The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same

These thoughts were written by Gabe, one of our 2020 summer interns. The opinions expressed herein do not reflect those of Civitas other than respect for the value of open dialogue.

I’ve had a dangerously large amount of free time these past few months. When I’m not playing video games (and committing war crimes) or writing letters to friends, I’m usually listening to music.

What, exactly, that music is depends on mood, day of the week, danceability, and a number of other factors. The map of genres is messy and often overlapping. Certain trends stand out, however. I’ve listened to American Idiot in its entirety at least once a week since quarantine started. I played the entire album twice on the eight-hour ride from my college to my home. At just under an hour long, it’s a perfect length too.

But most curiously of all, American Idiot was never supposed to exist. The band spent much of 2002 recording Cigarettes and Valentines, an album that would never be released. The band was “argumentative and miserable” according to Mike Dirnt, and Billie Joe Armstrong considered shutting the whole thing down. Then, in November, someone broke into the recording studio and stole the master tapes, effectively ending Cigarettes and Valentines before it was off the ground. It was after this theft the band decided to abandon the album and work on something new over the next three months. Starting in April of 2003, they would work until March of 2004, and they would have American Idiot to show for it.

And even now, 16 years and a Broadway adaptation later, American Idiot is considered not only one of Green Day’s best albums but one of the best war protest albums ever written. It regularly appears on lists of the greatest rock albums of the 2000s and is known to show on lists of the greatest rock albums ever.

The first time I’d ever heard anything from the album was in 2006, or somewhere close to it. I was in the car going somewhere with the rest of my family, and “American Idiot”, the lead single off the album, came on the radio. I didn’t know anything about music at the time (whether or not I know anything about music now is up for debate), but six-year-old Gabe sat in the car and thought “Hey, this is pretty good.” Six-year-old Gabe also had no idea what the album was actually about. This is a two-fold issue: I certainly didn’t understand how politics worked at the time, and pop punk artists are notoriously hard to understand.

The American Idiot album is about a number of things, but most distinctly it’s about an American identity being born out of the shadow of the Iraq War. Only two songs are explicitly political: “American Idiot” and “Holiday”, which decry the “redneck agenda” and “the hollow lies” of the Bush administration, respectively. The entire album is a microcosm of American youth in 2004. I’m a firm believer in listening to albums without shuffling the track list. American Idiot simply demands to be listened this way. It tells the story of the “Jesus of Suburbia” a lower-middle-class teen, the “son of rage and love” raised on “a steady diet of soda pop and Ritalin” who leaves his home to go to the city (“Boulevard of Broken Dreams”). It’s there he meets “St. Jimmy”, the “patron saint of the denial with an angel face and a taste for suicidal.” St. Jimmy becomes the drug-addicted, violent, rebellious alter-ego of the Jesus of Suburbia. Jimmy is poised to fully overtake Jesus’s life until he meets “Whatshername”, a “symbol of resistance” that’s “holding onto [his] heart like a hand grenade”. The Jesus of Suburbia battles with the influence of St. Jimmy versus the influence of Whatshername until Whatshername leaves Jesus behind (“Letterbomb”). This event presses Jesus to destroy his alter-ego of St. Jimmy and check himself into rehab so he can return home (“Homecoming”). Now back after his journey, the Jesus of Suburbia, now “back in the Barrio”, has returned to a life of normality, though he can no longer remember the girl who saved his life, forgetting even her name (“Whatshername”).

American Idiot tickles at this certain despair that seemed to plague the idea of coming-of-age during the Iraq War. The album is a total mess—pop punk albums usually are—but it is through that mess that the album shines brightest. Cool pulled instruments that seldom appeared in punk music for the drum lines, adding timpani, glockenspiels, tablas, and even African bead gourds into songs. Armstrong saw the album as “taking those classic rock and roll elements, kicking out the rules, putting more ambition in, and making it current” after all, it made sense to make things messy. The Jesus of Suburbia was not a happy and optimistic character; the album about his life simply could not be traditional or standard.

All this to say please listen to American Idiot. It is exceptionally good.

But this is not an essay about American Idiot alone.

As easy as it would be for me to speak at length about the album in detail, breaking down individual songs and musical motifs, American Idiot was not the only music I’ve been listening to in quarantine. I listen to an awful lot of what’s known as American folk revival. If you’ve ever met me, that is either entirely shocking, or the most obvious statement I’ve ever made. Regardless of how this alters your perception of me, the ultimate truth here is that the Venn diagram of American folk revival and American Idiot sure looks like two separate circles.

That’s not a terribly shocking revelation; at least, it shouldn’t be. The differences between Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger’s “Playboys and Playgirls” and Green Day’s “She’s a Rebel” are obvious. The songs were written 40 years apart, “Playboys” before Dylan had even started to tour with an electric guitar.

And yet, despite all the differences between American folk revival and American Idiot, from the fact that one was recorded almost exclusively in mono and the other in stereo to the fact that they’re entirely different genres, they’re surprisingly similar.

The folk revival took place over 20 years but came to its climax in the first half of the 1960s. As the Vietnam War grew increasingly distasteful in the opinions of the American people, with anti-war sentiment steadily rising, the music scene was adjusting to match. Phil Ochs released I Ain’t Marching Anymore to great success in 1965. It’s an anti-war album through and through. The titular track, though not as particularly biting as “American Idiot”, it tugs at the same anti-war resistance present.

Protest is a consistent theme in the folk revival. Woody Guthrie wrote one of his most famous songs, arguably the most famous American folk song ever written, “This Land Is Your Land” explicitly because he hated “God Bless America” (the first draft of the song was titled “God Blessed America for Me”). Though the version commonly taught to schoolchildren is a terribly pacified husk of Guthrie’s work, the original includes verses about private property and welfare offices. Most importantly though, Guthrie is on the side of the rejected. He crosses into the private property; by the relief office are his people. Whether we’d like it to be or not, that’s a deeply political message. Guthrie firmly plants himself among the poor and working class in “This Land Is Your Land”.

The working class would be a recurring theme throughout the folk revival. It’s one of the reasons so many folk artists were blacklisted during the Red Scares. Pete Seeger, in a particularly extreme example, was sentenced to ten 1-year prison sentences in 1961 on contempt of Congress charges (he was granted an appeal in 1962).

Bob Dylan’s early career is distinctly marked by a series of some of the most famous protest songs of the 1960s: “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1962), “Masters of War” (1963), “Talking World War III Blues” (1963), and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (1964). The majority of protest songs Dylan wrote all came about in short time, Mike Marqusee wrote of them: “The protest songs that made Dylan famous and with which he continues to be associated were written in a brief period of some 20 months – from January 1962 to November 1963. Influenced by American radical traditions (the Wobblies, the Popular Front of the thirties and forties, the Beat anarchists of the fifties) and above all by the political ferment touched off among young people by the civil rights and ban the bomb movements, he engaged in his songs with the terror of the nuclear arms race, with poverty, racism and prison, jingoism and war.”

Yet, here we are, nearly sixty years after the songs were written, and they seem just as applicable to today. It’s hard to hear “You’ve thrown the worst fear / that can ever be hurled / fear to bring children / into the world” from “Masters of War” and not think about all the articles I’ve read about Millennials having fewer children, or the conversations I’ve had with friends who don’t want to have kids distinctly because of the state of the world. It’s been sixteen years and two presidents since American Idiot was released; the complaints haven’t changed at all. The lines “bang bang goes the broken glass and / kill all the f— that don’t agree” from “Holiday” were written in reference to the destruction wrought in Iraq, but now seems particularly poignant given the developing situations of protests following the death of George Floyd.

I listen to a lot of music. A lot of that music is protest music, from the Italian partisans’ “Bella Ciao” to Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” to Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer” to Green Day’s “American Idiot”. Nearly 100 years of music, different genres, different languages, and at the end of the day, the songs are all saying the same thing.

Whether or not that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I have yet to decide. The timelessness of the folk revival means fifty-year-old songs still feel as real as when they were written, but it also means not enough has changed in fifty years. Whatever the case, the more things seem to change the more they stay the same.

The goal is to break that cycle though. At least we’ll have quite the range of music to provide the soundtrack to the mission.