American Idiot, Part Three

I’m resuming this because, for years now, all I can do is listen to this record over and over again. If my therapist were listening to me right now, I think she’d say that this is yet another way of anxiety hemorrhaging outward. Out of my body, computer input, then output, and then I hear it, the same as ever, and then the serotonin secretes in my brain. Some days the tingle is stronger than others. I feel the need to keep stressing it: this is a vanity project and nothing else. This is for me to wank and for the rest of whoever’s here to enjoy it, or to be nice, pretend to. I say that because listening to Jesus of Suburbia transmits me back to specific memories for me, personally, and right now, as I type this in the middle of a totally mismanaged craterfucked pissed-all-over fucking global fucking pandemic, I don’t much feel like discussing the musicality of this particular song. Not in this paragraph, at least. Maybe a little bit later. I tire of writers who can only write thinly veiled autobiographies and pretending literary digressions are profound, or that discussion language itself, directly or otherwise, in fiction or poetry, is at all productive or helpful. Material conditions matter, and so does the actual content of the writing, and not just memories with slight details changed. The Other is the main thing that matters or is interesting. You have to filter The Other through your own perspective for any of this shit to matter, and no one in the literary world seems to be doing that. Ben Lerner and his proteges come to mind pretty much immediately. I feel the need to get those feelings out of the way specifically because this is little more than a wankfest. At least I can fucking admit it. Karl Ove Knausgaard mastered writing about the self, everyone. You can all go home now.

Speaking of home, I’ve been stuck here for years, I’m stuck here now, and I’m stuck here, eternal, experiencing one of the only things that has consistently brought me catharsis as long as I’ve lived, which at twenty-six may not be long, but every day is an eternity, repeating itself ad nauseum, broken up mostly by tears, or by hangovers, or by shouting at my poor shrink over the phone. Sometimes I wonder if once a week with her is too much, and that the pent-up (insert whatever ephemeral, relevant, potent feelings that are socially unacceptable express out loud in front of friends, family, and/or colleagues) would help me in my fiction and stuff like this. I think about the four open D chords, how clear they sound, and what a fucking idiot I must have looked like trying to play and sing them at the same time on the electric guitar in front of my family, casually, after they asked me to take my rented instrument out of its case and struggle to play something. I never listened to albums all the way through until I got out of college. I bounced around on records, even of artists I knew, often afraid of touching another song with my cursor because I feared I wouldn’t enjoy it, and then that would be wasted time I’d never get back. And apparently, according to every music criticism outlet ever, we’re supposed to review records as a whole, not songs individually, even though I’m not sure why that’s even the standard, because albums generally aren’t very cohesive, no matter what. That’s just me, though. Don’t think about that too much. What the hell was I talking about? The song. That’s right. The song. When I discovered the glory of American Idiot, there was only so much poking around on AOL MusicNet I could do, as mentioned previously, and I didn’t know anything about where to find music or where to look. I only had comfort tin my video game message boards and whatever else my friends would show me, however limited, and this was one of two albums that I fell in love with, the second being blink-182’s frankly horrendously misogynistic (but unfortunately historically important) ‘Enema of the State,’ which is a whole other discussion.

What catches me first is always the music, the melody, the rhythm. Lyrics are second. I said that already, but they do matter. I’m almost (read: not actually, just bear with, you’re the one who decided it was a good idea to read this far) convinced at this point that anyone who enjoys poetry for its lyrical qualities or language’s musicality is already lying. The Velvet Underground’s lyrics are as good as any revered poets’, and the actual music delivers a deluxe experience. I don’t know what it means to be ‘the son of rage and love.’ Well, actually, I do, but that’s because of a very particular affinity for that line, being able to wallow among extremes in my immense propensity for both of those things, which is too vague of a statement for me to be able to elicit some meaningful anecdote. Maybe I’ll add something here when I revise this. Anyway, the more interesting line here is right after, ‘the Jesus of Suburbia,’ which illustrates not a failing of this album, but a prescient observation of a failing of our culture at large. As I’ve said above, we only ever seem to be able to write about ourselves. How many books are there about writers? How many movies are there about artists and the film industry? How much poetry is self-referential? So many of Shakespeare’s sonnets explicitly explore the speaker’s hope to live forever so long as someone is around to experience the verse in which they’ve inserted themselves. I wrote that just now, but the thought I meant to explore before it was, how many teenage sex comedies have to do with suburban white kids who feel dejected? Eminem and Marilyn Manson made a career off them buying their records while we bombed the melted shit out of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Rockstar Games suffered congressional scrutiny while we invaded a country confined to colonial boundaries and had nothing to do with 9/11. We have all this schlock about how hard it is to be a white suburban kid and their moms’ self-championed Thermopylaes while they pumped their children full of ‘soda pop and Ritalin.’ Yet, nothing ever seems to call it out directly like Jesus of Suburbia does, despite the sin of self-referentiality, even if it isn’t the pinnacle of poetic genius. Those confined to suburban whiteness, and I am among them, we sacrifice the realities and color of life for a coddled existence in a boring, shitty utopia. We can write about ourselves as much as we want, as I’m doing here, but how much of it is worth anything? How much of it is truly relatable for people who don’t match that that cookie cutter? (Before anyone asks, yes, I am aware of how largely ignored people of color were in pop culture until the BuzzFeed staff took it upon themselves to force other white people to say that as much as they could so they’d feel like they were doing something good with their worthless lives.) I’m tired of self-inserts. They’re usually lazy and self-aggrandizing. Being “raw” or “honest” does not make a work of art good. And no, the irony is not lost on me. Billie Joe Armstrong started this band in the early eighties in a suburb of Berkeley, and then they were known as Sweet Children. All art has some sort of self-insertion, writing or otherwise. Our points of view are the conduits through which we experience anything and everything, so that’s always going to be the case, but it’s about the removal of the direct self and the synthesis of both feeling and ideas, and this is where the record excels. I can’t emphasize how thin the line is between telling the truth and just being lazy.

I’m giving half-assed treatment to the “no one ever died for my sins in hell/as far as I can tell/at least the ones I got away with” line because that just sounds like bad theological research, but it’s still a catchy way of expressing loneliness despite parents who probably love you. I don’t know. I was never good at literary analysis, and no, the irony is not lost on my trying my hand at it anyway. But when Billie Joe sings, sweetly, “there’s nothing wrong with me/this is how I’m supposed to be/in a land of make-believe/that don’t believe in me.” I’m yanked back into my sixth-grade life, a time I can only remember taking place at night, never in the sunlight. I think of parent-teacher conferences, taking Spanish for the first time ever and think of that as a sign of intellectual maturity even though I never would have used that phrase as a twelve-year-old, and Monday night dance classes where parents pair you off to get you to talk to girls and that’s supposed to be a big thing, or whatever. The traditional narrative wants me to write about my journey to sexual maturity, to add to the aforementioned schlock, and its glorification is now that I think about it, kind of creepy, especially when people so much older than I was (or we were) try to talk about it. It’s tired. It’s invasive. And I get it, don’t get me wrong, I was happy in eighth grade when I watched Superbad for the first time ever. I felt seen for the first time ever in a medium that wasn’t this album, and I even got my first kiss upon my third crafty AMC infiltration to see it. With American Idiot, I had to look for my Zembla in the lyrics and the noises I could skew to mean anything I wanted them to, wanting them to reflect how I was feeling, which was, again, lost, alone, dejected, unwanted by girls. When you’re twelve, that’s all you’re supposed to think about, only to say it to your guy friends, only half of whom have figured out how to correctly masturbate and half of those who will admit it out loud, either for “honesty” or for laughs. All of us would come to love Monster Energy drinks at one point in our lives, and God help anyone whose arrythmia never went away. I wonder, then, about how much control we really have over our lives and our choices. Where we’re born, what diseases we’re prone to, what ailments are suppressed and/or brought out of us based on our environment, our traumas that are never fully dealt with, the choices we make and how all of them are necessarily in reaction to something else, thus impurifying agency, all that bullshit that will make me sound smart. Hell, I’ll never forget when I had the bright idea of finally installing Half-Life 2 on my PC for the first time, playing the multiplayer add-on, and decided it would so frickin’ epic to have iTunes play this album in the background while I tried to pwn le n00bz on the Killbox map. I hate to say it, but I wasn’t very good. I can’t believe you’re reading this. Don’t you have The Sopranos to watch for the fourth time through, like I do?

The chorus is the real tell-all, here. I’m sure every white guy who’s ever finished a book that’s slightly not-so-mainstream (or, God forbid, the ever-loathed Infinite Jest, which I haven’t read, and if I do, I promised myself I would never read it in public) will say “there’s nothing wrong with me/this is how I’m supposed to be/in a land of make believe/that don’t believe in me.” I wish it didn’t sound so funny to quote these things outside the music it’s nested in, because on its own, this feels like an angsty teenager wrote in. Inside the music, though, it feels right. An instructor from one of my classes in Portfolio School said, describing what kind of person succeeds in the advertising game, “If you feel like you don’t belong anywhere, you will go far in this field.” Everyone looked at him like he had three heads. He’d been known for being cynical and severe, to mixed reactions, but that’s why I loved him. I said the same thing to my therapist again and again, over and over. I’ve never felt like I belonged anywhere. I’d love to give a cop-out answer and say oh, yes, I’m just so smart that no one gets me and I don’t fit in anywhere because they’re not on my level. But that shit ain’t the truth. There are plenty of people way smarter, way more driven, and way more talented at me at everything I want to improve upon to become the person I want to be. The other thing is, how many other suburb-bred white guys feel the same way I do? Chances are, I wouldn’t want to hang out with them. I don’t want to listen to their problems, should I ever cross paths with one. It’s the same reason I didn’t want to hear from others in discussions during any class: I came to hear someone with answers and guidance help me sort this out. I have enough neuroses bouncing around my head and in relation to what I experience, whether it be text or other people or anxieties that flare up, glow, and flicker out. But society doesn’t care about me. Why should it? It’s fractaled into this superorganism that can’t regulate itself, destroying everything around it, which scrambles on top of itself repeatedly. I don’t know anything about tribe or community. I never experienced it until I worked in a restaurant, only to have it be destroyed by the pandemic. I’ll get into that later, I guess. We can go on and on about how everything’s made up and the points don’t matter, that money is fake and so is the jagged line that informs us why some people have ample comfort and why others just have to die. But it’s not fake. Just because it’s socially constructed doesn’t make it not real. It is and it isn’t. These made-up motivators enrich us, but the pursuit of numbers in an app on a phone tethered to a bank to algorithms should not dictate life or death, there should be no have-nots, and in this pursuit, we alienate each other, and alienation is king, especially because life has no inherent meaning except for what we give it, and who the hell knows what that entails. The next part that talks about drugs and “moms and brads,” and I have no idea what that means, either someone was screwing too many people too obviously for a kid to be okay with it, or Billie Joe’s dad was named Brad (it wasn’t) and this is his admonishment. But it adds an edge to it, I’ll give it that. I’m not convinced that rock operas are known for their narrative prowess, so I choose to view it as a ‘concept album,’ like a Calvino novel, in the way that it sits around and meditates but doesn’t accomplish anything plotworthy. The phrase ‘concept album,’ oddly enough, first their second “rock opera,” 21st Century Breakdown, which, unlike this beauty, is an unabashed piece of shit and they should feel bad for recording it.

I like the interlude. It made me feel cool in sixth grade as it transitions into an andante soliloquy. Billie Joe sings about “the center of the Earth in the parking lot/of the 7-Eleven where I was taught” where I assume this Jesus of Suburbia character (saying this makes me squirm because it’s so on-the-nose) learned how to buy drugs from the kid two grades above him. The center of the earth, a few lines later, is also the end of the world. “It says ‘hope is where your heart is, but what a shame/’cause everyone’s heart doesn’t beat the same,” sings Billie Joe. I have no fucking idea what profound grandiosity he’s supposed to be getting at, but I hate this line. “It’s beating out of time,” he adds. The phrase “out of time” is one of Billie Joe’s favorite phrases to use in his lyrics. It’s used again in Holiday, I heard it again on Warning, it’s there on the Too Much Too Soon B-side (and it’s a fun track) he just loves to mention us being out of time, that is to say, time is running out and we have no more life left to live, and as I age, I don’t know where I land on this. Working at the restaurant on boring days stood my life still. My blood vessels still oxidized. It makes me wonder when people will stop telling me I have my whole life ahead of me, like the day I noticed flight attendants calling me ‘sir.’ Billie Joe plunges further into cliché—lost children, highways with no exits, I just gotta get outta here, man. With all of the world’s horrors more visible than ever now (hell, this came out at the height of the Iraq War), this just seems inappropriate at best. The woes of suburban children are the most insurmountable in the world, y’know, until you turn eighteen and get a real job, like a pizza delivery driver or self-proclaimed marketing guru. Palestinian children’s faces are melting off from missile heat, but Lord God help us, they will never know the struggle, dude.

The next part, where he boasts about not caring, also cliché, but also understandable, which made it foundational in my life. When I was ten, that’s when the anxiety started to kick in more than usual, beyond feeling scared around crushes or feeling like everyone would laugh in my face like demons and vampires at the slightest mistake I made, ready to pounce. I remember the exact moment I went to hand in a math test to my teacher and how scared I was, because I felt like I didn’t do well, and I decided I didn’t care. Didn’t give a shit anymore. The fear and cortisol that made me restless wasn’t worth giving a shit about the outcome, and even if I hadn’t done as well as I’d hoped, the relief wasn’t enough to justify the anxiety behind it. Having this verse to come home to validated that. If the speaker doesn’t care, he says ‘I don’t care’ over and over and over again, it’s like when Keats writes about ‘happy, happy love!’ in Ode on a Grecian Urn: you get the sense that he’s trying to convince whoever’s listening of something that isn’t really care. For Keats, it’s happy love. For Billie Joe, it’s that he doesn’t give a shit, even though he clearly does. It is an admission of powerlessness. Besides, it’s cool not to give a shit about somethings. It’s cool to give a shit about others. I think gung-hoism is what’s frowned upon, but maybe it’s better to feel like that on the daily than to feel like a fucking depressed loner, a feeling I’m all too familiar with, as I’ve said before. There’s a thin barrier, invisible to the naked eye, that separates me from every other human being on the planet. Just like every other white guy in his twenties and thinks he can write. “Everyone’s so full of shit,” Armstrong sings. Yes. Of course. That’s why I feel the need to irritate anyone who reads this. “Born and raised by hypocrites,” he continues. Disagree. I like my parents, even if they get on my nerves. It goes on like this, in this brooding, abrasive edgelord microphone trick with the power chords:

Everyone is so full of shit
Born and raised by hypocrites
Hearts recycled but never saved
From the cradle to the grave
We are the kids of war and peace
From Anaheim to the Middle East
We are the stories and disciples of
the Jesus of Suburbia!

Yowza. Even in sixth grade I felt silly singing these lines. But I did it anyway. This Jesus of Suburbia “character” doesn’t actually profess any ideology other than, uh, hanging outside a 7-Eleven like what the kid with the Oxy problem did when I ran into him one summer night after college because all I wanted were some fucking Sour Patch Kids to enjoy with The Simpsons. But no, he had to accost me with his existence. This person once called me ‘C-dog.’ He wasn’t joking. I left the college we both attended for our freshman year shortly after because I soon understood that that stuff wasn’t temporary. I would think about the line about hearts, but in my mind, that was about my crushes not liking me back, which was apocalyptic. The best part, though, is that he mentions Anaheim and Middle Eastern kids in the same sentence, as though they suffer from the same level of despair and disillusionment, which is just so fucking laughable and embarrassing. Sorry, Billie, you may have gotten famous without having to go to college, but you’re no Louise Glück. Better luck next record. I get it, man, when I was listening to this album, I was pissed off, too. I’m sure your reasons were better. (More of mine will follow. I’m saving the meat of it for the first section of ‘Homecoming,’ near the end of the record, so uh, stay tuned, I guess.) He talks about not caring, how the land of make believe don’t believe in him, variations on a common them, I’m tired of this shit already. Fuck.

Part four, Dearly Beloved, is about uh. A dearly… beloved… person. It’s like a soliloquy in the middle of the song, and I like it well enough, I guess. I liked to sing it because it really shows off the gorgeous range and texture of Billie Joe’s voice, which is still one of the best in the business without being one of those artists that’s praised for his technical skill and literally nothing else, like every single contestant on The Voice or American Idol. I don’t even know what I’m doing here, half-assedly dissecting these lyrics. I was never any good at lit classes, despite doing my undergrad degree in it. He asks himself if therapy would help, if he’s retarded (because he certainly feels that way, and his choice to use that word is fucking hilarious and totally inappropriate), but that’s the way it is… cuz he’s not perfect. No one is. But I learned what a renaissance man was when I was fifteen, and I thought, yeah, that’s the kind of person I want to be. Someone who’s good at everything. I can’t be good at math or science, ever, so thought, fine, I can be the best I can be in all the right-brained stuff. And I still suck at all of that, but Lord, how I did try. I’m still trying. Just look at this fuckin’ pointless essay, dude. The fifth movement—and I don’t even know if I should call it that—is where the track really falls apart. Like, musically, it’s fine, but he just repeats his woes about how everyone is lying to him, how it’s all fake, and shit, man, you have to go into more specific imagery than just saying everything is bullshit over and over and over. I too “lost my faith to this/this town that don’t exist.” At the time, it was the only town I knew, but I sure as fuck had a crisis of faith when I was twelve. He breaks again from the guitars to do something like Dearly Beloved, about being victimized. I can’t say I’ve ever been truly victimized. Not then, not now. But the bags under my eyes are so fuckin’ bloated, I’d swear they were packing every bit of my overpriced wardrobe.

I don’t have much to say about the rest of this, because the first half of this track is immensely better than the second. It tires itself out, and it tires me out as a result. It rubs off on me. It’s even less fun to sing. We’re all, like, totally tired of the bullshit, but what else is there? If we responded to “How are you?” with complete honesty like the Dutch do, well, we’d probably be living in an even weirder place than we already are. The world is built on two things: absurdities and counterintuitive pillars. I’m fucking exhausted just looking at this stupid fucking essay. I’m gonna post it on my blog now, even though that probably isn’t a good idea. Whatever. Fuck it.  Here I go. Just watch me.