I've found a laptop to borrow, so I can post on the blog, even if I can't put up an articles or anything, because I'm in Nevada and my computer is in California. Here's a long post I wrote mostly on a pad of paper when I thought I wouldn't have any computer access for the whole trip!
I used to listen to the radio a lot. In high school, I listened to the dying strains of grunge rock as well as the faint echoes of the hyper liberal punk rock movement, now missing its Reagan-Bush anti-figurehead. Until high school, I lived with my dad in Michigan, burying myself in books, computers, anything that would stave off classmates taunting me for being poor, being uptight, being a nerd. I wanted to move to California for so long, when I finally got there I wasn't entirely sure what to do with it. Attitudes, the weather, social behaviors; it was different. And then there was the usual inability to deal with physical and mental changes brought on the heartless mechanisms of puberty, oh yeah, and not being able to get a girl became a more important issue.
So I listened to music, I read, I sat at the computer, and I played video games. I freely admit much of the music I listened to then was angsty and relied heavily on fewer than five chords at a time. That's okay, because that's all I was looking for musically. I was also looking for certain lyrical content, and while angst was not a necessary component, it helped. What I really wanted was some fire, some anger. Even Nirvana at its lowest, heroin-tinged ebb had that capacity for outrage that I needed. Even the mostly acoustic
Nirvana Unplugged album had that undertone of being pretty pissed off.
I recently discovered a cache of old emails from high school, and I found numerous letters that went back and forth between me and a girl a couple years older than me who lived in Canada. We talked a lot about Green Day. I know what you're thinking, but don't start bitching yet. Just hear me out. These emails reminded me of a time when I really cared about Green Day, and hearing their new(ish) song on the radio just disgusted me the other day, and seeing a (pathetic) music video while trying to watch reruns of
Daria the night before last only compounded the issue.
I first heard about Green Day in the
Kerplunk! days, the Look Out! Records days. That makes sense, because I started spending my summers in California regularly in 1990, and my first trip to the state was promptly after my Kindergarden graduation. The Look Out! punk pop/ska punk movement was and is centered around the bay area. I also first heard Operation Ivy around this time, and though I fucking loathe most ska/punk (cue Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Reel Big Fish, and other such sewage that turned me off commercial radio in the first place), I still like Op Ivy. And I liked Green Day a lot back then. But you know, I was in maybe 7th grade, and as soon as I got back to Michigan, that music vanished.
People outside of the Detroit music scene at the time may have a hard time relating it to their own experiences in the early 90's. That's okay. I'll break it down for you. There was a
lot of techno and rap. A
lot. I'm not talking like the west coast NWA scene. I'm not talking like the east coast Tribe Called Quest scene. I mean, yeah, we heard both of those in Michigan, but there was just an overwhelming amount of local stuff. So much so that it was actually played pretty regularly on the commercial stations, believe it or not, especially on what was then 96.3 Jams. This station has since become a bad "Alternative Rock" station (whatever that means, since "alternative" began as a nicer synonym for grunge rock, but is still around even though grunge is quite dead). Then the station briefly became a talk station, and I hear now it's a country music station or something. I don't know; I can't keep up with Michigan radio stations when I've lived in California full time for ten years. Anyway, all this rap and techno did not leave much room for punk of any sort. And yeah, I mean, there were rock stations playing grunge. Absolutely. Nirvana was on the radio. I remember a big press event the day Kurt Cobain died.
But there wasn't any punk until a year or so after Cobain's death, and grunge was starting to lose steam. In my last year living in Michigan, Op Ivy's remains had become Rancid, and along with Green Day, I heard them both on the radio in Michigan. Wow, that was a weird feeling. I had one friend in school at the amazingly small Mayville Middle School 8th grade class who was also interested in this music, and we listened to Green Day together. I can tell you what appealed to us about it. The music was simple and catchy, and we thought the lyrics were great. (And believe me, my dad had made music education a required part of my life; I was practicing the fucking saxophone once a day whether I fucking wanted it or not, so I was very aware of just how simple the music was.) Oh yes, and the guitars were distorted and really loud, which is something we also liked about grunge. But I do have to say that the bass factors into it quite a bit, too, even if it isn't distorted. Look at the bassline in
Longview.
Why did we like the lyrics? Well, part of it was definitely that they swore a lot. We were still at the place in our lives were swearing was taboo, and listening to other people swear was definitely a subtle form of rebellion. In fact, listening to music so simple a hamster could write it was probably also a form of rebellion against a dad who was making me enter contests playing
Take Five and fucking
Für Elise on the saxophone. There was more to it than that, though. The lyrics were also angry, and kind of depressed. And hey, that's how teenagers feel a lot of the time. Admit it. You were the same way. Or if you're a teenager and reading this now, you are the same way, and will be writing me an angry email soon. Follow that urge.
There's a couple more aspects to the lyrics that we liked. There was a lot about being bored (and if you've ever lived in a small town in Michigan, you can relate), and a weird thread that ran through the lyrics about sex/growing up, which is definitely something that was an issue when I was 13 or 14.
So let's actually go examine some lyrics, again using
Longview as an example.
"I sit around and watch the tube/But nothing's on/I change the channel for an hour or two". Okay, Michigan is really fucking boring, especially when you're a teenager and it's winter. You watch TV not so much because you like TV or what's on, but more to kill time until you go to sleep, so you can get up and go to a school that you hate. "Twiddle my thumbs just for a bit/I'm sick of all the same old shit/In a house with unlocked doors/And I'm fucking lazy". Yeah, that was basically what it was like. Really bored. I lived by my mom's sarcastic mantra of "same shit, different day", and in a nowhere town like Mayville, no one locked their doors, and I just sat on my ass all day. I mean, frankly, what were my options? It's not like we could go clubbing or something.
The part that really got us rocking was of course the chorus, especially the last version of it. "Bite my lip and close my eyes/Slippin' away to paradise/I'm so damn bored I'm going blind/And loneliness has to suffice". Yeah, bored out of our fucking minds, with no potential for girls whatsoever. Mayville Middle School had pretty slim pickings for the female population, and besides, none of them would talk to us anyway. We were riff raff. I mean, we were the nerds who confused everyone by listening to punk. I guess we were supposed to listen to Barry Manilow or something, but feeling alienated and disenfranchised is all too frequently a part of being a nerd. Why wouldn't this music appeal to us?
Now, when I heard this "new" Green Day song on the radio,
Boulevard of Broken Dreams I commented, "I remember when Green Day used to be a punk band." And it's true. I do. What they are now is something else. It's the culmination of a process of watering down that began somewhere in
nimrod. and continued through
Warning and whatever the album between
Warning and
American Idiot was. They are not a punk band. They are adult contemporary.
Let's do some lyrical analysis again, this time on
Boulevard of Broken Dreams (which is a lyric I heard from Deadsy three years ago, by the way, in a much better song).
"I walk a lonely road/The only one that I have ever known/Don't know where it goes/But it's home to me and I walk alone". Okay, look, first of all, this lacks some necessary authenticity. Green Day. How many records have you sold? How much money have you made? Your road is not fucking lonely. Maybe you could say this in the Look Out! days, but back then you were writing about how girls didn't like you. Beyond that, those are some dull fucking lyrics.
Look, I was 13 when I first started listening to Green Day. I'm 23 now. Ten years have passed. I know I am no longer the angsty nerd stuck in a small town in Michigan looking for a girl worth lusting over. Punk fucking rock lyrics have to appeal to one of two things as far as I'm concerned, they better speak to my inner angsty teen, or they better fucking have some complex sociopolitical commentary, and no, saying you think Bush is lame does not fucking cut it. Crass fits more politics into a 3 minute song that you guys do into an entire album.
So far we have established that Billie Joe, a guy with two bandmates who have been at his side non-stop for more than ten years, not to mention the zillions of fans, walks alone.
"I walk this empty street/On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams/Where the city sleeps/and I'm the only one and I walk alone". And that's basically the exact same thing over again. Right. We're getting nowhere, except now we have the "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" bit.
Allow me a brief aside to show you Deadsy's lyrics from the 1999 song,
The Key to Gramercy Park. "Every night/Looking for the fight/Thoughts on the left/The action's on the right/As you know, the id wasn't meant to be starved/Face white/Revenge of the Hittites/When you're inside/And you thought to take a walk in the park/Think someone is about to be carved/From the other side of the under scene/To the boulevard of broken dreams/To find a way to Gramercy Park".
There's a lot more to unpack from this song than Green Day's. First of all, it meets the teenage quota by being angry and talking about violence and being of two minds. It also talks about the id, a psychological concept from Sigmund Freud. Basically the id is all the dark parts of your psyche. While this is hardly beyond junior college Psychology 101, it's a much more complex idea than walking a fucking lonely road, you fucking whiners. There's also the bits about the "under scene" are probably referring to Freud's "other". Also, there's stuff about the left brain and right brain, and it's also pretty interesting because the left brain is supposed to be the creative side.
Let's talk about the Hittites, which were an ancient tribe that managed to get control from Mesopotamia to Syria from 1600-1200 BC, or BCE if you're a fucking pussy who can't handle a reference to Christ in your measurements of time. They were basically ancient badasses, credited with inventing iron, which they used almost soley for the purpose of making more weapons to kick ass with. Why are they in the song? Well, a lot of the song is about dealing with anger, but Deadsy also has a motive of trying to encourage education, as odd as that sounds. Their debut album (which the song is from), was even called
Commencement. Now, I'm not trying to say Deadsy is a punk band (they're not; they're sort of half-neo synth pop, half punk industrial, and since I'm good at making up genres, I should be a zine writer!), but I am saying that Green Day's song is weak, and uses the same lyric to lackluster effect.
Getting back to the Green Day song, "I walk alone/I walk alone/I walk alone/I walk a...". Boy. That is some profound writing, and not at all different than the other lines I already commented on from the same song. Look, repeating the same thing over and over is a technique that works in comedy, where each instance of a running gag gets funnier. This is not fucking comedy. This is a song from a supposedly punk rock band. Since there is so little to the music, punk rock
really needs to get a lot of mileage out of its lyrics. And this, my friends, is not pulling it off.
"My shadow's the only one that walks beside me/My shallow heart's the only thing/That's beating/Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me/'Til then I walk alone". Gee. This is really going places. This is once again the same fucking thing over and over. YOU'RE ALONE! WE FUCKING GET IT! MOVE THE FUCK ON!
Longview, which was a song about being bored, had 20 times more content in half as many words.
"Ah-ah/Ah-ah/Ah-ah/Aaah-ah/Ah-ah/Ah-ah/Ah-ah". Aha. It's the old rock and roll standby. When you run out of lyrics, just go, "ah-ah!" or "yeah! yeah!" It works for U2! The problem is that before U2 resorted to that, there were actually lyrics other than 50 variations on one line. WE KNOW YOU WALK ALONE, MOTHERFUCKER.
"I'm walking down the line/That divides me somewhere in my mind/On the border line/Of the edge and where I walk alone". Okay, we have a line that
might mean something. There's something there about being divided. Hey, that might play to the teenage crowd who are all confused. However, Billie Joe elects to avoid exploring this, and goes back to fucking walking alone. ARGH!
"Read between the lines/What's fucked up and everything's alright/Check my vital signs/To know I'm still alive and I walk alone". Okay, read between which lines? Is this supposed to be about Bush? Are we supposed to be relate this to the war on Iraq? We're supposed to believe they're telling us everything's okay, but it's really not? Is that it? Who knows, because Billie Joe doesn't bother to explore that idea either, and I'm desperately trying to wring meaning out of this. And before we forget, HE WALKS ALONE.
There's no point in examining any more lyrics, though, because they're all repeats of previous lyrics. So basically, the only message in this song is that a guy who has had numerous records on the top of the Billboard charts and has made roughly five jillion dollars walks alone, despite his many supporters, including his new audience of bland adults who want unchallenging music to make their dull work days slide by a little more quickly. UGH.
Let me take the time to address something I keep hearing people say. They keep talking about how
American Idiot is Green Day returning to punk rock, attacking the conservative government. Let me take a crack at that. Green Day was
never that kind of punk rock. They were pop punk. They wrote songs about girls hating them and songs about being an alienated teenage shit. They were on Look Out! for God's sake! They were no Crass, they weren't even fakeass anarchists like the Sex Pistols. So there's no return involved.
Furthermore, this is the most softball attack on Bush I've seen from music. Off the top of my head, the generally awful but much more dangerous Radiohead album,
Hail To The Thief was much more direct, and Skinny Puppy's most obviously titled album yet,
The Greater Wrong of the Right, is both brilliant musically and a nasty, nasty little assault on Bush. Why would you listen to, "I walk alone" when you could listen to, "Everything is wrapped up tight/Every little thing that is discovered/Did it ever really happen/Attached in awe/What a whiplash hate filled culture of viruses/Born raised and infected with violent thought". Maybe because it's much harder to hear, and maybe it has something to do with Skinny Puppy's touring theatrics, including staged executions of effigies of the heads of state. Do you want to hear that your culture has raised you to violence? Green Day collects accolades for their limpwristed critique, and Skinny Puppy is ignored for their knife to the face. America depresses me sometimes.
I tried
really hard to continue liking Green Day. Hey, I still like Nirvana! But I just fucking can't. This song is just tripe. There is nothing going on musically or lyrically, and the delivery has all the verve of a corpse. I should have seen this coming a long time ago. I liked a lot of the songs on
nimrod., even to this day, but there was a warning sign right there.
It was my least favorite song on the entire album, the sappy
Good Riddance (Time of Your Life). This was the exact point when the wussification began. This is the start of the death of Green Day the punk band and the beginning of Green Day the adult contemporary band. This song is so bland and safe that they played it at my high school graduation. The lyrics, "So take the photographs, and still frames in your mind/Hang it on a shelf of good health and good time/Tattoos of memories and dead skin on trial/For what it's worth, it was worth all the while/I hope you had the time of your life" were supposed to remind us of the good times and bad of high school. But that's not what I remember. I remember the wrenching confusion, the rejection, the alienation. Yeah, there were some good times. But they were few and far between, and it was mostly a myself and a few likeminded others huddling together, trying to survive the maelstrom occurring around us.
Guess what? College was much, much, much, much better. I do not look on high school with sentimentality. I look on high school with distate. The lyrics that remind me of high school are, "My eyes feel like I'm gonna bleed/Dried up and bulging out my skull/A crooked spine/My senses dulled/Fucked up and spun in my room/On my own/Here we go!" Can I have that Green Day back? I can't guarantee I'd buy more albums from an angry, disenfranchised Green Day, but I can guarantee I wont buy any from the Green Day we have now.
