on to the next...
An inquest in Maidstone has heard that Hannah Bond, a 13 year-old girl from Kent, committed suicide by hanging herself - and emo music has been blamed.
Roger Sykes, the coroner who gave the verdict of suicide yesterday (May 7), suggested that the fact that Bond was an obsessive fan of such music was linked to her death.
The inquest heard that Bond had discussed with friends the "glamour" of suicide, and was obsessed with American band My Chemical Romance. She had a picture of an emo girl with bloody wrists on her Bebo page.
Bond's father Ray explained that his daughter had had an episode of self-harm prior to her suicide, which she told him was an emo initiation ceremony.
Her mother Heather Bond, also provided some background on her interest in the genre explaining: "There are [emo] websites that show pink teddies hanging themselves. She called emo a fashion and I thought it was normal. Hannah was a normal girl. She had loads of friends. She could be a bit moody but I thought it was just because she was a teenager."
However as he gave the verdict of suicide, coroner Sykes criticised the genre saying: "The emo overtones concerning death and associating it with glamour I find very disturbing."
If you're not already aware, this is not the first time MCR has been attacked like this. The last time it was in some crappy tabloid, but many people took it very seriously. Probably this will be kept pretty quiet here in the states, but I can only imagine what the reaction will be in the UK.
Everybody's got it all wrong.
"Emo initiation ceremony"? I'm sure there's some cracked up people out on the internet who would convince people of this. "Emo" isn't a cult, it's a label, a stereotype, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were some people trying to make it a cult. And, yes, there are some people who believe they need to cut themselves to fit in. This was her problem. Gerard Way said that he once saw a girl in the audience with cuts all over her arms. He said he thought it was sad that she felt she needed to harm herself in order to fit in.
MCR does not support this.
At the end of the video for "Teenagers," there is a short message from MCR - "violence is not the answer."
MCR does not support this.
"The emo overtones concerning death and associating it with glamour I find very disturbing."
Now, I'm not really big on "emo." I'm actually unsure of the actual meaning of the word, and I have a fascination with trying to find a definitive meaning for it. You may or may not label me as an emo kid, but (in case you couldn't already tell), I am a huge fan of My Chemical Romance. And I know firsthand how their music affects people.
Sure, The Black Parade is full of death, but it's about learning to not fear death, and at the same time, not fearing life. That very same album saved my own life, and changed it for the better. I'm one of thousands.
Go watch their documentary, Life On The Murder Scene. In the very beginning, Frank Iero says, "We're definitely a band that wants to save your life." Glamorous suicide, indeed.
This isn't to say that people who are MCR fans won't commit suicide. It happens, obviously - they're not a surefire cure. They've helped an enormous amount of people, but do you ever hear about that in the papers? Hardly.
My point is, you've got it all wrong. This girl's problem was not that she listened to My Chemical Romance. Her problem was that she thought she needed to harm herself, and that suicide was somehow glamorous.
The wrong people have been incriminated.
