I love seeing new material from Billie Joe, and I’m as excited and giddy about it as anyone. But I found the underlying message in the interview to be rather somber and sobering. I wasn’t sure if I should even post my reaction to it. I’ve been ruminating about it for a few days. But here it is anyway.

But I’ll start with happy stuff. Screencaps:

More: 1, 2, 3.

And here are my not-as-happy thoughts:

Mainstream entertainment culture tends toward the crass and disturbing. Starlets like Britney Spears and Lindsey Lohan make headlines for their very public personal failings more than they do for any talents or accomplishments. Some of the most successful rap stars are proud to display their conspicuous consumption and disrespect for women. Movie actors are incessantly pursued by shameless paparazzi, whom they claim to loathe but whose attention they also court. And the public is not only not put off by all this but appears to be delighted by it.

Then there’s Billie Joe Armstrong, a multi-platinum selling rock star who has integrity, humility, intelligence, a careful, reflective thoughtfulness, and a social conscience, and who doesn’t hide any of it, nor flaunts it.

Not that there aren’t other stars who also have good qualities, of course, but in today’s entertainment world, he stands out. He’s this scruffy little guy who, although he’s brilliant and tough-as-nails, also has the endearing and self-effacing habit of constantly saying “you know” when he talks. He often smiles sheepishly, looking slightly dazed and amazed, and shrugs if he’s given a compliment. It’s lovely that he would offer a kind and compassionate assessment of Britney Spears, who is so frequently an object of the most callous ridicule, when he’s the anti-Britney: she’s “a manufactured child” and he’s the polar opposite. He’s like a sweet and scruffy antidote to the crassness of so much of what passes for entertainment.

Green Day has always been an anomaly in mainstream entertainment. Billie Joe mentions their first Rolling Stone interview, and even then they were oddly misunderstood. Their Dookie fans tended to be aggressive and thoughtless, and Billie Joe resented being lumped in with the mentality that fans brought with them from other musically aggressive bands. Green Day’s music had and has that raw edge, but they were and are about compassion and honesty, and a sharp sense of bullshit-detection. They had come out of the East Bay punk rock scene that valued camaraderie and love, and when they tried to bring that message to their mainstream audience it fell on deaf ears, and that still seems to be largely true today.

Billie Joe in Rolling Stone, 1995:

“That place and that culture [Gilman St. and the East Bay punk scene] saved my life. It was like a gathering of outcasts and freaks. It wasn’t about people moshing in a pit and taking their shirt off. That’s one thing I hate about the new mainstream thing: blatant violence. We get lumped into this bandwagon of this fucked up mentality. To me punk rock was about being silly. The whole thing had a serious message to people but at the same time it was silly, and people weren’t afraid to talk about love.” [ Source ]

Even today, when they urge fans to take care of each other in the pit, it doesn’t seem to have much of an effect. Billie Joe was still saying that in at least one of the American Idiot performances I was there for, in 2004: he invited someone who looked like she had been hurt to watch the performance from the side of the stage, and he said, “You guys look out for each other okay?” And when Billie Joe defends Britney Spears in the interview, even the interviewer tries to contradict him: She was a willing participant, so screw her.

Billie Joe is much less angry or frustrated about all of it now than he was 13 years ago, it seems, and I’m glad to see that, for his sake, and for the sake of all of us who love his work and wouldn’t want him to give up in bitterness and disgust. His final words are lovely and hopeful:

“I’m going on faith — because I was there. Gilman Street [the Berkeley, California, club where Green Day played early shows] is still around. And that’s a hard task, because there is no bar — it’s a nonprofit cooperative. It’s like a commune — this feeling of bucking the system together, surviving and thriving on art. It gives me goose bumps — punk is something that survives on its own.”

But he doesn’t seem to be hopeful about the mainstream view of bloodlust as entertainment, or the seemingly widespread lack of interest in serious issues. What he seems to be saying here is that he is counting on those who are on the outside to keep on fighting the good fight, unseen and unnoticed by the apathetic majority, for whom he has blunt words: “none of the kids give a shit. They’d rather watch videos on YouTube.”

This is a sweet and thoughtful interview, as always, but his unease with the culture at large is as strong as ever. Not only does the public “want blood” and “want to see other people thrown to the lions,” but it also fails to “question [our] rulers” and includes “the biggest hypocrites in the world.” I’ve often wondered why people find him preachy, or are angered and annoyed by the political content of his work, and even by his involvement in good causes, all of which I see as admirable, but it occurs to me that when he refuses to point fingers at an easy target like Britney, he’s really calling all of us to task, and that, understandably, can make one bristle, especially if the criticism seems to strike close to home.
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This is a reaction to his comments. I’ll let it stand on its own uh, merit:

“Armstrong [said] that the Iraq War had to end before any major improvements could take place. He added that the lack of a draft is why kids didn’t “give a shit” and would “rather watch videos on YouTube.” Umm, nice try, but I looked up Iraq War on YouTube and found this video that had 473,257 views. Don’t hate our generation just because we know how to have our cake and eat it too. Of course, the video only had 6 comments, so maybe Armstrong has a point, although personally I think it just needed a better background song or a piano-playing cat.”

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