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On Green Day, Nanowrimo, and Election Day
Nov. 2nd, 2004 01:50 amScattered bits of burning paper aloft on their own heat in my head:
I BOUGHT AN ALBUM AND IT MADE MY JOKE OF A NOVEL AN ANTHEM.
Green Day's album -- not just the song, the entire album, which is a cohesive inchoate work of desperate beauty -- 'American Idiot'. I bought it, and I listened to it, and I GOT IT. I /get/ it. I get it.
I'm in love.
They remember; they learn. They /know/. They're on FIRE. And this time they are talking out of myhead.
They finished a night dancing to the Clash and waking Joe in the best possible way, with friends they just met and Guinness and smoking /inside/ the bars after hours, and wound up exhausting themselves in the fiercely sorrowful joy of expression, and the next day they woke up sobbing and knew why and WROTE IT FOR EVERYONE TO SEE.
I kept reading through the lyrics, staring. Staring and almost choking, almost crying. Wondering at the fact that a band translated, perfectly, the furious sarcastic hope and the politics and the anger at the hopelessness and the confusion and the *striving* of the Clash in the late 70s/early 80s -- translated it into the references, the symbols *I* grew up with, and the situation *now*, and the politics *now*. And then I read the liner notes and--
--Kathleen Hanna appears courtesy Strummer Recordings.
I'm in love.
And, and all in the right ways, it makes me *seethe*, /livid/, ready to smash things - and it makes me burstingly fiery /brilliantly/ happy because I'm not alone with a million scattered grassroots voices, I'm together with my towering RAGE of a generation and we vote today. I'm exhausted and I feel like going for a run, goddammit.
I BOUGHT AN ALBUM AND IT MADE MY JOKE OF A NOVEL AN ANTHEM.
Green Day's album -- not just the song, the entire album, which is a cohesive inchoate work of desperate beauty -- 'American Idiot'. I bought it, and I listened to it, and I GOT IT. I /get/ it. I get it.
I'm in love.
They remember; they learn. They /know/. They're on FIRE. And this time they are talking out of myhead.
They finished a night dancing to the Clash and waking Joe in the best possible way, with friends they just met and Guinness and smoking /inside/ the bars after hours, and wound up exhausting themselves in the fiercely sorrowful joy of expression, and the next day they woke up sobbing and knew why and WROTE IT FOR EVERYONE TO SEE.
I kept reading through the lyrics, staring. Staring and almost choking, almost crying. Wondering at the fact that a band translated, perfectly, the furious sarcastic hope and the politics and the anger at the hopelessness and the confusion and the *striving* of the Clash in the late 70s/early 80s -- translated it into the references, the symbols *I* grew up with, and the situation *now*, and the politics *now*. And then I read the liner notes and--
--Kathleen Hanna appears courtesy Strummer Recordings.
I'm in love.
And, and all in the right ways, it makes me *seethe*, /livid/, ready to smash things - and it makes me burstingly fiery /brilliantly/ happy because I'm not alone with a million scattered grassroots voices, I'm together with my towering RAGE of a generation and we vote today. I'm exhausted and I feel like going for a run, goddammit.
