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[raccoon-writings]

The Effect of Cubicles  an essay about my chemical romances song cubicles:

My Chemical Romance released I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love in 2002. It’s a messy yet passionate start to kick off their catalog of concept albums. Lyrically, Bullets reads like an anthology. Telling tales of two lovers, addicted and infected, by pills and vampires, until death do them part when they are shot dead. It has a variety of stories and goes through many different moods. All set in a punk rock, basement recorded world.

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Because of its variety, it's not uncommon to hear any of the songs off it as someone’s favorite My Chemical Romance song. Though one song always sparks controversy- “Cubicles.” It has a polarizing reputation, with one side loving its embrace of loneliness and the path to get there. The other side only hearing overdone emo whining.

The album begins with “Romance,” an acoustic guitar intro. From there, the second song builds with sharp distorted electric guitar and classic punk drumming, taking us into the terrorized, angry heart of the album. The records A-side follows two lovers fighting to stay alive in a world of vampires while learning to trust each other. “Drowning Lessons” shows these lovers as one kills the other time and time again. When we reach the end of the A-side we get the first song solely about this rough sketch of a main character, “Headfirst for Halos.”

Set with high pace anger and poignant quiet sections, the album has a consistent drama. Even though most songs are different in how they express that drama, the whole picture stays cohesive with its intensity. Two songs, “Early Sunsets Over Monroeville'' and “Demolition Lovers,” travel through crescendos that build slowly throughout the entire song. While others like “Our Lady of Sorrows” and “Headfirst for Halos” stay at an in-your-face tempo. The individual stories in each song are fully committed to. That consistent intensity is what makes Bullets work so well.

When the listener reaches the B-side, they find not another short story, but “Skylines and Turnstiles.” It’s about 9/11. It’s an offering of consolation with depictions of what singer, Gerard Way, saw that day. It's the only other song set unarguably in the real world. Yet it still fits it nicely into the album by staying with the drama. Additionally, its placement as the first B-side recognizes how different the story being told is compared to the others. It’s a thematic break, a checkpoint. The listener has to manually flip over the record and replace the needle to get to it.

After two more fiction-based songs, we now reach “Cubicles.” Placed right after one of the most genuinely happy songs, and right before on the most storybook intense songs. It’s the second to last song on the album. “Cubicles” is about the unnoticed writer and his crush. Detailing an office romance that never was, as the love interest switched jobs before the character has the courage to make a move. Its stakes are shockingly low as Way details photocopying and sterile views. Similar to the other two crescendoing songs, it too builds into a declaration of wanting to die alone.

“Cubicles” presents the listener with another tonal shift. It disrupts the onslaught of fantasy to show a dull reality. “Cubicles” romance is already on a small scale and when compared to the other songs, it’s almost comical. After it establishes itself as being lower stakes, the statement piece kicks in, “I think I’m gonna die alone.” It inflates itself by claiming that it is as big as the others. The other crescendoing songs had the stakes to pull this off, “Cubicles” doesn’t. It values this feeling, this longing and awkward pain, on the same level as loss and addiction. But maybe that’s part of the point.

The character realizes at the end of the song that these little life moments can be pieced together to be this overwhelming thing that takes over his life. He’s not just speaking about the one crush, it’s the many others that have also been replaced. While a lot of the verse lyrics focus on the daydreams of the writer, the chorus emphasizes what took away the love interest. It’s a short chorus with a subtle message about their non-stop corporate workplace. The three-by-four workers are constantly being replaced creating this emotional hole. “It happens all the time.” As Alice Maney puts it,

“Like to the system, everyone is just a cog in the machine, but for the people working in the system it matters who’s next to them, they create social connections that get ripped away and replaced.”

This gives the song more depth. It’s not just about insignificant crushes, it’s about the overarching nature of his workplace. It’s able to take something small and see the connections to the rest of his life.

Let’s look at Bullets without Cubicles for a minute. This makes nearly every song have a fictional or life threatening story to them. All of the songs are so saturated in theatrics that at some point it can become a blur. The intensity solidifies its identity but it also makes this high point of tension flat line.. There’s nothing to shock the listener back.

“Cubicles” shatters that and makes it bigger. Theatrical and down to earth. It’s the only honest song about a boring life. Where the romances aren’t star-crossed, they’re watercooler. Where they don’t end with being shot in the desert, they’re constantly ending when people quit and are replaced. It makes the album theatrical and down to earth.

“[It’s like] wanting romance and a real connection but everyone sucks and nothing ever works out so you just kill that dream but doing so you kill a large part of yourself and living doesn’t feel worth it anymore- and then it kicks into “Demolition Lovers”.”

Says Summer Johnson.

And yet these huge revelations about the character can be born out of his mundane job. Only then does the song aggregate into a complicated tragedy. We see a normal man descend into loneliness. This carries us into the grand finale of the album, a six minute epic where the lovers are murdered once again. “Cubicles”  amplifies the climax creating a certain kind of finality to the deaths that can’t be achieved without it. It breaks the cycle to prepare the listener for this instead of just having the last song glaze over.

“Cubicles” is a break from all of the fiction to hear about the guy who might as well be daydreaming the whole album. In comparison it might feel whiny but it breaks up the album to re-engage the listener before sending them off to the last song. It's not the most well-crafted My Chemical Romance song but it doesn’t have to be for its place on Bullets to be undeniable.

a/n: thank you for reading! quotes by me friendz <33