Inside
AMERICAN IDIOT
background and analysis by Scott Miller

America is a very angry place right now in the first couple decades of this new millennium. American Idiot sits in the center of a political rock theatre trilogy. As tuned into its own zeitgeist as Rent was, so was American Idiot. But it’s not really a jukebox musical or a catalog musical, even though it appears to be. True, the score started out as an album (and a half), but this is no Mamma Mia! This is serious, powerful storytelling, capturing a pivotal moment in our collective lives both then and now.

Every song is outstanding, so many of them powerfully emotional, some of them deeply haunting. To the surprise of many, these songs work beautifully as theatre songs. Perhaps one reason is that they were translated for the stage by Tom Kitt, composer of High Fidelity, Next to Normal, and If/Then. Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, who wrote most of the songs, loved what Kitt did with his work. Armstrong says in the documentary Broadway Idiot, “I think some of these versions are better than what we recorded.” Kitt is a master of turning non-theatre music into theatre music, having also arranged and orchestrated Head Over Heels, featuring the songs of The Go-Go’s, and Jagged Little Pill, featuring the songs of Alanis Morissette.

Birth of The Idiot

In 2003, the American pop-punk band Green Day decided to write and record their own rock opera, inspired by The Who’s Tommy, Jesus Christ Superstar, and The Rocky Horror Show. Their resulting concept album, American Idiot, followed the life of Jesus of Suburbia, a sort of anti-hero who goes on a journey of self-discovery. The album was released in 2004, selling fourteen million copies worldwide, almost six million in the U.S., and it won the Grammy Award for best rock album. From early on, the band hoped to turn the album into a stage piece or a film.

Director Michael Mayer heard the album soon after its release and he was knocked out by it. The San Francisco Gate relates the story this way in a 2009 article:

“I'm not the hippest guy around,” said Mayer, whose Broadway credits include Thoroughly Modern Millie, “but there's depth and politics and beautiful poetry in this music.” In an offhand remark to a Variety reporter about rock music on Broadway at the time, Mayer said he thought someone had to be thinking about a stage version of the Green Day smash. When the actor-turned-producer Tom Hulce read the interview, he called Mayer, with whom he was already working on Spring Awakening, and essentially called his bluff.

The director, curly-haired and boyishly ebullient at 49, recalled that phone conversation in Berkeley recently. “Are you serious? Tom asked me. The next thing I knew I was in meetings with Green Day’s people in Los Angeles and making a very rough pitch for this show.”

After a run at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2009, the show was substantially revised and moved to the St. James Theatre on Broadway, where it officially opened in April 2010. The show closed in April 2011, after 422 performances. While Green Day did not appear in the production, vocalist/guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong occasionally performed the role of “St. Jimmy” throughout the run, usually with no advance public notice.

The critics were mixed, often praising much about the show but complaining that the narrative was too thin, apparently not under-standing that Mayer had created a post-9/11 American myth. Myths aren’t about narrative complexity; they are about the power of symbol and metaphor to explore human lives. On that level, it succeeded brilliantly. The New York Times review was titled, “Stomping Onto Broadway with a Punk Temper Tantrum,” and critic Charles Isherwood wrote:

Rage and love, those consuming emotions felt with a particularly acute pang in youth, all but burn up the stage in American Idiot, the thrillingly raucous and gorgeously wrought Broadway musical adapted from the blockbuster pop-punk album by Green Day. Pop on Broadway, sure. But punk? Yes, indeed, and served straight up, with each sneering lyric and snarling riff in place. A stately old pile steps from the tourist-clogged Times Square might seem a strange place for the music of Green Day, and for theater this blunt, bold and aggressive in its attitude. Not to mention loud. But from the moment the curtain rises on a panorama of baleful youngsters at the venerable St. James Theater, where the show opened on Tuesday night, it’s clear that these kids are going to make them¬selves at home, even if it means tearing up the place in the process.

Peter Travers wrote in Rolling Stone, “Though American Idiot carries echoes of such rock musicals as Tommy, Hair, Rent, and Spring Awakening, it cuts its own path to the heart. You won’t know what hit you. American Idiot knows no limits – it's a global knockout.” Paul Taylor in The Independent called the show “the Hair of its generation.”

One common complaint focused on the emptiness of the female characters. Harry Lou wrote in The Indianapolis Business Journal, “Its female characters are sketched even lighter than the main men are.” Though the charge was fair, the story was told from the point of view of these three very selfish, very shallow young men who all need to grow up and find out who they are. From that point of view, of course the women will be two-dimensional. So is that a psychologically truthful detail or a serious flaw?

At the Center of the Earth

Without altering the order of the songs on the Green Day album, Mayer and Kitt fashioned a triple Hero Myth, as their central characters Johnny, Will, and Tunny all respond in different ways to the cultural upheaval of a post-9/11 world, all three going on spiritual journeys to find their place in the world, their path, their “Real” as Passing Strange would put it. Each of them takes his own Hero’s Journey, though Johnny’s is the most detailed.

Heroes’ Journeys can be concrete, as in an actual journey, or they can be interior. Or both. In American Idiot, director and book-writer (which means in this case, re-conceiver) Mayer gives us all three versions. Will stays behind, and his journey is interior, about learning to grow up and stop being selfish (just like Rob Gordon in High Fidelity). Both Johnny and Tunny take physical trips, but Tunny literally goes to the other side of the world, while Johnny travels to New York, but then journeys inside through the use of drugs. Both Tunny and Johnny travel to “the underworld” in one way or another, as many classic heroes do.

All the big ideas in the show are present in the Green Day album but more abstract, more broadly thematic, more metaphoric. In the context of our triple Hero Myth, “Wake Me Up When September Ends” is no longer about the death of Armstrong’s father, but instead it makes September into a symbol, the month that contained 9/11 and all its anniversaries, the post-9/11 mindset in its totality, forever with us. This song of personal lost and pain becomes instead a song about social oppression and delusion. September becomes the culture of the War on Terror.

What’s different about these three journeys from their archetypes is this additional element not usually present in stories like these. Not only do these men have to find their individual paths, but at the same time, a very aggressive, oppressive culture is pushing them onto different paths, into a mindset they feel is false and toxic. The entire conflict of the story is set up in the first sentence of the show, “Don’t wanna be an American Idiot!” In other words, “Your Real is not my Real. Your fear is not my fear. Your path won’t get me to my destination. But how can I find my own Real, how can I avoid being an American idiot, if Bush and Cheney’s Real is the only Real anyone recognizes? How can I find my Real when their Real permeates everything?”

In the book, Mass Media, Mass Propaganda: Examining American News in the “War on Terror,” media critic Ben Bagdikian explains corporate monopolization of the media bluntly:

A cartel of five media conglomerates now control the media on which a majority of Americans say they most rely. These five are not just large – though they are all among the 325 largest corporations in the world – they are unique among all huge corporations: they are a major factor in changing the politics of the United States and they condition social values of children and adults alike. These five huge corporations own most of the news¬papers, magazines, books, radio, and TV stations and movie studios of the United States. They have acquired more public communications power – including ownership of the news – than any private businesses have ever before possessed in world history. Nothing in earlier history matches this corporate group’s power to penetrate the social landscape.

Our three heroes don’t want to be passive, controlled sheep who accept what “authorities” tell them, believe what others believe, chase the prizes others chase. These three guys know or at least feel that’s not right. And yet, they have been passive in their own lives for so long. They have not yet taken control of their destinies. At the top of the show, these three don’t know what the right path is, but they know what the wrong path is. Even if they don’t know it rationally, they know instinctually that they can’t follow the same road everybody else (the “American idiots”) are following. They have to find their own road, their own Real.

But they have no road map. Armstrong says in the Broadway Idiot documentary, “A big theme of mine is just being lost in the chaos.” He also says of the album, “It’s about learning the hard lessons.”

What’s particularly fascinating about this story is that we get three Hero Myth stories, three different responses to the obstacles of a post-9/11 culture of fear, disconnection, and lies. Some reviews called these characters slackers, but that trivializes the richness of their individual hero-myth journeys. As reconceived for the stage by Mayer, Kitt, and Armstrong, American Idiot chronicles a year in the life of three friends who are lost in the labyrinth of modern day American suburbia. As the story begins, Johnny, Tunny, and Will decide to head for the Big City, but Will stays home with his pregnant girlfriend; and after getting to the Big City, the depressed, desensitized Tunny decides to join the army. Now off on his own, Johnny conjures up the mythic drug dealer St. Jimmy, who leads him down a road of sex, heroin, and rock and roll, while Johnny pursues a mysterious woman he calls Whatsername. Ultimately, Johnny tells Whatsername that he’s leaving her to follow St. Jimmy, but Whatsername tells Johnny that St. Jimmy is, “a figment of your father’s rage and your mother’s love,” and she leaves. Johnny abandons St. Jimmy and takes a soul-killing office job. All three friends ultimately find their paths unfulfilling, and they end up back home, much the wiser, accepting the demons and complexities of adult life. They may still be lost, but they are self-aware now in a way they had not been before.

In some ways, this is a classic story built on the hero myth, and while there are obvious echoes of Rent here, there are also many echoes of Tommy and Rocky Horror, and other works (like Act II of The Fantasticks), yet it is still very much its own, very original work, with a very distinctive, authentic rock voice that Broadway doesn’t often hear. Far from being just a rock album on stage, this is a fully realized rock musical with some interesting things to say about our culture and our times – from the show’s opening video montage of very dark, depress¬ing news stories, to the only partly resolved finale. Steven Hoggett’s powerful, athletic, intensely aggressive hip-hop choreography in the Broadway production equaled the tone and intensity of the material. The walls of the set were covered with newspaper, rising all the way up past the proscenium, dotted with TV screens, and here and there the word OBEY written across the papers.

There were those who hated American Idiot for not being a normal Broadway musical, for not having a more detailed, conven-tionally plotted story. But this is real rock theatre, not a Broadway musical that just uses rock as musical vocabulary. American Idiot’s aesthetics are different, its language is different, its goals are different. Rock theatre often tells much more primal tales. Like The Odyssey, the Passion story in the New Testament, The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, and many other stories, American Idiot is a hero myth, a twenty-first century fable, as each of the three lost friends has to take his own journey and face his own obstacles, each crossing into the “under-world,” learning something about himself, and returning to his people with his new knowledge. In a twist, Johnny has to face his own “evil wizard” in the person of St. Jimmy, but he finally realizes he is his own evil wizard.

The tragedy of the show’s ending, despite its uplifting feel, is that these three friends are still lost. They’ve gained some understand-ing and self-knowledge, but that’s not enough in our oppressive, over-stimulated, overly combative world. To its credit, there are no easy answers or resolutions at the end of American Idiot because, like Hair, it’s telling the truth and there are no easy answers or resolutions in real life.

All Across the Alienation

The politics of American Idiot are even more overt than many other recent shows. Look at this opening lyric, set to a driving, aggres¬sive beat:

Don’t want to be an American idiot
Don’t want a nation under the new media
Hey, can you hear the sound of hysteria?
The subliminal mind fuck America

Welcome to a new kind of tension
All across the alienation
Where everything isn’t meant to be okay
Television dreams of tomorrow
We’re not the ones meant to follow
For that’s enough to argue

Well maybe I am the faggot America
I’m not a part of a redneck agenda
Now everybody, do the propaganda!
And sing along to the age of paranoia

Welcome to a new kind of tension
All across the alienation
Where everything isn’t meant to be okay
Television dreams of tomorrow
We’re not the ones meant to follow
For that’s enough to argue

Don’t want to be an American idiot
One nation controlled by the media
Don’t want to be an American idiot
One nation controlled by the media
Don’t want to be an American idiot
One nation controlled by the media
Information age of hysteria
Calling out to idiot America

Welcome to a new kind of tension
All across the alienation
Where everything isn’t meant to be okay
Television dreams of tomorrow
We’re not the ones meant to follow
For that’s enough to argue
Hey!

Almost feels like this song was written about America today. Maybe the truth is, it’s about American at all times. How perfectly Billie Joe Armstrong describes politics right now, with “Welcome to a new kind of tension, all across the alienation...”

The world changed drastically in the mid and late 1960s. Values changes, perceptions changed, belief systems changed, humor changed, language changed, sexuality changed, culture changed. It’s the most obvious reason why Rodgers & Hammerstein shows no longer speak to the reality of modern-day America. But change that big, that fundamental, is scary, traumatic, disorienting. Freedom isn’t easy. No longer armed with clear expectations about their future, America’s youth was lost, searching for meaning, for purpose, for spiritual truth outside mainstream religion. And that feeling of being lost, and that search for answers is the whole point of shows like Hair, Pippin, Rocky Horror, and Tommy.

But massive changed was visited upon our country again after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. And just as Hair documented the anger and disconnection of youth in the 60s, American Idiot is a clear companion piece, taking a similar snapshot of America in the earliest years of this new century. And like Hair, American Idiot doesn’t paint a pretty picture.

But the last scene, “The Final Letter,” leaves us with something of value, almost subliminally. It’s not optimism, exactly, but an embrace of life, the good, the bad, and the ugly. You can’t just embrace the easy parts of life; you have to embrace all of it.

FINAL LETTER
Somewhere New. Johnny: And that was that.
Tunny: Or so it seemed.
Will: Is this the end Or the beginning?
Johnny: All I know is,
She was right.
I am an idiot.
It’s even on my birth certificate.
In so many words.

Heather: This is my rage.
Extraordinary Girl: This is my love.
Will: This is my town.
Whatsername: This is my city.
Johnny: This is my life.

END OF PLAY

Whatever life may hand you, it’s your life. These characters learn what Chip Tolentino learns in Spelling Bee, “Life is random and unfair, Life is pandemonium.” That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, as you long as you understand it – life is neither reward nor punishment; it’s just a road. The trick, as the great scholar Joseph Campbell put it, is to find your bliss and follow it. Ultimately, our heroes find their Real inside themselves. Exactly like Luke Skywalker and all the great heroes in all the great hero stories. There are really only a few great stories, which we repeat over and over in different forms, all of which act as metaphors for a human life. Storytelling is how we make sense of ourselves and the world around us. It’s good to be reminded how ancient and fundamental to our existence storytelling is. And it’s a worthwhile reminder that though this is a punk rock opera, these stories are as old as human experience.

The Son of Rage and Love

American Idiot is a punk rock musical, though you’d be making a mistake if you think that means the whole score sounds the same, that it’s all loud and aggressive. Some of it is, but there’s a great variety within punk, and much of it is not the screaming, racing, distorted, unpolished punk rock stereotype. On the contrary, there are some power ballads in this show that are genuinely beautiful and emotionally potent, “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” “21 Guns,” “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” “Last Night on Earth”...

Just as there was a great variety among the punk artists of the 70s (almost none of whom embraced the label “punk” at the time), so too is there great variety in the score for American Idiot. People who don’t know any punk rock, or its more recent cousin, “emo rock,” will be amazed at how versatile and how expressive it can be.

Maybe a better label for American Idiot is “pop punk” or maybe even “art punk”? Or does that just conjure New Wave? No, Green Day is much more raw, more visceral than that. Maybe it’s just another evolution of punk, which has always included elements of pop. The songs of Green Day are far more musical, more melodic, more poetic, more insightful than anything the New York Dolls ever sang. On the other hand, Green Day’s more aggressive songs (“American Idiot,” “Holiday”) share a great deal with their punk ancestors.

It’s important to remember that all punk rock isn’t about the visceral, primal rage of the Sex Pistols. Some of the punkers are/were real street poets, some very consciously picking up the mantle of the Beat writers, the cultural revolutionaries of the 1950s. America has had “punks” throughout the 20th century, in rebellion against the homogen¬i¬zation of emotional expression and individual experience, the swallow¬ing up of man by the mainstream culture. Backlash was inevitable then as it was in the 70s, in the early 2000s, and still today. When rock and roll was born in the early 1950s, the sound was every bit as raw, as untrained, as rebellious as punk in the 70s. Rock forms always evolve to challenge the status quo. And there’s always an enfant terrible or three who appears at just the right moment to push the music forward. It’s a natural process of periodic death and rebirth.

It’s not primarily the music itself that defines punk – there’s not much in common musically between The Ramones, Patti Smith, and Talking Heads. Instead it’s the attitude, the aggressiveness, the rejection of authority, the rejection of mainstream values, the rejection of commercialization, and often real political rage, sometimes overt (as in the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen”) and sometimes more sub¬textual (like Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” a companion piece to the title song of American Idiot). But also, punk is about authenticity. As Henry Rollins says, “It only takes one guy to stand up and say Fuck this!” And that’s at the heart of punk rock. And American Idiot.

Rock artist Bono says, “You don’t start a band to save the world, you know. You really don’t. You start a band for all the wrong reasons. Just to make a big fucking noise and roar at the world.” And isn’t that what American Idiot is, a “roar at the world”? Maybe that’s not the “wrong reasons.” Maybe raging at the world is how we change it. American Idiot is a punk musical, or at the very least, a punk-inspired rock musical.

True story. A guy walks up to Billie Joe Armstrong and asks “What’s Punk?” So Armstrong kicks over a garbage can and says “That’s punk!” So the guy kicks over another garbage can and says “That’s punk?” And Armstrong says “No, that’s trendy.”

Understand?

Punk is rebellious, but it’s more than just that. It’s also personal. It’s angry, aggressive, rebellious, but on a very personal level. And its authenticity comes from the fact that the anger is arguably justified and the aggression at least understandable. There are things in the world we should be angry about. The Punks hated New Wave, because that was just Punk without the anger or aggression, just artistic and aesthetic rebellion, rather than social and political rebellion.

Webster’s defines punk rock as “rock music marked by extreme and often deliberately offensive expressions of alienation and social discontent.” That definition is a bit narrow. Wikipedia says, “Punk bands typically use short or fast-paced songs, with hard-edged melodies and singing styles, stripped-down instrumentation, and often political, anti-establishment lyrics. Punk embraces a DIY ethic; many bands self-produced recordings and distributed them through informal channels.”

That definition excludes Green Day today, although maybe the truth is that Billie Joe Armstrong and his band mates are pushing the boundaries of punk, allowing it to evolve into an even more expressive (or at least more complex) art form. And that’s something to celebrate. Or maybe the real truth is that you can’t adequately define punk because the whole point of punk rock is to deconstruct rock and roll, to live outside conventional definitions. After all, how do you describe American Idiot and Green Day’s other work? Certainly they are a punk band, by most definitions. But they write incredibly catchy, melodic songs, so are they pop? They also write serious, dense, poetic lyrics, so are they alt pop? They write ballads and pop anthems, but they’re about politics, society, drugs, the media, religion, government, all infused with “alienation and social discontent.” Green Day is definitely punk in their aesthetic, their politics, etc., but they’re also much more than just rejection and rebellion. American Idiot is a magnificent piece of art, with real depth and insight, delivering politics, poetry, and popcorn.

So what are they rebelling against? After 9/11 the nation was plunged into an ear of fear, the fear of violence, sure, but more than anything else, fear of The Other. It was a crazy time and American Idiot captures that moment so insightfully.

Hear the sound of the falling rain,
Coming down like an Armageddon flame;
The shame,
The ones who died without a name.

It’s always the same pitch – ”The end of the world is coming, and only I can save you.” Or as Green Day characterizes it:

Zieg heil to the President Gasman!
Bombs away is your punishment!
Pulverize the Eiffel Towers
Who criticize your government!

The Rest of Our Lives

Billie Joe Armstrong wrote his own autobiographical Hero Myth story with the American Idiot album, and it seems, also with 21st Century Breakdown. Then Michael Mayer turned that single Hero Myth into three Hero Myths. To do that, a lot of songs that were originally sung by the hero (“Jesus of Suburbia” on the album, Johnny in the show) have been distributed among three “heroes” and the woman in their lives. And the result is that this very personal story has become a collective story, a national story. Every Hero Myth story is a metaphor for a human life (the struggles, the mentors, the friends, the enemies, the acquired wisdom the journey gives you), and we are the heroes of these stories in American Idiot. This is our history.

And as it should be in this ironic, self-aware, “meta” moment in our history, our heroes seem to know they’re off on a Hero’s journey. They sing, in “Tales of Another Broken Home”:

To live and not to breathe
Is to die in tragedy.
To run, to run away
Is to find what you believe.

Most musicals are either hero myth stories or stories about whether or not the hero will assimilate into the community. Once producing musicals got really expensive in New York in the 1970s, the commun-ity stories became less prevalent, partly because it’s easier to make the budget balance if there’s no chorus. But that new focus on the individual also matched the culture of the 70s and 80s.

But today in this fractured time, we need stories about communities again, about our collective lives. That’s why Rent still speaks so powerfully to us. These new shows are post-modern community stories, with different rules. American Idiot is about the struggle not to assimilate into a mainstream culture gone astray. While it’s still a story about whether or not our heroes will assimilate, the value of that assimilation is up for debate, unlike it was in The Music Man or Brigadoon. Johnny doesn’t assimilate, Will does grudgingly, and Tunny does full-out. But their redemption in the end is learning that each of us must find our own road, even within a community. It’s a complex, hybrid story form, and it serves these complex times.

But just as in old-school musical comedies, the community in American Idiot is a character too. Here the community is us, but pointedly not all of us (although, maybe it is “all of us” among the people coming to see American Idiot). Still, even if you’ve never been Johnny, Tunny, or Will, most people feel like outsiders at one time or another, like the world’s going crazy, like we want to just scream. That’s what’s at the heart of this show, that deep frustration.

So many of the shows in this new Golden Age of musical theatre are about the failure of institutions – American Idiot, Heathers, Jerry Springer the Opera, Bonnie & Clyde, Hands on a Hardbody, Rent, Cry-Baby, Passing Strange, bare, Love Kills, Urinetown, Bat Boy, and others. In its early form at Berkeley Rep, American Idiot opened the show with Johnny singing the title song. That makes sense, of course, starting the story by introducing the central protagonist. But before the show transferred to Broadway, the creators realized their mistake. Yes, this is a story about Johnny, but also Tunny and Will, and their entire generation. And not just them. Now the show opens with various members of the ensemble singing the beginning of the song. Now the song delivers context, not just emotion. Now the song describes a national problem. Now they begin their story with the community, and it instantly becomes universal. This song – this show – is about all of us.

And when you put a community onstage, you’re automatically referencing the community of actors telling this story, the one-night-only community of the this audience on this night, and the larger community of Americans and of humans, of which we’re all a part. So American Idiot becomes America’s collective Hero Myth, the journey and struggle we all endure together. We need that connection right now, as social media is facilitating the splintering of our society, into Us and Them.

We need to be reminded sometimes that we’re all us.

Throw Up Your Arms

In Billie Joe Armstrong’s lyric for the song “Know Your Enemy?” the drug dealer St. Jimmy, Johnny’s “dark half” alter-ego, tries to tell Johnny that he is his own worst enemy, that only he is standing in his way. This starts a sequence of songs tracking the descent of our three heroes to rock bottom.

“Enemy” segues into “21 Guns,” the three women’s poignant attempt to reach their men. This is a song about hitting rock bottom, about “letting go and letting God” essentially (but without the god part). The script says at the beginning of the song, “Whatsername decides to make one last plea to Johnny, who is soaring on junk, to embrace the authentic relationship between the two of them rather than the spiraling self-destruction of St. Jimmy and his addiction.” She’s trying to get him back to reality, to stop searching for escape, to stop struggling against life. She sings to Johnny:

Do you know what’s worth fighting for,
When it’s not worth dying for?

That’s intense, especially right off the bat in the first two lines. In other words, she’s saying, do you have the ability to recognize what is valuable enough to fight for, but not valuable enough to die for? Is the search for that answer frustrating and confusing? Does the weight of that question overwhelm you? Can you even draw that line? Are you too far gone? Or, as the lyric asks:

Does it take your breath away,
And you feel yourself suffocating?
Does the pain weigh out the pride?
And you look for a place to hide?
Did someone break your heart inside?
You’re in ruins.

What a powerful description of the spiritually lost Johnny, Tunny, and Will. You’re in ruins. Ruins can’t be restored. You have to start over from scratch. Ruins is certainly rock bottom. The post-9/11 years left a generation, if not a country, in spiritual ruins. But it’s often only when a person reaches rock bottom that they can climb back, only when they are in ruins, only when ego and pride have been broken down.

Extraordinary Girl pleads with Tunny to stop struggling against his life:

One, twenty-one guns,
Lay down your arms,
Give up the fight.
One, twenty one guns,
Throw up your arms into the sky,
You and I.

The lyric works on both a concrete and metaphorical level, all at once. She’s asking him literally not to go back out on the battlefield, but also to stop struggling against his own life.

There’s an obvious reference here to this new, already bloody, 21st century, the nightmare forest of the title of the song’s album, 21st Century Breakdown. Maybe “21 guns” also refers to 21 centuries of bloody human wars, implying both that humans must learn to stop settling conflict with arms, and also that Johnny and Will and Tunny must face life as it is, and stop trying to escape this world in which they feel like outsiders, like The Others, strangers in a strange land. Their curse is our national curse, fear of the chaos of life, and confusion in the topsy-turvy world of post-9/11 upside-down, Orwellian “alternative facts.” But living is about embracing the chaos of life, not running or hiding from it, not raging against it or trying to control it. They don’t know it, but these women are trying to teach these men how to be more Zen. But these men are deeply damaged and lost, and comforting words aren’t gonna cut it. Tunny sings:

When you’re at the end of the road,
And you lost all sense of control,
And your thoughts have taken their toll,
When your mind breaks the spirit of your soul...

He’s in a very dark place, where the terrible truth of the world has shattered him, where what he knows (“your mind”) has destroyed what he believed (“the spirit of your soul”), a place where the outer lives of these three men have crushed their inner lives. Now all three men are singing, soon joined by all three women:

Your faith walks on broken glass,
And the hangover doesn’t pass,
Nothing’s ever built to last,
You’re in ruins.

Talk about vivid images! The phrase, “Your faith walks on broken glass,” may be a dense, complicated metaphor, but the images are so powerful, that you instantly know exactly what it means on a gut level. But think about it – how do you walk on broken glass? Nimbly, carefully, painfully, maybe desperately. Now apply those words to your faith. Add to that a metaphorical “hangover” that lasts forever, lasting pain that forever reminds you of past misdeeds. They’re all in ruins. We’re all in ruins.

Tunny and the three women repeat the chorus. Adding Tunny here makes even more obvious the connection between the horrors of literal war and interior psychological war.

One, twenty-one guns,
Lay down your arms,
Give up the fight.
One, twenty-one guns,
Throw up your arms into the sky,
You and I.

The phrase “You and I” is so important. These women are saying to their men, You aren’t alone. I’m here with you. You can do this. Whatsername asks of Johnny:

Did you try to live on your own
When you burned down the house and home?
Did you stand too close to the fire?
Like a liar looking for forgiveness from a stone...

In other words, the path he’s on is a destructive one. He’s stumbling through his life, leaving pain everywhere he goes, still a selfish, irrational child inside, chasing pleasure and escape rather than enlightenment, and not caring who he hurts in the process. He has to grow up.

As rich as the images are, don’t miss the outstanding craft here. There’s alliteration in “try to,” “house and home,” “Like a lair looking,” and “for forgiveness from,” and “for forgiveness.” There’s only a little rhyme here, which makes sense for a song so emotional, but there’s a beautiful interior rhyme in “...too close to the fire? / Like a liar...”

Extraordinary Girl sympathizes with Tunny. Maybe she really does understand him. But then again, is she real or just in his head? If she’s just in his head, it’s not a surprise she understands him. Or maybe it’s an even bigger surprise that she does...

When it’s time to live and let die,
And you can’t get another try,
Something inside this heart has died.
You’re in ruins.

And the whole cast sings that last line with her; again, first introducing a situation in the most intimate, personal way, then universalizing it out to the full ensemble, standing in for all of us. This is a plea to all of us, to stop fighting. In this era of fierce, ugly, angry political polarization, it becomes a lesson specific to these three men’s journeys, but also one we should all take to heart.

One, twenty one guns
Lay down your arms
Give up the fight
One, twenty one guns
Throw up your arms into the sky,
You and I.

The song ends (not counting the freaky little musical tag) with everyone on stage singing, “You and I.” This is a song – this is a story – about all of us, and our shared experience as Americans.

But significantly, the women can’t make these choices for these men. Johnny, Will, and Tunny haven’t quite hit rock bottom, and until they do, they can’t find themselves again. They’re going through a necessary part of the Hero’s Journey, traveling to the “Underworld” to meet and do battle with their own dark sides.

Just a few songs later, in “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” now the three men have finally hit rock bottom, and only now can their new, more adult, more self-aware selves (“becoming who we are”) be born out of the destruction of their child selves (literalized by Tunny’s lost leg). As the song begins, Johnny has just lost Whatser-name, and he sings:

Summer has come and passed;
The innocent can never last.
Wake me up when September ends.
Like my father’s come to pass,
Seven years has gone so fast.
Wake me up when September ends.

Billie Joe Armstrong originally wrote this song about his father, who died of cancer in September 1982, when Armstrong was still a kid. At his father’s funeral, Billie cried, ran home, and locked himself in his room. When his mother got home and knocked on the door to Billie’s room, he simply said, “Wake me up when September ends.” Seven years later, Armstrong formed a band which would eventually become Green Day. It’s an interesting lyric because it expresses both the desire to hide from the horrors of life, but also the understanding that the darkness will end. September will end. In the context of our show (and arguably, even on the album), September also comes to represent the 9/11 attacks, all the anniversaries of those attacks, the ugly politicization of those attacks, and the culture of paranoia and lies that was born from the attacks.

Our three main characters are finally coming to an adult understanding of the world. They are growing up. Bad shit happens. You have to continually meet that challenge. But those challenges shape you and make you the person you become. You can’t become a fully formed adult without all the bad shit that has helped shape you.

Will sings:

Here comes the rain again,
Falling from the stars...

Tunny – significantly, “fitted with a new prosthetic leg” – sings:

Drenched in my pain again,
Becoming who we are.

The three sing, first individually, then together:

As my memory rests,
But never forgets,
What I lost,
Wake me up when September ends.
Summer has come and passed;
The innocent can never last.
Wake me up when September ends.

They are becoming different people. They are becoming who they really are. They continue, but now in much more hopeful imagery about rebirth:

Ring out the bells again,
Like we did when spring began.
Wake me up when September ends.

Here, instead of the waking up referencing the horrors from which to be escaped, now waking up looks forward to a new morning, a new beginning, and a new perspective that accepts both the good and bad parts of life – not because the lyric has changed, but because the context has subtly changed.

Here comes the rain again,
Falling from the stars.
Drenched in my pain again,
Becoming who we are.
As my memory rests,
But never forgets what I lost,
Wake me up when September ends.

Even though this is a lyric that we’ve already heard, it takes on subtle new meaning here. Once Armstrong introduces the idea of spring and rebirth, this stanza feels more like an acceptance of the yin and yang of life, rather than a struggle against all that.

And significantly, they are putting the pain of their journey (“my memory”) aside, with the new understanding that pain is not meant to be escaped from, but learned from. They will “never forget what I lost.” And they have gained important knowledge. We can’t stay kids forever. We all have to grow up.

Summer has come and passed;
The innocent can never last.
Wake me up when September ends.
Like my father’s come to pass,
Twenty years has gone so fast.
Wake me up when September ends.
Wake me up when September ends.
Wake me up when September ends.

When the song ends, there’s a single line of dialogue, as Johnny says, “Time to wake up.” Exactly.

American Idiot is a fable that teaches us about our times and our reaction to them. But most of all, it teaches us one of the oldest of human lessons – as Bill Finn put it in Spelling Bee, “Life is random and unfair.” If life is random, then by definition it can’t be fair. To embrace life means to embrace all of life, the good and bad alike, because it’s all part of the same whole. All of it is beautiful and all of it teaches us some¬thing. The magic of the Hero Myth is that it’s a metaphor for a human life, so any good story based on the Hero Myth model is automatically universal. American Idiot sure is.

Extraordinary Girls

After the horrors of the battlefield, Tunny can never again separate violence and death from the rest of life. Now, even love and desire are over-shadowed, tainted, by death. And Tunny can’t even see how damaged he is... or how bloody his new girlfriend is...

He sings, as the drug trip begins...

She’s an extraordinary girl
In an ordinary world,
And she can’t seem to get away.

Tunny can see that they are alike, misfits, outsiders, trapped by circumstances. Maybe she’s a mirror of how he sees himself – a hero trapped by fate in a hospital bed. She recognizes his pain in herself. She knows how he feels, the impotence, the hopelessness. She sings:

He lacks the courage in his mind,
Like a child left behind,
Like a pet left in the rain.

They’re true kindred spirits. Or they would be, if she weren’t a product of his hallucination. They feel the same way because they are both Tunny. She knows how he feels because she is him. The rock gets a little harder and Tunny sings:

She’s all alone again,
Wiping the tears from her eyes.

We know he’s describing himself, alone in his hospital, with a leg missing. She sings:

Some days he feels like dying.

He sings:

She gets so sick of crying.

It’s an effective, poetic way of dramatizing Tunny’s desire to separate from unwanted emotions – swapping the lyric between them, giving them each total insight into the other, underlining the fact that this is not the messy terrain of the real world, but an interior, psychological, Fight Club type landscape. Now Tunny, having already split into two (himself and Extraordinary Girl), splits further, into alter-egos for both him and Ex. Girl. Now there are four Tunnys singing. First, his two male voices:

She sees the mirror of herself,
An image she wants to sell,
To anyone willing to buy.

Maybe Tunny is finally realizing that he’s been living by other people’s measures and expectations, by others’ definitions of manhood and patriotism, rather than finding and following his own path. But in the context of our story, we have to wonder if the “she” of this song is also America. This last lyric certainly makes sense in that context. Or is “she” war... or the War on Terror? Maybe the point is that Extra¬ordinary Girl does not show her authentic self to anyone, only what they want to see, or what she needs them to see to get what she wants. She stands in for America under Bush-Cheney, trying to manipulate Tunny (and all of us) instead of leveling with him.

Tunny’s two female voices continue:

He steals the image in her kiss,
From her heart’s apocalypse,
From the one called Whatsername.

Is this the show’s creator’s way of telling us that Tunny was seduced by Bush and Cheney’s America? Or if she represents war, maybe Tunny was seduced by the John Wayne patriotism of post-9/11 America, seduced by the swagger, fearlessness, and self-righteousness of George W. Bush. On the original album, this song seems much more straight-forward, but here in the show, the mention of Whatsername creates an interesting mashup of characters, subtly blending our lead characters together into a universal whole. Extra-ordinary Girl and Whatsername (notice that neither has a real name) become one. We were all seduced. But we were seduced by phantoms and shadows. The song now returns to the two original voices, repeating earlier lyrics, with a subtle change at the end. Tunny sings:

She’s all alone again,
Wiping the tears from her eyes.

Extraordinary Girl sings:

Some days he feels like dying...

Tunny sings:

She gets so sick of crying.

The lyric now feels deeper and more complex than in its first appearance, and we see again the complete empathy and total connection these two feel for each other. They’d be perfect for each other, if she were real, if she weren’t a fantasy (extra- or beyond, ordinary), while Tunny is stuck in reality (an ordinary world). Tunny and Extraordinary Girl sing together for the first time, repeating the more aggressive bridge. As in most musicals, we know they belong together because they harmonize.

She’s all alone again,
Wiping the tears from her eyes.
Some days he feels like dying,
Some days it’s not worth trying,
Now that they both are finding...

Tunny sings alone:

She gets so sick of crying.

They’re both struggling along the road of life, but at least now they can struggle together. Except she’s not real. And as the hallucination ends, the ensemble repeats the title line:

She’s an extraordinary girl...
An extraordinary girl...
An extraordinary girl...
An extraordinary girl...

After the song, the script says, “The Extraordinary Girl brings Tunny back to his gurney and flies away into space. He is left with the other soldiers in agony.” The song segues directly into a reprise of “Before the Lobotomy,” as Tunny and three men sing, “Dreaming, I was only dreaming...” But we’re left to wonder, do Tunny and the others mean that they were dreaming just now, or have they awakened from the dark seduction of the war mongers, just as Johnny has to wake up from the dark seduction of sex and drugs.

American Idiot is finally a story about waking up. The dramatic climax for these characters, the moment they decide to engage their lives, is in the song “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” at the end of which Johnny says to himself – or is it to us? – “Time to wake up.” Waking up represents both the coming to self-awareness and know¬ledge that they have to grow up, and also the ability to see through the façade and manipulation of mainstream society and culture. As in The Matrix, waking up is about seeing the truth you couldn’t see before, the truth that most other people can’t see.

“Extraordinary Girl” is a companion piece to the song “Extraordinary” from Pippin. In both songs, our heroes are convinced they are extraordinary, different, darker, and more complex than the rest of us. But they both learn later that everybody feels that way at some point, that the truly extra¬ordinary path is to embrace your own ordinary life, to find richness in the world as it is. There’s a reason that these are the last words the show leaves us with:

It’s something unpredictable, but in the end is right;
I hope you had the time of your life.

On stage, that last line being in the second person really packs a wallop. At the end of the show, the audience has had the “time of their life” because they’ve just witnessed a triple Hero Myth, and a Hero Myth is a human life in miniature. The audience has literally had the time of their lives. So when the cast sings “you,” they mean you. And the first of these last two lines here also takes on extra resonance when it’s put in this context. Now, as an epilogue, it comments on the Hero Myth stories we’ve just experienced. Billie Joe Armstrong’s lyrics are so relentlessly truthful – life is unpredictable, but if you stay on your path, it will turn out right in the end.
Whatever that means.

This Sensation’s Overwhelming

Musical theatre fans used to call them “concept musicals,” shows for which the central theme or metaphor is as important (or more so) than the story. Steve Sondheim and Hal Prince perfected the form but they didn’t invent it; after all, there were The Cradle Will Rock, Love Life, Hallelujah Baby!, The Fantasticks, and a few other shows that arguably qualify as concept musicals, that came long before the Sondheim-Prince Revolution. But the concept musical flourished and evolved in the 1960s and 70s, practiced most powerfully by Sondheim and Prince, Kander and Ebb, Michael Bennett, Bob Fosse, and Tommy Tune.

We still have concept musicals, but we generally don’t use that label anymore. Maybe it’s because the elements of the concept musical (i.e., Cabaret, Company, Follies, Chicago, Grease, Hair, The Wiz, Rocky Horror, Working, A Chorus Line, etc.) have become more inte¬grated into the art form as it has evolved in this new Golden Age of musical theatre. If we were still using that label, there would be lots of contemporary shows that qualify: Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, The Scottsboro Boys, The Blue Flower, Passing Strange, The Wild Party, High Fidelity, Bukowsical, Spelling Bee, A New Brain, Urinetown, Bat Boy, If/Then, and so many others.

And American Idiot.

In American Idiot, the ensemble starts the show as friends of Johnny, Tunny, and Will’s. After a prologue (the title song), in which the actors are outside our narrative, announcing their intentions for the evening, they move inside the story. In the second number, the “Jesus of Suburbia” medley, the ensemble plays our heroes’ community. But once we finish that medley (ending with “Tales of Another Broken Home”), everything changes. Now we move into concept musical territory...

The whole middle part of the show, starting with “Holiday” and ending with “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” largely leaves the concrete world, for an inner world of emotion, fear, dislocation, isolation, anger. And for this middle section, the ensemble acts more as projections of Johnny, Tunny, Will, Heather, and Whatsername; and/or they are the outside world through our heroes’ warped, angry, drugged-up eyes. Just as St. Jimmy is a projection of Johnny’s dark side, Jimmy’s acolytes and mourners are a further projection of Jimmy. So throughout most of the story, the ensemble takes on an entirely conceptual role, illustrating and extending the inner turmoil of these fucked up young men and women. Only at the beginning and end of the show, the ensemble plays real people in Johnny’s real word.

In most Hero Myth stories, the hero has companions who go on his journey with him (think the Tin Man or C-3PO). In this story, our heroes’ friends do accompany them on their journey, but only inside our heroes’ heads. In a normal Hero Myth story, Tunny and Will would be companions on Johnny’s journey. But Michael Mayer is doing something more interesting than that with this show. He sets out to tell a story about America’s reaction to 9/11 and the War on Terror, but Americans didn’t have just one response. So Mayer splits up the usual merry band and he gives us instead three hero myths and three heroes who take very different journeys. And the ensemble spends the show jumping around from inside Johnny’s head, to inside Tunny’s head, to inside Whatsername’s head.

All this works and the audience accepts it, partly because we’ve all been prepared for this kind of thing by other concept musicals. It’s rare that an ensemble gets used in so many different ways within a single show, but the surrealism of much of the show (because it’s almost all interior and/or drug induced) makes it all feel like a unified whole. It also works because of the consistency and artistry with which Mayer and Kitt use the ensemble. As one example of this craftsmanship, the character of St. Jimmy, one of the leads and arguably the antagonist, is also inside Johnny’s head, so Jimmy bridges those two worlds, the concrete and the interior, the real world of the characters and the metaphorical world of the ensemble.

And In the Darkest Night...

Has there ever been a better explanation of the Hero Myth story – or a human life – than “It’s something unpredictable but in the end is right”? The lyric for “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” is so wise. Every lyric in the show is beautiful and complex and crazy catchy, but this last one is incredible...

Another turning point, a fork stuck in the road...

What an interesting way to start a lyric! Billie Joe Armstrong often takes clichés and complicates them, twists them, all throughout this score. Here he takes the image of a fork in the road, a choice; and he combines it with the cliché, “Stick a fork in it, it’s done.” This choice is “done.” You chose a road and there’s no going back, so deal with it.

Time grabs you by the wrist, directs you where to go.

In other words, you can’t direct your destiny; you can only stay on the road and keep moving forward. In time, you’ll see where you’re going, and you have to learn to embrace the journey, the struggle, the learning, rather than fixate on the endpoint.

So make the best of this test and don’t ask why;
It’s not a question but a lesson learned in time.

In other words, stop struggling against obstacles and setbacks and injustices. Accept that they are part of the journey, part of the soup of experience that forms the person you are. Why? is a pointless question. An embrace doesn’t question; it trusts. We all have to learn to trust our road, our “Real.”

It’s something unpredictable but in the end is right...

Your road is right for you because it is your road. It’s unpredictable, but ultimately, it is the only right road for you.

I hope you had the time of your life.

The audience has just gone on three Hero Journeys, each one representing a human life, and most everyone in the audience has identified with one or more of our heroes. In sharing these universal Hero Myth stories with our audience, we have literally given them the time (90 minutes) of their lives (in metaphor). And we hope it has enriched them, even if only subcon¬sciously. The second verse starts:

So take the photographs and still frames in your mind,
Hang it on a shelf in good health and good time,
Tattoos of memories and dead skin on trial –
For what it’s worth, it was worth all the while

This verse is telling us that memories are beautiful and healthy things, but living in those memories, rehashing the past, regretting past decisions, nursing scars from past wrongs will take you down the wrong road. You wonder if you made the right choices, took the right turns, but the fourth line reassures us, “For what’s it’s worth...” (if you’ll take the word of a punk rocker) “it was worth all the while.” A typically cheeky, acrobatic, alliterative, and deeply truthful lyric from Armstrong. Every experience, every hurt, every triumph goes into making you the person you are. It is worth suffering through the bad times because they make you strong and give you perspective. It is worth making mistakes, because we learn and grow from them. And then song repeats several times that amazing, wise, Zen-like couplet:

It’s something unpredictable but in the end is right;
I hope you had the time of your life.

The main body of the story ends with a vocal wall of sound in “Whatsername,” as the entire cast sings:

And in the darkest night,
If my memory serves me right,
I’ll never turn back time,
Forgetting you but not the time.

In other words, even when life is at its worst and most difficult, these characters will now remember that the past is past, that we can never really Go Back. We can only make choices and move forward. We may forget the details of what’s past, but we won’t forget the hard-learned lessons. We have been changed by what’s past and it leaves its mark on us. We are never the same again. Even if Johnny can’t remember her name...

The opening number of Kander and Ebb’s dark musical Zorbá, its statement of purpose, is called only “Life Is,” and for a good reason. Life is good and bad, wonderful and terrible. Trying to make it one or the other is always doomed to failure. Life isn’t an adjective; it’s a road. And the richness of life is in everything along that road. Zorbá and Passing Strange and American Idiot tell us that this existence is all there is, so you have to learn to love it, to grab it and hug it to you, whether it’s good, bad, trivial, or profound – not because it’s wonderful in a musical comedy way, but because it’s Life. At the end of Zorbá, Zorba tells us that he lives like he might die any minute. That’s not life-denying; it’s life-embracing. He does not judge the experiences of life; he swims in them. He tells us he’s free at the end of the story because he has no fear of what lies ahead. As far as he’s concerned, whatever lies ahead is fine with him. It’s all Life.

There isn’t a conventional resolution to the plot at the end of American Idiot, no tying up of loose ends. None of our three central guys have found happiness, and they have only the earliest glimpses of some possible wisdom. But they are growing up. They’re no longer stuck. The central struggle of the story is not to “fix” the problems of the world, but to grow up and face them and engage with them – and endure them. Like the ends of Company, High Fidelity, Pippin, Passing Strange, and other shows, we don’t really know if Johnny, Will, and Tunny are going to be okay as American Idiot closes. We don’t know if they’ll get jobs, if they’ll find lasting relationships. All we know is they’re all three taking a step in the right direction.

They’re not gonna be American idiots.

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Copyright 2016. Excerpt from Scott Miller's book Idiots, Heathers, and Squips. All rights reserved. Miller is also the author of Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals.. Strike Up the Band: A New History of Musical Theatre, Deconstructing Harold Hill, From Assassins to West Side Story, and Let the Sun Shine In: The Genius of HAIR, and many other books.