Last Chance to Piss It All Away: Green Day's 'Warning' at (Almost) 20
A better understanding of Green Day's most personal album, as I've aged alongside it.
As the legend has it, Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong was walking on the street one day when a guy came up to him and asked him what punk is.
He looked around, saw a trash can and kicked it over, replying, “That’s punk!”
Still not grasping the premise despite Armstrong’s concise explanation, the pedestrian did the same, and looked to clarify Armstrong’s point. “That’s punk?” he asked.
“No,” Armstrong replied. “That’s trendy.”
The first and most important thing to note about this interaction is that it probably did not happen. People don’t just walk up to famous people on the street and ask what the thing they do is. When I ran into former Philadelphia Flyer Jeff Carter on the street, I didn’t say, “Hey, Jeff Carter! What’s hockey?”
But, to paraphrase Chris Farley’s bus driver character in Billy Madison, “You can imagine what it’d be like if it did.”
It would be cool. It would be a great example of quick thinking on a level even the smarmiest Aaron Sorkin character couldn’t dream of.
Kicking over a trash can made a lot of noise and probably a big mess, but it wasn’t sticking it to any man. Someone working a criminally low paying job is going to have to clean that up. Nancy Reagan isn’t coming out to pick up the garbage. Oliver North was not aware of this act of fictional vandalism, nor was Dick Cheney shaking in his boots over it.
This story stands out to me as a perfect representation of the protest culture that Green Day sang about for so long. Hearing that, you probably first think of the Bush-era “American Idiot” and the fanfare that followed. But whenever I think of Green Day getting in on the politics game, I think of the album that came out a year before 9/11—Warning. It was divisive at the time as a betrayal of the pop punk roots of Dookie and Insomniac, but still had plenty of “Greatest Hits” quality tracks that still hold up today.
And if you dig below those attempts at political commentary, you get some of Billie Joe’s most personal and relatable music, and in that earnestness the album has aged especially well to a certain demographic. It was the most dignified album from a band that no one wanted to be dignified.
In this second edition of “Early Birthdays,” I’m going to complete the Pop Disaster tour of blogs, and dig in on Warning – an album I love, an album I think was misunderstood at the time, and an album that I think best represents where Billie Joe Armstrong Green Day could have gone.
When I first thought about writing this, I thought I’d lean heavily on songs like “Minority” and the lines in “Warning” about being a “victim of authority.” Looking at these songs from the point of view of someone who has internalized everything that came after—American Idiot, 21st Century Breakdown, an American Idiot Broadway show (which I actually saw - blog post for another day) Revolution Radio and beyond—this seemed like the very beginning of Billie Joe Armstrong’s political phase. I thought about all of this after reading Jeremy Larson’s really fantastic review of Rage Against the Machine’s The Battle of Los Angeles on Pitchfork this past Sunday.
In Larson’s review, he talks about how Rage’s Zack De La Rocha was inspired by the Zapatista National Liberation Movement, a guerrilla army of indigenous farmers in southern Mexico, and its leader Subcomandante Marcos. His philosophy was that, rather than supporting his cause directly, you should use his to influence your own, whatever and wherever that might be.
Both Rage and Green Day found themselves inspired by revolutionary ideas, bringing romanticized versions of them to the largely suburban and white audiences they served. The difference between the two (among many) is that the guys in Rage actually got involved with these political and activist groups. De La Rocha regularly met in person with the Zapatistas. Tom Morello’s political involvement is well documented. The band had specific targets of their ire. They, to use their words, knew their enemies.
Billie Joe, historically, has not. His political voice relied more on romanticization and the hope that his listeners fill in the blanks, whether it’s an older crowd still harboring resentment of a dehumanizing Reagan administration or 10 year olds who are pissed off their 7th grade teacher gave them detention for chewing gum. The warnings about being a “victim of authority” ring equally true in both of their heads, and just like the Zapatistas wanted revolutionary thinkers and actors all over the world to use their uprising as inspiration, Billie Joe Armstrong leaned more on the idea of activism more than the practice of it. There was an enemy, but he never really told you who it was. He might not have been totally sure himself.
We saw it on American Idiot, which at least had a personified antagonist in the Bush administration, but rather than telling us how to fight back against a hawkish government invading a sovereign nation under false pretenses, we got activism theater. We saw it on Revolution Radio even more acutely, but still with blurry thesis statements and possibly more embellished stories involving destruction of public property.
Here’s how he described that album’s title track to Rolling Stone in 2016 (but could have easily been last week, sadly):
The idea came to him in New York two years ago when he ran into a Black Lives Matter protest; before he knew it, Armstrong had gotten out of his car and was walking up Eighth Avenue with the throng. “I was screaming, ‘Hands up, don’t shoot,’ ” he says. “I felt like I was on the right side of history. … It’s like something is breaking in the world. A lot of the old people are dying off and the values of the Fifties generation are starting to break and what happened in the Sixties and is starting to manifest more now than it ever has before.”
Even with the firsthand experience of the most important movement of this generation, unfortunately Armstrong still fell back on his habitually metaphor-heavy turns of phrase, avoiding any of the real nit and grit of the protests and missing the mark.
We are revolution radio
Operation 'no control'
And the headline 'my love's bullet proof'
Give me cherry bombs and gasoline
Debutantes in surgery
And the headline 'legalize the truth'
It’s catchy, because Armstrong is fundamentally wired to write catchy hooks on a McCartneyan level. But it’s ultimately meaningless, and still disappointing to see someone who supposedly ditched his car in Manhattan on a whim during a protest (which seems impossible) and marched with the masses still have such a tenuous grasp on protest culture.
And this is where I stop myself from devoting the entirety of this piece on Armstrong’s “protest music,” because to call Warning a protest album because of a few lines in the title track and “Minority” would be doing a great disservice to what is ultimately Billie Joe Armstrong’s most personal work of his life. It will never be remembered as Green Day’s best album, because it’s not (that honor goes to James Gandolfini’s personal fav), but it’s their most unique, and time has only helped its legacy, especially as some younger fans catch up to it.
When Warning came out, Billie Joe Armstrong was 28. His band was the biggest name in pop punk and one of the biggest in music overall. But on a much smaller scale, his life was now wildly different at home. He had two kids now. He was married. He hadn’t put out an album in three years, a length of time so long that Warning was heralded as a “comeback” album.
As I listened to this album more today, thinking I would focus digs at what is probably my all-time favorite band for its hapless attempts at political theater, I started relating to the rest of it more than I ever had before. Themes that previously felt foreign or went over my head now hit hard.
Maybe it’s because I’m 28, too. Not that the age comes with some unlocked ability to empathize. And I am not married, nor do I have children, but I relate to one theme of the album on a deep level:
I’m tired, and the unexciting issues of day-to-day life seem to weigh more heavily than any authoritative political straw man could. And life can feel like being pulled on opposite ends by youth and maturity.
You wake up in the middle of the night in terror worried that you missed an electric bill payment. Maybe you did neglect a few payments, and you’re just waiting until the power goes off. And when you catch yourself feeling too “old” you try something to reconnect to your younger self.
“Better homes and safety-sealed communities / Did you remember to pay the utilities?” he sings before snapping out of it momentarily and trying to get back to the offensive, wondering “Is the cop or am I the one who’s really dangerous?”
But then he sinks back into the couch in a subdued, slowed-down “Suburban Home” for Gen X and Millennials.
And there’s the high water mark of on-the-nose writing with “Deadbeat Holiday,” where Billie Joe also seems to grapple with his own fading celebrity and importance.
"Icon" is the last chance for hope
When there's no such thing as heroes
Your faith lies in the ditch that you dug yourself in
As the album goes on, Billie Joe flexes his fiction writing muscles plenty, crafting character-driven narratives of degenerates navigating the urban blight in “Misery,” sort of a precursor to the late-album tracks on American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown down to the polka rhythm and everything.
And the times that He can squarely zero in on his enemy, it’s himself, his malaise, his boredom, his inadequacies, his insecurities. But unlike on Dookie where he’d just drink or smoke or masturbate those away, he has to face them this time. Now he’s an adult with responsibilities. He has kids. He’s making bargains with himself and his wife to go have fun and prove to himself he’s not the horrible character he described on “The Grouch” on Nimrod (“Wasted youth and a fist full of ideals”).
He’s so many of us in our late 20’s and early 30’s, who swear to ourselves that we can still stay up past 11, even if it means tomorrow is going to hurt like hell and all we wanted to do was go to bed at 9. And he can do those things as long as he’s also there for his responsibilities, something he and his genre has worked so hard to avoid.
The flashes of anything resembling political music, if you could call it that, are the last flashes of Billie Joe Armstrong railing against what he’s become.
Because there’s plenty of evidence that he has, in fact, become The Grouch. He’s now aiming his disgust at (allegedly) Blink 182 for their immature humor on “Jackass,” basically yelling at them to grow up before throwing in a rippin’ sax solo.
Everybody loves a joke
But no one likes a fool
And you're always cracking the same old lines again
You're well rehearsed on every verse
And that was stated clear
But no one understands your verity
Grow up. Stop making those jokes. I don’t get it. Get a job. What even is this?
The album was also polarizing at the time for its literal sound, but from a musical standpoint, the cleaner guitar tone and softer edges weren’t actually a surprise, regardless of how many critics wanted to act like it was. After all, they had teased that sound with the then-ubiquitous “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” on Nimrod in ‘97. And Billie Joe’s love of 60s rock like The Kinks has been well documented, which he eventually doubled down on with the Foxboro Hot Tubs side project, and then tripled down on with the … ambitious … Uno, Dos, Tre releases.
You could argue that those were the real midlife-crisis albums. Going way too far over the top in an embarrassing fashion.
But at the time of Warning, this was a band taking what for them was a long break from touring, from making music. Suddenly Billie Joe had more time at home to reflect. You could call it a “quarter-life crisis album” and be correct, but I think a more accurate way to describe it is as a coming of age album, really. Because I think a better way to describe a “quarter-life crisis” is shaking through that last bit of childhood anxiety of “when I grow up.”
Using myself as a further example, I used to get kind of weirded out and anxious about turning 25. I don’t really know why, in hindsight. I think I felt like I hadn’t accomplished things I wanted to before I crossed some threshold into actual adulthood for real, and then once I got there things would be cemented in dullness and there was no room for trying new things. I had missed all of my window maybe. In my mind, I was too old to be bad or new at things. That dissipated quickly once I hit 26, and realized none of that mattered. There was no deadline. It wasn’t some race.
At that point I think I settled into a new calm. Expectations became more realistic, and my worldview became a little clearer. If anything, I’m even more optimistic now. Looking back, I realized this anxious spell was what you could describe as a “quarter-life crisis.” I’ll probably have another one near 30, but that was round 1.
This is how this album feels to me, at this point in my life at the same age Billie Joe Armstrong was when Warning came out. Once again, like I did for Blink 182, maybe I’m projecting my own emotions onto something incorrectly. But as someone in their late 20s now, the calmness and anxiety that comes from everyday life are much more relatable than any attempt at personifying radical ideology or changing the world.
And for the time when this album came out in 2000, in a pre-Bush and pre-9/11 world, these were the majority of problems facing Green Day listeners. The ones who grew up with Kerplunk or Dookie were now paying mortgages, working jobs and wrangling kids. There wasn’t quite as much of a panic sewn into daily lives yet. For as much as Billie Joe tried to capture the zeitgeist with American Idiot and everything after (sometimes more successfully than others), he managed to do it perfectly by writing songs about himself and his life at home.
And I can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened with Green Day had they followed this path instead. I think it would be a safe bet that their fanbase would skew older, and their shows would look much different without the re-energized young fanbase from American Idiot. You’d have a crowd that looks a lot more like a Chuck Ragan or The Hold Steady show. But you could also argue that they’d do a better job representing their demographic than they ever did with American Idiot and beyond.
Or would they have just called it quits there, leaving Dookie as the peak and this as the last gasp? That was a rumor swirling around when they recorded this album.
“Macy’s Day Parade,” in its sleepwalk through consumer culture and slow build, would’ve been quite a career ender for a band.
Where the midlife crisis is personified as an embarrassing fight like hell against aging, a quarter-life crisis is a more subtle struggle that isn’t much of a fight at all. It’s just anxious acceptance.
You become more “domestic,” and you can either resent that aspect of your life or accept it. You can hate yourself for staying in on Friday night or you can thank yourself for the good night’s sleep and more secure bank account come Saturday morning.
Warning is equal parts looking out the window at some of your friends having fun while you’re at home with your responsibilities and imagining the other realities where you were still young and wild and free, and equal parts being happy you’re there in a situation that previously you might not have dreamed of being in.
And Even with the muted, gloomy rhythm of “Macy’s Day Parade,” Billie Joe slips in a huge hook in the chorus, and a promise that he wants to do more. He obviously had no idea what was next for the band, or even himself, but that encapsulates the quarter-life ambition pretty damn well. The stage where you realized your early 20s were actually kind of stupid, and there’s plenty of time to get to whatever next level you want to get to regardless of age. If anything, it’s now more easily attained.
Give me something that I need
Satisfaction guaranteed to you
What's the consolation prize?
Economy sized dreams of hope
In another parallel reality, there’s a world where Green Day became power pop ol’ reliables, putting out a few consistently very good but never great albums and enjoying a devoted fanbase, having never phoenixed their career with American Idiot by following the route of largely empty political rhetoric rather than deeply personal yet unexciting themes. And Warning is a glimpse into what that would’ve looked like had Bush and 9/11 never happened, or if those reported “creative differences” in the studio actually got the best of them.
Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Ganser.
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