I was introduced to Green Day when I was maybe thirteen. One of my then closest friends, fifteen, had been badgering me to listen to some of the songs he liked. While most of them were pretty unmemorable (read: I don’t remember them), one of them, American Idiot, stuck with me. I spent the next few weeks hunting down and listening to the entire album on repeat. Not unsurprisingly, this phase did not last long, but it’s still an old favourite that I frequently revisit.
Inspired by contemporary American political events of the early 2000s including the Iraq War and the Bush presidency, American Idiot is the seventh studio album by Green Day. Dubbed a “punk rock opera” by the band, it is narrated by and tells the story of the antihero Jesus of Suburbia who hates his town and the people who live in it, calling them hypocrites. He leaves for the city, meeting with two characters on the way – St Jimmy, embodying rebellion and violence, and Whatsername, who personifies reason and ethics – as he tries to understand the world around him. He has to make a choice between the two characters, implied to be facets of his personality, and chooses to follow the girl, leading to the death of St Jimmy. The final song, “Whatsername” – in my opinion, one of the best and yet most underrated songs in the album – shows how he eventually loses touch with Whatsername as well, to the point where he has forgotten even her name.
The “breakup song” is by no means uncommon, Green Day themselves having released quite a few (“Time of Your Life” being the most notable of these). However, Whatsername differs from most of them in that the emotions that drive the song are not wild and unrestrained. There is no anger in frontman Billie Joe Armstrong’s voice. There is regret, but it is not the dominant emotion. In many ways, the song feels like the way you’d remember your first failed relationship – the passage of time has healed old wounds, but you still wonder what it would’ve been like if everything had worked out and you were still together.
The track as a whole is balanced and provides a refreshing change from the other songs in the album. It sounds different from them, understated and not as loud as “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and the titular “American Idiot” – as an epilogue, it more than does its job, showing how the passage of time has changed the narrator. None of the instruments try to drown out each other. I especially liked how the drums stand out from the rest of the instruments throughout. (Drummer Tre Cool apparently recorded this part in a room designed to record guitars in order to obtain a dry sound. It seems to have worked pretty well.)
The lyrics, on the other hand, are straightforward – and yet it is hard to wrap your head around them. How do you forget the name of someone you once loved? How hard is it to forget them? “Seems like she disappeared without a trace” – why could they not stay in contact? It’s obvious he hasn’t thought of her in a long time. He does not regret the fact that they broke up – noting that he “took a different path” – but rather regrets the fact that he cannot remember anything about her, and wonders how she has been and what she is doing. He must have tried very hard to forget her and dissociate himself from the time he met her, and succeeded. Now, however, as he thinks of her, he is also reminded of the very strange time in his life that he met her.
It’s ironic, but I have not spoken to my friend the Green Day fan in more than a year. He came to school a few times after he left, but the only contact I have with him now is the odd story or meme he puts up on Instagram. It’s been a really long time. I wonder how he’s doing.
Article by Abhirami Girish
Poster by Namrata Nirmal
Article 19 