"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast" -Oscar Wilde |
"The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself." -- Proverbs 11:25 |
When I was 13, there was no freakin' way my parents would have taken me to a rock concert. Now here I was, 34 years later, with my husband and (slouchy, unkempt) 13-year-old on a clear, crisp September night, at what was, for my son, the equivalent of that Rolling Stones concert: Green Day at SBC Park in San Francisco. The East Bay trio was celebrating the biggest album of their career, the ferociously anti-Bush cannonade "American Idiot," and this show was their triumphal homecoming. When I first heard Green Day on the radio 11 years earlier, I nearly wept at how much they echoed the Clash, my defunct heroes, the greatest band, ever. The musical revolution that the Clash promised had only been delayed, blooming again in Billie Joe Armstrong's fractious singing and the band's exhilarating three-chord thrash.
When my son discovered my Green Day CDs, I quietly rejoiced. He had previously resisted my musical suggestions and was content listening to his lightweight Smash Mouth CDs and (ick) the Dave Matthews Band. But Green Day lighted a fuse and he was soon riffling through my collection to sample the Clash, the Sex Pistols and the Ramones, as well as the Who and the Kinks, all of them Green Day's spiritual fathers. Billie Joe, Tre Cool and Mike Dirnt are much cooler teachers than I am, and I thank them for it.
I also thank them for the unvarnished anger of the "American Idiot" album, which has become the soundtrack for my son and his friends' nascent liberalism. I wasn't sure how to talk about the war or about the erosion of civil liberties to my son without seeming like a ranting old lady. But "American Idiot" gave me an opening. Note to politicians: The 13- and 14-year-olds of today get their news from "The Daily Show" and their attitude from Green Day and the cool-again '70s punks. Their hair is long or color-streaked, they think the president is a bozo, they know we're in Iraq for the oil and they aspire to own Priuses, not Hummers. Fear them. They are the old antiwar movement redux.
"This song is not anti-American, it's anti-waaaaaaaaaaar!" screamed Billie Joe at SBC Park, kicking into "Holiday" ("I beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies/ This is the dawning of the rest of our lives"), and 45,000 fists pumped the air. I looked around at all the families like us, and felt a curious sense of time shrinking and falling away. I was as happy as I had been at that Stones show at 14, and at Clash shows at 22. Earlier that night, we had sat in the golden San Francisco dusk waiting for the show to begin. We watched the people wandering around the stadium: Parents and kids, lone adults wrangling four or five preteens, pierced, plaid-skirted girls and waifish, T-shirted boys taking pictures of each other with their camera phones. An Irish punk band called Flogging Molly ambled onstage while the sky was still light and blew us away. They dedicated a song to the Clash's Joe Strummer, my poor, dead idol, and my son and I clapped loudly. Two girls on the edges of left field danced a jig to the music and one suddenly turned a running cartwheel. The night was full of joy and release.