"American Idiot" by Green Day
It was October 2004 and my mother was driving me to the seventh/eighth grade dance in the passenger’s seat of my family’s white 2001 Jeep Cherokee. I wanted to be a rock star - had you seen by black Fender Squire Strat!?!? - and at every turn took great pains to demonstrate my will. This meant getting my mom to buy me black, baggy pants at Hot Topic with like 15 zippers on each leg. This meant obsessively listening to the compact discs my sister had given me Christmas 2003: Sum 41’s seminal Does This Look Infected? and (with slightly less enthusiasm due to its significantly harsher quality) Punk-O-Rama Vol. 2. This also meant listening to DC101, which kept bands like Incubus, Pearl Jam and The Foo Fighters in heavy rotation. Occasionally, however, a gem would come on. That night, waiting at a red stoplight on Twinbrook Parkway, I got lucky.
A cutting guitar, then a moist band, then: “Don’t wanna be an American Idiot / Don’t want a nation under the new media.” I’d heard my friend Jonah talk about how something called “Jesus of Suburbia” was his favorite. “And can you hear the sound of hysteria? / The subliminal mind— America.”
“Oh, who is this?” my mom asked.
“It’s Green Day, I think,” although I already knew. Their black and red hand grenade advertising had already captivated me. They fucking were rock and roll.
“Oh. I’ve heard of them.”
An election was a month away that we all (as a seventh grader I was well versed in the evils of George W. Bush - thanks Michael Moore!) hoped would go a different way than it eventually would, and the “liberal elite media” was doing its best to pile on. And had I been the cynical, pseudo-intellectual, twenty eight year old hipster that I am now back then I likely would have dismissed all of the standing around on soapboxes as piling on with nothing original to say. After all, the sentiments behind “Fuck the government for going to war” and “Don’t be a follower” are as old as they are easy to get behind, and, well, follow. The Washington Post review of Green Day’s concert at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland also pointed this out, and it pissed me the fuck off, because at that point I was a dyed-in-the-wool Green Day fan (but mostly American Idiot) and John Kerry had lost.
I was not alone because American Idiot was the perfect album for a 13-year-old suburban liberal kid in 2004. It was edgy and made my parents uncomfortable - Billie Joe Armstrong used the f-word and my mother ask/told me in the way that only parents can, “You’re not going to use that kind of language, right?” - but it was also relatively “clean” and “wholesome.” It was a bunch of rich, white men singing about love conquering all even in the face of abject media disillusionment to middle-to-upper-class white kids so it all made sense. It was the musical equivalent of going to the movies for the first time with your friends, and pretending you were unsupervised, even as your dad slept through most of Spider Man 2 in the back of the theater. It was the appearance of danger and independence with all of the actual danger and independence removed.
American Idiot inspired me, and so I learned how to play a power chord, bought a black button up shirt and a red tie and started to resent my parents for my upper-middle class upbringing: what do you write about when everything in your life has been pretty okay? I had no idea so I wrote about class-struggle, income inequality, the war effort, HIV (thanks, Rent) and the dangers of doing drugs: “Something was wrong / Made you think things were hopeless / Something was wrong / Made you think you should take drugs.”
I wish that “Whatever Didi Wants” wasn’t the only song that I enjoyed listening to on Punk-O-Rama Vol. 2, or that I got into any number of bands back “when they were good,” but that’s just not the way that things worked out. My mom gave me Weezer’s The Red Album and I actually really enjoyed listening to it. I wish that I wasn’t so desperate to fit in and I wish that I was smarter. None of this wishing does anything, but it’s also incorrect to not recognize how much I was influenced by mediocrity and safety.
I had nothing to be scared of and so I invented things to be scared of and the best thing about invented, scary things is that there is no proving they don’t exist. You can stew, and spiral and nobody can convince you otherwise. In 2004, I knew that my parents were going to get a divorce. I knew I was a weird kid that no girl would ever be interested in so it was better that I just stand off to the sideline and look at boobs. I knew that the only way that I would matter would be if I one day became Bille Joe Armstrong - became Green Day. Then it would all make sense. Then everyone would be jealous. Then I’d have a story to tell.
Until then…
