10 Perfect Rock Songs Of The 2000s

For most of the '00s, the emo brand of rock and roll felt more and more like a joke than anything else. As much as bands like Fall Out Boy may have had some genuinely great hooks behind them, there was still a good portion of fans who couldn't look the eyeliner and the over the top melodrama behind every one of these songs. Yes, this was a moody genre most of the time, and sometimes the only way to get people to listen is to hit them where it hurts.

When My Chemical Romance were first working on the record the Black Parade, the idea was to tell a story of a man dealing with a terminal cancer diagnosis and dissecting his state of mind as he faces mortality. Coming at the midway point of the record, Welcome to the Black Parade is the kind of song that you get once every generation, combining every piece of of rock's past and bringing it to the present to construct something entirely new. As death comes to this man in the form of a Black Parade, the song keeps a sense of optimism, as the rest of his family promise to carry on his memory long after he's gone.

In just 5 minutes, it feels like you're getting a crash course in everything that makes rock beautiful, from the loud guitars kicking everything off to the group chants in the chorus to the Broadway like melodies that cap everything off at the end of the song. For all of the song's context, this is not a song about death. This is about what it means to be alive, and anyone who appreciates rock can find something to love in this song.