It's a green new day

I was driving back to Georgia yesterday, and I caught a portion of the Fresh Air broadcast on NPR. Terry Gross interviews people from pop culture in a distinctly intelligently conversational way. I highly recommend Fresh Air. She was interviewing Billy Joe Armstrong, the frontman for Green Day about the adaptation of their album American Idiot into a Broadway play. I am a nominal fan of Green Day, but I was intrigued by the concept of a punk album turning into a Broadway show and how insane that felt to me. I remember hearing him talk about the back lash they got from the punk community for their fame. He said that he viewed their willingness to participate in that system as being the most punk thing they could do. They were going against the machine of what punk had become. I've always considered his perspective to be interesting, and so I listened.

Terry asked Billy Joe to describe the source of the apparent anger in his music and what generated so much anger in his teen years. He says, "Feeling lost. I always say that in every song I write whether it's a love song, a political song, or something, or a song about family, the one thing I find is that feeling lost and trying to find your way. I think a song like American Idiot is a series of questions, ya know. I think Holiday is a series of questions. It's like you're trying to battle your way out of your own ignorance. And that's where it gets personal. It's like I don't want to be an American Idiot. What I want to be is, I'm not sure. I just want more, and I'm willing to take the risks to try to get out of that, ya know, or try to find something more."

America... Church, this is a perfect description of the mind of a teenager. They feel lost. What are we going to do?

http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=13&prgDate=5-27-2010

Soundtrack: Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Green Day