#Wake me up When September Ends

[septemberkisses]

September - a soft goodbye to summer, whispered gently by the rustling leaves of autumn.

Excerpts from:

The Letters of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath • The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien • Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos by Julia de Burgos • Peggy Toney Horton • The Whole Story and Other Stories by Ali Smith • Albert Campus • To The Tune 'Soaring Clouds by Huang O. (tr. by Kenneth Rexroth & Ling Chung) • September by Earth, Wind and Fire

[hamletteprinceofdenmark]

REMINDER TO LEAVE BILLIE JOE ARMSTRONG THE FUCK ALONE

DO NOT TWEET HIM

DO NOT @ HIM

It’s a song about GRIEVING HIS DAD

LEAVE HIM ALONE

[emma-dennehy-presents]

Just heard Wake Me Up When September Ends on the radio and realized August is almost over. Time to schedule some "please dont be weird to Billie Joe Armstrong about his grieving song" posts.

[nerd-elf]

Can’t wait for his blood tour 🩸

[dev-solovey]

Reading up on the history of American Idiot (album) and realizing exactly how revolutionary it was and I just have to yell about it for a hot second

So, before they started working on American Idiot, the band was having problems and they were thinking they were going to break up. But for a couple of reasons, they switched directions, most notably because they all felt strongly about the Iraq War and how it was manufactured by greed and warmongering from the Bush administration, which was amplified by the news media. I read a quote from Billie Joe Armstrong where he talked about how the news media was becoming "more of a reality show" than it was news, and he couldn't have been more right. In fact, that problem got worse, and now we're living in an era of rampant misinformation where everything is politicized to a point where just supporting human rights for marginalized people is considered controversial. The song American Idiot came out in 2004, and when Donald Trump first visited the UK at the beginning of his presidency, it was the top played song on every UK radio station, 12 years after it was released. Most things would be culturally irrelevant at that point.

When creating the album American Idiot, a lot of thought went into it - they had a very specific message in mind, and their goal was to send that message to youth. This is because they realized at some point that their fanbase was a bunch of teenagers, and even though they hadn't necessarily intended it that way, they suddenly had a platform with the youth of America and they decided they ought to do something good with it. The drummer, Tré Cool, said something along the lines of "I've never really liked the idea of preaching to kids, but I realized we don't really have a choice at this point." And I love that so much because like, so many people who get rich and famous just become completely out of touch, and when they get a platform, it's very easy to exploit that platform, influence them with terrible ideas, or encourage them to act in terrible ways for self-serving reasons (ex: JK Rowling, Andrew Tate, Dream, Logan Paul, Onision, etc etc). Green Day refused to allow themselves to get to that point. They know the platform they had gave them power and they made an active choice early on to be responsible with it. And a lot of that moral code comes from the fact that they came up in the DIY punk scene in Oakland, which held its members to a very high standard of ethics, a code that they still follow even after they were disowned by that scene when they signed on with a major record label in 1994.

The song American Idiot has a message of "this mass media hysteria is manufactured bullshit, don't fall for it," and it is not subtle about that message. It punches you right in the face. I remember being 12 years old and listening to it and thinking, "yeah, I don't want to be an American idiot." And now, at the age of 28, I am a staunch leftist who is firmly against the atrocities the US government commits, and I feel strongly about stopping misinformation. So I can say with absolute certainty that they succeeded.

I also get like, really upset when people say that American Idiot is the album where they sold out, because that's objectively not true, both for the reasons I've provided above, and also because of the song Wake Me Up When September Ends. Not a lot of people know the story behind this song, but it's actually a song that Billie Joe wrote about the experience of his dad dying of cancer when he was 10 years old. The story, as he tells it, is that when he came home from school, his mom gave him the news, and being (understandably!) upset, started crying, ran to his room and slammed the door. When she knocked on the door to try and talk to him, he shouted "wake me up when September ends!!" in response. It took him decades to be able to write this song, and it shows because it's the perfect grief song, having been played at benefits for 9/11, hurricane Katrina, and so on. The first time I heard that song it reduced me to tears, because you can hear the intense sadness in it. A "sellout" would never write a song like that!! (Side note: maybe stop tweeting at Green Day to wake up every October 1st, it's super tone deaf given the subject matter,,,)

Anyway, I think I'm done being autistic about Green Day (that's a lie, they'll forever be my special interest), so TL;DR:

Thank you, Green Day, for creating a generation of leftists who aren't about the bullshit

[bobsten]

god bless good friends but also here’s my tits

[morcian]

idk if this has been done before

[delilah-briarwood]

Yet another yearly reminder than ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’ is a song about Billie Joe Armstrong’s grief after his father died. The jokes about it are overdone, disrespectful, and Billie Joe himself has said they make him uncomfortable.

[angelsgalore]

here comes the rain again, falling from the stars

[macaronijail06]

Wake me up when September ends

[rebelrobinrules1984]

Happy 20th anniversary to American idiot!

[strawlessandbraless]

Notable September 5th events:

A beard tax was introduced in 1698

On the Road by Jack Kerouac was published

Freddie Mercury of Queen was born

National Pizza Day

Supernatural Season 5 DVD was released

[playgroundeyes]

"twenty years has gone so fast" 😔 we all say in unison (I was not yet a thought in 2004)

[hayycat]

emo music has no business being this good I stg bro. Shoutout to my playlist for helping me power through leg day at the gym

[ribcageteeth]

Not only have I not seen a single post this year about When September Ends, I haven’t seen a single post passive-aggressively scolding us all to leave Billie Joe Armstrong alone. Nature is healing.