American Idiot, Part Two

            The first few chords of American Idiot tumble in with force and bravado, and I don’t care how much it was overplayed on the radio, it’s still iconic. Right away, it grabs you by the balls and takes you for the ride of your life, in your mom’s car on the way to the bar-mitzvah of a kid you don’t even really like that much but you’re going because everyone else is. It makes you want to get off your ass and do something about what oppresses you, whatever it is. The first draft of this section had the first stanza being analyzed like lines of poetry, but I had a gut feeling that that was a cop-out. When Mark Richardson was kind enough to answer some questions I had for him via Twitter DM about music and music criticism, he told me,  “I’d say [lyrics] are very important, but... they are easier to focus on... You hear a song and feel something even before knowing what the words are; you don’t often think a song is “meh” and come to love it because the words are great.” So, I guess that’s sort of my point. You don’t need to wait for lyrics, because if you’re a sap like me, you’ll agree that music is something you get drunk on, something you analyze only after you sit in silence for a minute, something that infects every aspect of your point of view while you’re listening to it, all for the better. Even so, this track (and record, but especially the track) never shook the reputation of it being the edgy thirteen year-old’s anthem, and I get that, because it was for me and a million others, but the whole point of m writing this is to get whoever cares enough to read this to look past that for just a little bit.

            I had a friend in middle school, Eric, who loved the guitar as much as his Xbox, even though he was always afraid to rebel under his mother’s watchful eye. That doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t, but to his credit, she wasn’t a very nice person. He loved playing the guitar, even as a technically oriented person, spending every other day in our high school’s architecture room, where I joined him and our other friends during my free period. I didn’t know if that was okay at first, but I never wanted to be anywhere else, and the semi-pudgy, red bearded teacher, didn’t mind my being there as long as I was quiet and didn’t distract the other students. He kicked me out once, but he didn’t seem to mind much after that, and I don’t know if that was a product of my being too loud once or my own constant, low to mid-level anxiety (of then, and less now; I refuse to be a statistic of an artsy Facebook group who commits to a life of activism and taking the fun out of everything that makes this awful life worth living and then blames anxiety for a lack of actual political action) doing a really bad job of pulling me under its tow. I don’t know how it came about, but I discussed with my mother on our way to her mother’s house about how I felt so directionless (and still do). She was trying to help me figure out my niche, but I kept fighting everything she said to me, out of the concern that every want from one would have been in vain and inauthentic. I also talked about his love for the movie Almost Famous, that “Every guitar playing wannabe loves that movie.” I knew he would never make it, I knew Kyle’s friends would never make it, and I knew I would never make it as a musician, which is why, for any reason, I absolutely refused to join a band. The thing is, I didn’t want to have that to look back on and make me squirm every night before I went to sleep. Reflecting on this, my desire to be a writer seems pretty stupid, but at least there’s stability and life in advertising, instead of pretending I can just make it as a poet vagabond like Bolaño or the precious assholes with whom I begrudgingly shared my creative writing seminars. When I was fourteen, it seems to me that every “independent” adolescent suburbanite joined a band, and fuck that. I said he tried too hard to be his own person. One of the candidates for eighth grade student council president, whose name I forget, kept saying in his speech, “I am an individual.” He kept saying it over and ever, and even then I knew it had no weight, nor any idea why or how that was supposed to make him the best choice. I knew deep down, sitting in those wooden bleachers among my peer group that that was meaningless, and that he wasn’t that smart, especially if that was all he had to go on. And then the other kid wore a shirt reading, “Vote for Pedro,” and on the back, “I mean Mitchell.” He won in a landslide. The only reason I voted for the other guy was because everyone told me to, like it was gonna result in free homework or something, even though it obviously didn’t matter. I could be a cheeky fuck and make a shallow crack at how it reminds me of our current political system, but such a statement would be hollow, unfunny, and ultimately land me a job at BuzzFeed. And that would be horrifying. All this criticism wasn’t really fair of me. I’m pretty sure no one really has free will before they’re twenty-five. I certainly didn’t as a teenager—if something was mainstream or popular, it was to be immediately treated with suspicion, and whatever I thought to be a hivemind was something to react against, no matter what it was. That said, no matter how woke and transcendent your insight pretends to be, you can’t escape the socialization punched into you during the years even more formative than those.

            I didn’t realize at the time that Rob Cavallo shined this whole record with radio-friendly sugar. I had no frame of reference for what real punk was (or hip-hop, rap, and other genres brought to the forefront of the mainstream by people of color, talking about much more relevant and pressing issues that have been ignored for way too long). The whole song is about people are stupid and the media is fucking up society and how these perpetuated structures and myths and rhetoric are infecting us all. It’s strange, because when I got older, I thought that shit was all so cliché, something that a hippie archetype would repeat ad nauseum, only to find out that it was true after I read Horkheimer and Adorno for the first time and took them way too seriously. When it comes to this, I can enjoy it for what it is: something that’s hardly poetic, but still very catchy, even if it was severely overplayed over the next few years, and still has a decent and relevant message, though, I feel like ‘the media’ has just been replaced by ‘fake news.’ News assumes the system works, and every depiction of anything and everything is a constant new normal. DeRay McKesson retweeted someone whose name escapes me, and I can’t be found it in his archive. He tweeted, “Media does not reflect reality, it shapes reality.” I only sort of disagree—I would argue, personally, that media reflects reality as much as it shapes it. It reflects reality, it reverberates, and then unfortunately whatever is depicted becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for whomever views it for whatever reason, on the news or in the theater, in the movies or on television, happy or sad. It ensures that things maintain as they are, and it seems that honest portrayals of society or human conflict, while massively important, are not always the best policy for whatever message the writers intend to convey. Tragedy highlights the realism of not just society at any given point. Say something is set in the future or on a fantasy timeline: they reflect realities of human nature, but also modifiable aspects of it, which is a lovely thing, but it also keeps them in place, because it reinforces an image. This single, as well as the record it, in a way, overshadows, the battle for America’s soul runs a lot deeper than big mean men in pinstripe suits needing to hear Kumbaya for the very first time in their miserable, worthless lives. Our zeitgeist is inescapable at a first glance, and when we do, it’ll have been so gradual that we never noticed the time go by.

            I had more in here, originally, but I took it out because it was too holistic with regard to the record and how it was born from its Bush-era landscape and how it informs the present one. I’ll get to that later, maybe at the end of this thing, maybe when I magically get a master’s degree in something. Who knows. But this single (and, the record in its entirety) is what drew me in to my interest in politics and policy and taking the fun out of everything so I can pone the normiez when someone decides to talk these things. But I digress, yet again. This single did exactly what Mr. Richardson told me it would when I was ten (and now twenty-four): it drew me in, but I didn’t come to love it because the words were great. I already loved it. The message just made me love it more.