Craig Schuftan’s Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone!: The Romantic Movement, Rock & Roll, and the End of Civilisation as We Know It is not only a great title for a book, but an absorbing study of the connections between modern pop music and its relationship with artistic traditions stretching back some two hundred years. Inspired by his attraction to the grandiose My Chemical Romance song (hey, stay with me now) “Welcome to the Black Parade”, Schuftan sets out to discover why this song hit such a nerve with him and thousands of music fans around the world. Schuftan digs through history to find the common ground between the Romantic poets of the 19th century, and modern pop punk music, and what emerges is an outline of why many of us find music such a powerful relay of emotion and solidarity.
Gerard Way has found that society, the real world, adult life-whatever you want to call it-cannot provide him with happiness or satisfaction. So he’s moved the search for happiness from outside to inside, and has found it, deep within himself, in his own dreams, his own imagination. This is what puts the romance in My Chemical Romance–the rejection of society in favour of the individual.
While Schuftan begins and ends with a focus on the lyrical and subcultural aspects of My Chemical Romance, he draws on a wealth of other cultural acts, from David Bowie to Saves the Day, Frankenstein to Edward Scissorhands, Wordsworth to the Dadaists. Using this collage technique, he manages to continually keep the reader interested as he moves swiftly from one to another, but brings each point of his argument together in a truly engaging manner. Whether he is citing a goth influenced pop punk band or a revered philosopher from the 19th century, all are treated with equal respect and importance, without the high art/low art distinction invoked.
As we contemplate art, we are able to see life–with all its striving and willing–in a detached, aesthetic way. We are freed, briefly, from the desiring that takes up so much of our time, and leaves us so unsatisfied, as we look at life from the artist’s point of view. In this way, the suffering of the world becomes bearable, and art, according to Schopenhauer, becomes our most important consolation for the pain of life.
Schuftan draws some startlingly accurate parallels, for one example, between Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s rejection of The Sorrows of Young Werther and the cult like following it inspired, and Rivers Cuomo’s rejection of the rapt devotion Weezer’s Pinkerton inspires. The way that Schuftan so subtly suggests the likeness between two cultural events leads into his premise that culture is always building upon itself, we are constantly moving backwards in order to move forwards; hinting, without saying as much, toward postmodernism in art and how audiences derive meaning from it. Not only that, but that the constant revival of cultural traditions can suggest similar social contexts, a reaction toward something unsettling within society – Enlightenment and reason for the Romantics; mass consumerism and denial of self expression in contemporary pop punk music.
Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone! sometimes comes across as on overzealous paean to My Chemical Romance, for the most part it reads like a lecture given by someone who can manage to meld the material you’re supposed to be learning about with the things you know in order to bring you to a greater understanding of both.
[The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Fora.tv has a really good hour long video of Craig Schuftan and Zan Rowe discussing his book. Most of the basic concepts of his argument are outlined here.]
