a visual and positive fan reception to the band going back on tour, which further strengthens the argument of the band’s impact. However, there was one last aspect I was curious about which was the statistics of songs played during the tour and if any of that data correlated with the wiki page view data.
With how active the fanbase is, I did some digging to find the Google Spreadsheet listing every song that was played at every show during the US portion of the tour. I was able to reach out to the creator of the spreadsheet @skyphlox on Twitter who let me use the sheet for data analysis. I made a copy of the spreadsheet and cleaned up some of the data before importing it as a CSV file and went straight to work. Above, is a chart of every song played on the tour and every day of the tour from August 20th, 2022 to October 29th, 2022. If a song was played during one of the shows then it was given a score of 1.0. If not, it had a score of 0.0. This is how the data was sorted and organized to visualize which songs were played on which days and how to represent when one song was played during a show while another was not. Needless to say, I was surprised by what I saw. Below are smaller versions of the song charts in a more digestible manner.
Naturally, I expected the song “Foundations of Decay” to likely be played at every show but I was actually wrong on this assumption. The band played the songs “Welcome to the Black Parade”, “Not Okay”, “Teenagers”, “Famous Last Words” and “Na Na Na” 38 times during the tour while only playing “Foundations of Decay” 37 times. This in my eyes made sense as a majority of these songs were off the album “The Black Parade”, which below can be seen to be considered a fan favorite based on the number of daily views the album’s Wikipedia page has. I was also pleasantly surprised to see a number of their B-Side album songs such as “Desert Song” off their “Life on the Murder Scene” album (Which is a B-Side to Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge) played five times and even songs such as “Demolition Lovers” played more than once which has not been played since 2004. This is interesting given the page views on the album “I Brought you My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love”, as well as the placement of some of these songs on the larger Wikipedia individual song pages. However, based on these statistics, there is certainly a correlation between the page view statistics and the songs played during the tour.
Having moments where one hears a song the band hasn’t played in over eighteen years certainly brought a lot of joy and energy to the fans that were there and even fans who tuned in online. My Chemical Romance has filled the hearts of many throughout the years, and their return only strengthens their fanbase as shown by the visual spikes of page views regarding everything ‘MCR’ on Wikipedia, band member pages included. Within the next two years who can say what may transpire in the emo pop-punk music community? Bands and groups certainly come and go, as nothing lasts forever. However, it’s clear groups like My Chemical Romance are in fact “not afraid to keep on living”, as stated in their song “Famous Last Words” which can also be said about this new revival of the pop-punk era. Their impact is monumental, and will absolutely go down in history.
