It was one of my first CDs, Green Day’s American Idiot, that had made me want a guitar.
I was 10 years old, and already dreaming of sold-out shows and Led Zeppelin tattoos (one of which did find its way to reality). My parents indulged, getting me a Fender Squier for my birthday that year. I strapped it on, plugged it in, turned on the distortion, and strummed. It felt like a tool in my hands, amplifying the volume of a feeling, like a way to shout to the heavens without looking nuts.
I realized pretty quickly that doing anything with it besides just making noises was going to take some work, so I started up guitar lessons with a plucky old bluesman named Robert and first learned “Smoke on the Water” (as one does), followed by Clapton riff after Clapton riff.
I recall impatience with the process, a disinterest in pentatonic scales and even the basics of rhythm, really. I wanted to skip to the part where I was sticking it to the man like Billie Joe Armstrong on tunes like “Holiday” and “American Idiot,” shouting at the people in power so loudly and with so much style that they couldn’t argue back.
I was still a long way from my high school days — which would find me playing a show with a powerviolence band at a communist bookstore in downtown Portland — but I had an eager ear for music with attitude from a young age, and I still find myself dipping into the throes of angsty punk rock on days when it feels like there’s nothing to do about it all but shout.
I had an eager ear for music with attitude from a young age.
American Idiot came at a time when I was really just discovering music and my own taste. And the eponymous opener felt like it was made in a lab for 10-year-old me — a banging kick drum and ripping guitar riff with an F-bomb in the first 20 seconds? Say no more.
The vocal highlights between heavier instrumentals made the song ripe for belting in my room, and the lyrics shaking a fist at an unseen authority were right up the alley of a kid entering his angsty years. Armstrong looked and sounded like a guy who did not go to bed on time.
Welcome to a new kind of tension
All across the alienation
Everything isn’t meant to be okay
-“American Idiot”
The album’s lyrics felt like they encapsulated my preteen experience in suburban Portland — giving permission to feeling uncomfortable and not knowing why — while somehow also singing to everyone else across the country who felt like something was wrong they couldn’t put a finger on.
American Idiot was Green Day’s seventh album, a self-dubbed punk-rock opera about a trio of characters on surreal adventures through their own inner demons. Released in the thick of the Iraq war, it played like a middle finger to the state of American politics over a soundtrack of alternating distorted guitar riffs and lamentful ballads, telling a story of loss and dysfunction that stretched wider than just the war.
Years later, I admire how honestly these songs sing of the ever-frustrating complacency of being an American citizen — sitting on our hands and going about our day jobs while the political power we are supposed to have a say in pours money out of our communities and into bombing someone else’s.
As a kid, most of that went over my head.
I tried to pluck along on a guitar and understand what he was saying about the world I was growing up in. Lyrics about the financial boons of war and the twisted manipulation of patriotism felt like bite-sized moments of understanding. But the lyrics about being misunderstood and unheard, and the anger in those words — that felt visceral and relatable.
I fell asleep while watching Spike TV
After ten cups of coffee and you’re still not here
Dreamin’ of a song, but somethin’ went wrong
And you can’t tell anyone ’cause no one’s here
-“Homecoming”
Though as well as Green Day does adolescent anger on this album, I think the really indelible songwriting lies in some of its softer numbers.
One of the album’s most ubiquitous tracks, “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” written about the death of Armstrong’s father, expresses a desire to fast forward through grief. “Give Me Novacaine” sings of a similar yearning for numbness.
Time feels like an unpredictable tool on these songs, with Armstrong wielding and being threatened by it in equal parts throughout the album. It’s used to cope, justify emotion, or just skip the most painful parts entirely.
I can’t take this feeling anymore
Drain the pressure from the swelling
This sensation’s overwhelming
Give me a long kiss goodnight
And everything’ll be alright
Tell me that I won’t feel a thing
-“Give Me Novacaine”
At 10, those concepts felt like an emotional depth I couldn’t yet reach or understand, reading as novelty filler from a band I was looking to as a head-banging outlet for fighting the power (or at least yelling at it). For them to have such sad, vulnerable feelings in the same space felt strange.
But as I’ve grown, these are feelings I understand more with each passing year. I have learned intimately in the interim decades how natural it is that grief is intermingled with feelings of anger and confusion. And as my 20s have waned, I have found the concept of sleeping through the worst of things a more and more relatable concept.
For them to have such sad, vulnerable feelings in the same space felt strange.
Which tells us what makes this album, or any piece of music, stand up to the weathering of time: I have found that different parts of it speak to me as the years go by and I mature, but it has never felt irrelevant.
This music ages like a grudge, a testament to the timelessness of angst. Bands like Green Day, Paramore, and blink-182 continue to tour, decades removed from some of the high school drama they still sing about on the hits. And new young artists have followed in their footsteps — most notably and gracefully, Olivia Rodrigo.
In the multi-generational opera about the death of the American Dream and the forever tragedy of growing up, Green Day plays the uncle who is so cool that you almost start to believe him when his beer-driven tirades dip into political conspiracy. Meanwhile, Rodrigo plays the younger sister who is more talented and smarter than you ever were at that age, up to speed in equal parts on fashion and which senator voted to increase military spending last week.
There are incongruencies in the sounds of their respective eras, but it feels like Rodrigo has added a missing harmony to the lexicon of American angst. To hear her work in playlists alongside those who were angry and young before her is to create a more full symphony on the terrors of living in a place where it feels like you have no say — big or small, in love or war. Despite aging into it decades apart, Green Day and Rodrigo both speak to a society that is fundamentally dysfunctional, and just a hard fucking place to be an adolescent.
Rodrigo’s second LP, GUTS, tells the story of a woman growing up in 21st-century America, chock full of fuck-yous to the patriarchy and mourning of the lies we tell ourselves every day. Musically diverse, she alternates between an early 2000s pop punk sound and the morose lyrical songwriting that has swept folk and indie in the 2010s — somehow holding hands with the angry millennials and the resigned Gen-Zers simultaneously.
I first came upon Rodrigo when the video for “drivers license” was released in 2021. I was taken with the songwriting, but maybe even more wrapped up in the layers of her influences. I could hear Lorde in her instrumentation, a dash of Phoebe Bridgers’s wittiness in her lyrics, and — when her louder singles came out — Paramore’s Hayley Williams in her presence as a frontwoman. It felt like seeing the Power Rangers turn into that big mechanized dude made up of all the little robot bits.
For the first time, I felt like the musicians I listened to growing up were the influence rather than the influenced. The phenomenon was akin to the realization your parents are real people or watching the athletes you once idolized begin to retire — a definitive moment of aging.
It’s a strange feeling to watch someone younger than you pick up the pieces your generation left scattered around — be it music, politics or technology — and explore them with the kind of curiosity that breeds innovation. Watching Rodrigo’s sound and career progress almost reassures, one of those welcome signs that there is still work to be done but that not everything that came before was wrong, or meant to be forgotten.
And despite Rodrigo, having been born just a year before “American Idiot” was released, I hear Green Day in her work too.
She sings eloquently about the ways we lie to ourselves to get through the day, month, or year.
“all-american bitch” kicks off GUTS with the same fanfare as “American Idiot.” The melodic dissonance between the chorus and verses mirrors the tone of the lyrics — a cutting satire dripping with venom. It’s a boppy fuck-you (a sound becoming her decadent bread and butter) to a world that’s asking her to be more things than any one person is capable of.
When she sings “I got class and integrity, just like a goddamn Kennedy” you can feel the frustration seeping out of her pores. The tone is perfect for the song, the album, and for this moment. There’s more said in what you can tell she’s holding back than in what she actually sings — reinforced as the closing lyrics “I’m grateful all the time” are echoed in chaotic grace with a choral harmony singing “Grateful all the fucking time.”
GUTS tells the personal side of the macropolitical commentary of American Idiot, blasting the societal structure Rodrigo lives within as a woman, particularly at her age. She sings eloquently about the ways we lie to ourselves to get through the day, month, or year, and the faces we put on for others to get where we’re going — or just to feel safe.
And I am built like a mother and a total machine
I feel for your every little issue, I know just what you mean
And I make light of the darkness
I’ve got sun in my motherfuckin’ pocket, best believe
-“all-american bitch”
The album casts a wide net with universal stories of anger and sadness but, like in American Idiot, also a self-loathing that feels uniquely American and uniquely adolescent.
To sit fireside with Rodrigo as she spirals on songs like this is to vividly relive the everyday anxiety of being a teenager — wanting the world to fit more cleanly around you while not being able to pinpoint or articulate how to make that happen. She conveys the overwhelming hormonally charged chaos of that time of life in a way that anyone who has ever been sixteen years old should empathize with.
And I bought all the clothes that they told me to buy
I chased some dumb ideal my whole fucking life
And none of it matters, and none of it ends
You just feel like shit over and over again
-“pretty isn’t pretty”
The enduring hook in these albums is Rodrigo and Green Day’s ability to deftly conjure up simultaneous feelings of wistfulness and dread, from the first notes giving the listener a window back to what was at-once a simpler time but also a time that none of us would wish to relive.
Both artists ask us to look at the world through the eyes of someone just discovering how unfair it really is — before we got used to it and started to accept the status quo where it served us. Far removed from the grips of high school and the thick of adolescent angst, it’s easy to forget how jarring some of this was as a young person just starting to fend for themself. Should it really be this hard?
I now hear the same indignation in Rodrigo’s voice that I felt at her age.
To compare these albums, made nearly two decades apart, is to get a glimpse at a sameness we often forget in squabbles about which generation messed up more. There are plenty of people of all ages looking for change, but the benefit of youth is having the energy to be loud about it, to write about it, to sing songs about it that are heard on stages and speakers for decades to come. There is proof in your local record store that every generation has been pissed off enough about something to write a song about it — and if that is all that ties us together, it seems like a pretty good starting point.
Both American Idiot and GUTS came out in periods of social and political climate marked by doom, gloom, and a reasonable dose of existential dread. They represent the mood of an era that is starting to seem like forever — powerless rage coupled with the day-to-day slog of barely containing it.
I now hear the same indignation in Rodrigo’s voice that I felt at her age. I hear someone who watches a world they feel powerless to affect continuing on a crash-course trajectory that has been predetermined for decades. I hear someone who isn’t being listened to, as she closes GUTS with the heart-wrenching “teenage dream.”
When am I gonna stop being wise beyond my years and just start being wise?
When am I gonna stop being a pretty young thing to guys?
When am I gonna stop being great for my age and just start being good?
-“teenage dream”
It’s the same indignation that equips Green Day to effortlessly pivot from songs about burning out to songs about war. I hear the frustration throughout American Idiot of someone finding themselves, and simultaneously finding out that the world around them doesn’t seem to care or want to listen. It’s a teenage masterpiece: there’s rage, there’s apathy, and there’s the beautifully youthful dream that the world will change before I do.
And there’s nothin’ wrong with me
This is how I’m supposed to be
In a land of make-believe
That don’t believe in me
-“Jesus of Suburbia”
My dad said once to my sister — 19 at the time — during the tumultuous summer of 2020 that he “remembered being young and angry,” in a way that suggested she’d grow out of it. And maybe it’s true that we get a little more tired with age, but I think we always carry some part of that adolescent angst with us: yearning for a better world but unsure where to start, pretending to be someone we aren’t just to get a foot in the door, angry at being misunderstood when no one was listening in the first place.
The post Green Day and Olivia Rodrigo Help Me Cope With My Leftover Teen Angst appeared first on Electric Literature.
