‘The kids from yesterday’: My chemical romance’s first when we were young festival performance and playing with ageing, outsider identities and nostalgia

Hubbard, Rachel

Abstract

My Chemical Romance’s (MCR) first headline performance at the When We Were Young (WWWY) festival in Las Vegas in October 2022 offered a rich and playful visual presentation of their history as a band. They played with multiple visual representations of youth and ageing that linked both to their visual and thematic history through stage costumes and merch design and with the notion of selling out by playing this commercial exploitation of nostalgia for lost youth. This article offers insights from the author – an older, queer female fan from the United Kingdom who attended this performance as a late-coming MCR fan. The MCR performance is examined in relation to WWWY as a festival of nostalgia, as a location for multiple fan identities, for example, gender, queerness and age and as a commercial enterprise, in the context of the often-fraught notion in punk-related scenes of ‘selling out’. The conclusion is that the nostalgic experience of a festival like WWWY was exploited by MCR as a setting for satire of their return as a band in middle age, for nostalgic festival goers and for fans of the band, where some of the insider/outsider tensions represented by the band remained.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jun 19, 2024
• Online Publication Date: Dec 20, 2024
• Publication Date: Sep 30, 2024
• Deposit Date: Dec 22, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 1, 2025
• Journal: Journal of Fandom Studies, The
• Print ISSN: 2046-6692
• Publisher: Intellect
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 2-3
• Pages: 201-221
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/jfs_00099_1
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/13540634