[With another
autumn upon us, a series on presences and representations of the season’s first
month in American cultural texts. Share your fall connections in comments, please!]
On what was
necessarily time-sensitive about Green Day’s concept album, and what was more
timeless.
As an aside in
this 4th of July post, I mentioned the critique leveled at Green Day’s American Idiot (2004) concept album/rock
opera by Brandon Flowers,
lead singer of The Killers. To Flowers, the album, and particularly its title
track with the repeated line “I don’t want to be an American idiot,”
represented a calculated and unnecessary bit of anti-Americanism, particularly
when the band toured with it abroad. While I take his point about audiences in
other countries singing along to that lyric, I think Flowers was more right
than he realized in linking Green Day’s song to Springsteen’s
“Born in the U.S.A.” Like that complex stadium-rock song, Green Day’s punk
rock anthem is easily oversimplified or misinterpreted, but to my mind forms
one satirical part of a socially smart and meaningful whole work.
Indeed, as an
album American Idiot is far more consistently
and cohesively linked to its moment than Springsteen’s (on which only the
opening title track and closing “My Hometown” are
overtly tied to the album’s mid-1980s moment). Indeed, if The Rising offers a definitive musical take on September 11th
(as I argued a couple weeks back), then American
Idiot is the front-runner for the
definitive musical response to the George W. Bush era more broadly. Balancing
the specific story of its everyman protagonist, “Jesus of Suburbia” (introduced
in that epic four-part song that follows the title track and moves us into the
rock opera proper), with the kinds of more thoroughly political statements made
by songs like “Holiday”
(which follows “Jesus,” immediately establishing the album’s back and forth structure),
the album highlights both the subtle and the extreme discontents of life within
Bush’s America. As a result, even the more non-specific songs like the mega-hit
“Boulevard of Broken
Dreams” become tied to those contexts—following “Jesus” and “Holiday”
directly, “Boulevard” can’t help but be read as a vision of identity and
community (or the lack thereof) in that Bushian nation and world.
Well, it can’t
help but be read that way if you’re listening to the album, anyway. As a single
on the radio (where it achieved that mega-popularity), “Boulevard” has far more
universal appeal, speaking to isolation and angst well beyond any particular
moment or context. I would argue that that’s even more true of the album’s
other ballad, “Wake Me Up
When September Ends”—because of the song’s lyrics and the way they use the
familiar imagery of summer’s end and fall’s arrival to reflect universal
experiences of loss and grief, and because of the very personal September 1982
loss (of his father) out of which Billie Joe Armstrong drew the inspiration
for the song. There’s nothing wrong with art emerging out of and engaging with
very specific historical contexts (my favorite song is “American
Skin [41 Shots],” after all)—but the greatest art has the power to endure
well beyond those moments, and to speak to audiences distant from as well as
connected to those particular contexts. “Wake Me Up” does just that, and it elevates
Green Day’s concept album into something more as a result.
Next September
text tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other fall texts you’d highlight?
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