There’s an old, 2007 Onion headline from the satirical-paper’s golden era, “Area Man Somehow Roped Into Arguing Passionately For Green Day“, wherein a local man who “admitted he hasn’t listened to the band in 10 years,” somehow finds himself “defending Green Day while slightly intoxicated at a local bar Saturday.” The band had been insulted by an inebriated Limp Bizkit fan, which soon results in the slightly-buzzed area man “pounding [his] fist on the bar and saying that Green Day might be the best band of our generation,” even as he admits, “Seriously, I don’t even know the lead singer’s name.” When he gets home afterwards, he goes to iTunes and listens to both American Idiot and Dookie, “and reported being amazed that the band hadn’t really changed at all since 1994.”
That old article roughly encapsulated my own 2000s-era feelings towards Green Day: though I still had plenty of adolescent nostalgia for their ‘90s hits, I already felt like I’d outgrown them when American Idiot debuted in 2004. They had previously hinted that they might actually consent to age with grace on their 2000 album Warning, but had now clearly regressed to formula. I found it cringe, quite frankly: They were 30-somethings writing like they were still teenagers; heck, they were writing protest songs as though they were effective like they were still teenagers! And when George W. Bush handily won reelection that Fall anyways, it was all the confirmation I needed of just how effective their protest Rock really was. (You’d think such a blow at the ballot box would’ve humbled them a bit, but it only seemed to inflate their grating self-importance further.) Good on them for finally getting some hits back on the radio, I figured, but I’d stopped listening to the radio entirely by then. I didn’t give them another thought for years.
Nevertheless, George Orwell was fond of saying that the only true test of art is longevity; and the fact that you can today find Gen Z college freshmen born well after 2004 sporting American Idiot t-shirts and hoodies, with that heart-shaped hand-grenade slapped on their laptops and car windows, indicates that the album really has achieved some measure of longevity after all. Were Green Day writing like teenagers in 2004? Well then they did a good job of it, because teenagers still love that album now. (And I teach at a minority-majority college in the northeast, mind you, one filled with working-class people of color who usually just listen to Hip-Hop; this is an album that really has resonated across multiple demographics.)
As Pitchfork once wrote of fellow ‘90s mainstays the Smashing Pumpkins and their biggest album: “they sacrifice being cool to show a deep respect for the way teenagers interact with music. When the world is a vampire, you don’t want history lessons or a list of influences, you want f*cking magic.” Green Day in ‘04 understood the same. (And incidentally, Gen Zers are getting more into early Smashing Pumpkins, too.)
After watching such a diverse array of Gen Z college students unironically adore this album for years now, I have finally begun giving American Idiot a second chance for the first time since I was a college student, and now admit some of its charms. Don’t get me wrong, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” remains insufferable, as does the bridge on “Holiday;” but the two suites and some of the deep cuts are musically more interesting than the singles let on. (At a bare minimum, if you don’t like “Are We the Waiting?” then you don’t actually like anthemic Rock.) Is the title track crudely blunt in its politics? Well, when has subtlety ever been a virtue, especially nowadays? However, the track I have come around the most on is the album’s biggest, most inescapable hit of all: “Wake Me Up When September Ends.”
Is it still cheesy as hell? Well, to quote again that old Pitchfork review, “teen angst doesn’t fight fair; you need some seriously heavy ammo to resist it.” When you are in mourning, you don’t want irony or cleverness or subversion, but only the simple assurance (to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut) that you are not alone. Because this really is a song of mourning: frontman Billy Joe Armstrong (unlike The Onion’s area man, I do know the singer’s name) was 10 years old when his father died of cancer in September of 1982, so it really had indeed been over 20 years since his passing when Armstrong recorded this track in 2004. It is a core part of our baptismal covenants to “mourn with those that mourn, and comfort those in need of comfort” (Mosiah 18:10), and this track mourns with you indeed. In fact, it is the rare track that only mourns more with you the older you get: for despite being such an aggressively teenaged album overall, that lyric “20 years have gone so fast” is by far the record’s most middle-aged line—the sort that teenagers like to think they understand, but really have no clue yet.
Because it has now been over 20 Septembers since my mother died of cancer. Wrote a book about it I’ve mentioned too many times before—about how she passed away two days after my mission homecoming, and of the wrestle which I had before God—all of which took place in September of 2004. And now that I’m even older than Armstrong was when he wrote that song, I can indeed confirm that the grief never completely goes away, no, not even with the promise of the resurrection—that 20 years really does go so fast. Is it teen angst that doesn’t fight fair? Neither does middle-aged angst.
(Edited to Add: We certainly did not intend a short essay on grief and mourning to go live the same day as both Russel M. Nelson’s passing and the LDS Chapel shooting in Grand Blanc, Michigan; but then, when is there ever not cause for grief and mourning? When do we ever not have reason to “mourn with those that mourn”? Is it not always the Last Day for someone?)