Photo by John Adams via flickr
Ladies and Gentlemen, Gen X has officially taken the stage in American politics. From the Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk character Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court, to the rise of former punk turned center-left Democratic rising star Beto O’Rourke, Gen X is beginning to shape America and before we know it we’ll have our first Gen X President (we won’t count Obama although some would say he’s an older Xer). As the weight of Gen X influence shifts from that of a subversive counterculture to the kind of mainstream culture that comes with social and political power I think it’s worth analyzing their effect on culture up until this point. Now to fully break down Gen X in all its flannel and Zima glory would be a tremendous undertaking, so let’s narrow our scope and examine Gen X solely through the example of the band that, to me, best exemplifies Gen X: Green Day.
Now I know what you’re thinking. “How can you say that Green Day is the most Gen X band and not Nirvana?” My counter to that is that while Nirvana is certainly the most beloved Gen X band, Green Day is the band that actually best represents Gen X. Kurt Cobain is the fantasy version of a Gen Xer. His apathy is seen as cool and counterculture; he is lauded for his inaction. Like John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Bed-Ins for Peace to a generation before them Gen X viewed Cobain doing nothing as the most subversive thing he could do. The problem with this is it unfairly paints Cobain as at best a failed slacktivist and at worst a conviction-lacking nihilist, and Kurt was neither of those things. Kurt was a proud feminist. He was an active supporter of the burgeoning Olympia riot grrrl scene. He had a long-running feud with Axl Rose stemming from Axl’s insistence that Kurt keep his wife’s mouth shut. Kurt was also a strong supporter of gay rights. In 1992 an Oregon measure seeking to prevent government funding from being used to promote “homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism or masochism”. Nirvana, in response, played a mini-festival/rally in opposition to the measure, which would go on to be defeated at the polls. At the same concert Kurt joked that a picture he saw of a recently firebombed GOP headquarter building would make a great Christmas card. Despite being the icon of a generation famous for its lack of participation in mainstream discourse Kurt Cobain was, at heart, an activist. His philosophy was perhaps no better stated than in the liner notes for the band’s third album In Utero where he proclaimed “If you’re a sexist, racist, homophobe or basically an asshole, don’t buy this CD. I don’t care if you like me, I hate you.”
If Kurt Cobain and Nirvana are our culture’s romanticized image of Gen X then Billie Joe Armstrong and Green Day are the truest representation of Gen X and their aimless disaffection. Where Kurt was a radical that wrote songs that railed against sexual assault and the culture that enables it Billie Joe Armstrong was a self-declared burnout that wrote songs about getting high, masturbating, and getting high and masturbating, with even the band’s name, Green Day, being a reference to days the group spent doing nothing but smoking weed. When Green Day burst onto the mainstream with 1994’s Dookie Billie Joe Armstrong made his own proclamation with the opening lines to the album: “I declare I don’t care no more. I’m burning up and out and growing bored”. 2 months after Dookie’s release Kurt Cobain blew his brains out. The fiery iconoclast that spoke truth to power and was ready to fight for what he believed in was gone and was seemingly replaced by someone not ready to do the same.
I know I’m coming off as being a bit hard on BJ and the boys from Green Day, and that’s not my intention because I truly do love Green Day and certainly feel that the generational disdain for the culture of the time was warranted on some level. Gen X grew up in both the economic and cultural shadow of Ronald Reagan’s America. The PMRC and the satanic panic of the 80s vilified everything that young people liked as evil, and George H.W. Bush criticized perhaps the only cultural touchstone that spoke to Gen X in the same way when he said that American families should be “a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons”. There was a cultural stigma around Gen X even before they formed a cohesive voice that they had been poisoned by a perceived lack of decent American values.
Economically, Reaganomics and loss of American manufacturing jobs to outsourcing would eventually lead to the top 1% of Americans earning more than the bottom 50% of Americans for the first time in the mid 90s, and that gulf has only gotten wider in favor of the 1% since. But even more importantly Gen X could see through the bullshit surface-level falseness of modern American life. The most prescient example I can think of comes from Green Day’s song “Longview” where, when the main character of the song is told to get a job by his mother he points out that his mother hates her job, so why would he get one? The facade of the American Dream was starting to crumble, so what happens when someone takes a sledgehammer to it?
The apathy that Gen X had become so famous for died on September 11, 2001. When the whole world watched as 3,000 people died on live television abject resignation was no longer acceptable. A line in the sand was drawn and Americans found themselves either on one side of it or the other. The culture no longer allowed passive spectators. As the country was swept into a national fervor and roughly ⅔ of the country supported a full invasion of Iraq the generation infamous for not doing anything was now literally going to war and the mainstream media was ready to turn it into a reality tv show. As Billie Joe put it “ "They had all these Geraldo-like journalists in the tanks with the soldiers, getting the play-by-play". War was becoming a can’t miss cultural event that we all got to watch in real-time and instead of stopping it Gen X was leading the charge.
By his own admission Billie Joe Armstrong felt a growing sense of responsibility in his songwriting and felt that for a Green Day album to come out in the Bush Era it would have to speak on how awful the Bush Era truly was. After a complete album rewrite and 10 months of recording the band would produce the iconic album American Idiot. The album was a bit on-the-nose in its political commentary (the track “Holiday” included a bridge featuring the line “Sieg heil to the President Gasman”), but what the album lacked in subtlety it made up for in relevance to the current culture. Sometimes when you try to say something, what you say is more important than how you say it, and what Green Day was trying to say was important. The album was a pointed critique of not only the rise of Bush and his administration but the media and culture that enabled it. Armstrong saw the country as being brainwashed into passivity in the face of such an important moment in American history. The band that hit it big with anthems of antipathy were now crying out for action. While the album has its direct political message, the operatic narrative of the album is where Billie’s cultural commentary is its most intriguing.
The album’s story centers around the character of the Jesus of Suburbia, who wastes his days away doing drugs and loitering with his friends at their local 7-11. He is disillusioned at the world he finds himself and feels adrift in the world. He can sense the fakeness of culture he finds himself in, directly saying on the track “Jesus of Suburbia” that “Everyone's so full of shit. Born and raised by hypocrites”. He’s the perfect example of the Billie Joe Armstrong version fo a Gen Xer. In the first act our main character leaves home after finally having enough of his hometown. After arriving in the city he meets and befriends Saint Jimmy. Jimmy is a lot like the Jesus of Suburbia, with both seeing the hollow facade of modern living. The difference in characters lies in their reaction to the world. Where Jesus of Suburbia chooses to disengage with the modern world Jimmy projects his frustrations outward. Jimmy represents anger at the world instead of simply doing drugs and accepting the world around him. He’s...a lot like the Cobain version of a Gen Xer. The conflict in ideology between Jesus of Suburbia and St. Jimmy is emblematic of the ideological struggle of Gen X as a whole. The album doesn’t totally have a narrative. The characters don’t really have concrete actions in the same way they would in a movie or book, but in the penultimate track the story reaches the closest thing it has to a climax. Jimmy, like the generational angst he embodies, dies having failed to start the revolution he believed the world so desperately needed. Jesus of Suburbia, for his part, abandons the hedonistic rock n’ roll lifestyle in favor of a job “filling out paperwork on East 12th Street”. For all his performative resentment at the state of the modern world, Jesus of Suburbia ultimately admits defeat and works a job he hates as a cog in the system he once was so disillusioned by. There is no revolutionary victory for him, but also no glorious defeat that renders him a martyr that fought for something noble and true. He is doomed to wander aimlessly in a world he couldn’t change, constantly reminded of his own failure.
American Idiot released in September of 2004, in the thick of Bush’s reelection campaign. To say that Green Day wanted American Idiot to contribute to a defeat of Bush would be an understatement. They were perhaps the most prominent band to support the Rock Against Bush campaign and associated compilation CDs. They dedicated significant effort to mobilizing young voters to defeat Bush. According to drummer Tre Cool the band was doing everything they could to “make the world a little more sane”, and the album was the final cherry on top of the better part of a year spent doing everything in their power to try to prevent a Bush reelection. Bush would go on to win reelection by a larger margin than in 2000, even winning the popular vote as opposed to 2000. The wave of anti-Bush sentiment that Green Day spearheaded had crested, and it just wasn’t enough to break the levee. In a way that is sadly the lasting legacy of the album, a relic of a time and place that was gone the morning after the election took place.
In the leadup to the album release the band would mention their worries about preaching to the youth of America, but they collectively felt the state of America necessitated the band’s intervention. This, however, cements the dichotomy of political ideologies of Cobain and Armstrong. Where one was a steadfast ally of the oppressed from the moment he gained a platform, the other was a late-arrival to the winds of political activism. Where one was deified as a voice for a generation, the other was a voice speaking at a new generation that he wasn’t a part of. If you’re gonna try to inspire a generation to fight it helps if you’re actually a member of that generation and not just some old guy preaching.
Over time Green Day’s music would become less and less politically minded. Their follow up album, 2009’s 21st Century Breakdown maintained the loose narrative operatic style from American Idiot, but the album lacked the political pointedness associated with its predecessor. The band would follow up this effort with a bloated trilogy of studio albums before releasing their 2016 album Revolution Radio. While some saw Revolution Radio as a return to political awareness for Green Day reception to the album seemed to confirm what many Green Day fans had already come to accept: American culture had left the band behind, and what little influence they had on America was waning fast. Much like American Idiot the album came out in the fall of an election year and much like American Idiot the album couldn’t stop the election of a repugnant right-wing fundamentalist. The true tragedy in the story of Green Day lies in their 2020 album Father of All Motherfuckers. Our current cultural moment would seemingly be ripe for critique and political commentary from a band like Green Day, but the band wanted absolutely nothing to do with that. Billie Joe noted the lack of political commentary on the new album by saying it “just seemed too expected. But really the state of politics in America just leaves us with a sick stomach. We just wanted to dance our way through the apocalypse rather than shine a light on all the bulls— that’s going on right now.” We have come full circle. The band that started their careers merely disillusioned with the world before becoming political firebrands have given up and returned to ignoring the problems of the world. The band lost a few too many battles and is now doing what feels like the musical equivalent of filling out paperwork on East 12th Street.
Matt Daugherty is a young writer from Northeast Ohio. He is primarily a fiction writer, but enjoys the occasional foray into pop culture and media criticism. He can be found on Twitter shouting into the void at @mdaugherty1221.