Just to be clear, Billie Joe Armstrong isā¦okay I forget at the moment if heās bi or pan and my app has been resetting itself if I dip into another app so I donāt want to go look it up because Iāll lose this post, but heās one of those.
NOW. It is important that you know Green Day was primarily a 90s band. This is important because it means they came of age in a time period where we were trying to reclaim āfaggot,ā and among the countercultureāwhich, again, was Green Day, they were a pop/punk fusionāit WAS within-the-community reclaimed. If you read a lot of queer zines from this period youāll see it used routinely. Dan Savageās advice column originally ran under the name āHey, Faggot,ā which he himself had chosen. Thereās a section in the musical RENT where the characters refer to themselves as āfaggots, lezzies, dykes, cross-dressers too,ā and while Jon Larson himself was straight he was writing as someone who was in daily contact with these cultures. Pride parades from the time often have it on at least one sign. This was not unusual language.
This is part of the background from which American Idiot was born. It came out in 2004, and while the queer movement was losing a little steam in the counterculture direction at that point (although not as badly as it has today, good lord), this was still an ongoing thing. I was hearing it as late as 2009.
This was, indeed, Billie Joe challenging the mainstream that had come to love Green Day: maybe IāM the faggot, did you think of that? We havenāt just supported queer artists, I AM a queer artist. Fuck you.
This whole album is political commentary. Itās practically a time capsule of Everything Wrong With The Bush Years, including Bushās attempt to put āmarriage is one man and one womanā in the Constitution. (This is why, as a Jew, I donāt object to the lyric āseig heil to President Gas Man.ā Itās a pretty succinct takedown of the Islamophobia he stoked as a way to justify war with Iraq.)
So SING that āfaggot,ā and do it with your whole chest. Itās a word of anger and protest and taking back autonomy with your own two bloody hands.
Billie Joe wasnāt and isnāt ashamed to be a faggot, America. Donāt you be either.
snowghoul
jacobvanloon
yousharknotpass
kianamaiart
andulkaphoto
