Back in the late 70's, I wasn't one of those big fans of the really angry brand of punk rock. Oh, sure, I listened to WPIX-FM in those days, back when Mark Simone was a punk DJ instead of a right-wing asshole, and his Sunday morning show would feature Elvis Costello, the Clash, the Police, Lene Lovich, and other then-luminaries of the genre, along with some delicious skewers of The Knack. But you wouldn't have caught me dead at CBGB's with a ring through my nose.
By then I was too old for adolescent angst (though my particular brand of said angst ran more towards depression, moody poetry, and Joni Mitchell's Blue album than the kind of rage required for a true appreciation of punk rock.
Of course back then, Jimmy Carter was president, and while gas lines were a pain in the ass, I don't recall feeling angry at our leaders all the time the way I do now. Of course I was working a retail management trainee job and trying to pay the rent on the apartment that gave me my much-needed independence.
It wasn't until much later, after I'd met Mr. Brilliant during the Reagan years, and he'd given me a cassette of Elvis Costello's Trust, that I began to regard the angry music of youthful alienation is not just fun to listen to, but necessary.
Of course since then, Sting has become the Moral and Environmental Police, Elvis Costello is delirious over his Big Canadian Torchsinger Wife, Joe Strummer is dead, and while I like the Dave Matthews Band, their latest release twelve years on sounds simply like more of the same. It's no wonder that my music listening tends these days towards American roots music like neo-bluegrass and the blues -- and towards vintage jazz from the 1920's.
Until American Idiot came out, and it all came back to me like the hot kiss at the end of a wet fist (TM Firesign Theatre).
Recently I want to the theatre with a friend, and showed her what was in the CD player in the car. It was American Idiot, and her reaction was "You've got to be kidding. My daughter loves Green Day. She's ten!"
It's almost enough to make you wish you had a ten-year-old, so you too could go to see Green Day live without feeling like a pathetic old dork.
Well, Salon writer Joyce Millman doesn't have a ten-year-old, but she has a 13-year-old, and therefore was able to enter the current Inner Sanctum of Punk Rage:
When I was 13, there was no freakin' way my parents would have taken me to a rock concert. Now here I was, 34 years later, with my husband and (slouchy, unkempt) 13-year-old on a clear, crisp September night, at what was, for my son, the equivalent of that Rolling Stones concert: Green Day at SBC Park in San Francisco. The East Bay trio was celebrating the biggest album of their career, the ferociously anti-Bush cannonade "American Idiot," and this show was their triumphal homecoming. When I first heard Green Day on the radio 11 years earlier, I nearly wept at how much they echoed the Clash, my defunct heroes, the greatest band, ever. The musical revolution that the Clash promised had only been delayed, blooming again in Billie Joe Armstrong's fractious singing and the band's exhilarating three-chord thrash.
When my son discovered my Green Day CDs, I quietly rejoiced. He had previously resisted my musical suggestions and was content listening to his lightweight Smash Mouth CDs and (ick) the Dave Matthews Band. But Green Day lighted a fuse and he was soon riffling through my collection to sample the Clash, the Sex Pistols and the Ramones, as well as the Who and the Kinks, all of them Green Day's spiritual fathers. Billie Joe, Tre Cool and Mike Dirnt are much cooler teachers than I am, and I thank them for it.
I also thank them for the unvarnished anger of the "American Idiot" album, which has become the soundtrack for my son and his friends' nascent liberalism. I wasn't sure how to talk about the war or about the erosion of civil liberties to my son without seeming like a ranting old lady. But "American Idiot" gave me an opening. Note to politicians: The 13- and 14-year-olds of today get their news from "The Daily Show" and their attitude from Green Day and the cool-again '70s punks. Their hair is long or color-streaked, they think the president is a bozo, they know we're in Iraq for the oil and they aspire to own Priuses, not Hummers. Fear them. They are the old antiwar movement redux.
"This song is not anti-American, it's anti-waaaaaaaaaaar!" screamed Billie Joe at SBC Park, kicking into "Holiday" ("I beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies/ This is the dawning of the rest of our lives"), and 45,000 fists pumped the air. I looked around at all the families like us, and felt a curious sense of time shrinking and falling away. I was as happy as I had been at that Stones show at 14, and at Clash shows at 22. Earlier that night, we had sat in the golden San Francisco dusk waiting for the show to begin. We watched the people wandering around the stadium: Parents and kids, lone adults wrangling four or five preteens, pierced, plaid-skirted girls and waifish, T-shirted boys taking pictures of each other with their camera phones. An Irish punk band called Flogging Molly ambled onstage while the sky was still light and blew us away. They dedicated a song to the Clash's Joe Strummer, my poor, dead idol, and my son and I clapped loudly. Two girls on the edges of left field danced a jig to the music and one suddenly turned a running cartwheel. The night was full of joy and release.
I don't think anyone would say that Green Day is a musically ambitious band. The sound combines really aggressively bad drumming, some clever lyrics that still aren't as clever as the stuff Elvis Costello used to crank out like a cocaine-fueled Tin Pan Alley songwriter, the musical proficiency of the Ramones, and the most aggressively catchy pop hooks heard on a rock record since the heyday of Squeeze. They're derivative as hell; a tribute band echoing the sound of a hundred punk and even metal bands that came before them. In fact, there are times when I can even hear "All the Young Dudes".
But if all that's old is new again, if we're reliving the past on a vastly accelerated timetable so that punk is the soundtrack of an antiwar movement instead of an outgrowth it, well, count this old broad as one of the marchers...even if the meaning of "this is the dawning of the rest of our lives" has a different meaning at fifty than it does to a ten-year-old.
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