The “perfect angel” Billie Joe Armstrong was gutted to lose
The legends of rock and roll aren’t getting any younger. As much as people like the idea that their favourite artists are invincible and will live vicariously through the music, it’s a shame to see people who helped start a genre fall by the wayside. And while Billie Joe Armstrong can claim to be a living legend in many senses of the word, that didn’t mean he was exempt from a few tears when watching some of his idols lose their personal battles over the years.
But for most of the kids from Armstrong’s generation, there’s a certain familiarity with loss. Armstrong already had to deal with his dad passing away before he was even in his teens, and before Green Day had properly blown up, Kurt Cobain’s death already cast a dark shadow over everything. If Dookie had taught us anything, though, it was that those dark clouds hovering overhead didn’t have to be raining on us forever.
Was it immature? Absolutely, but that was exactly what the rock world needed at the time. Things had become far too cynical, so hearing Armstrong singing songs that were about topics such as masturbation and being an immature burnout made everything seem fun again. They still had their mature songs, but Armstrong was always brilliant at disguising some of his best work in that regard. Even if ‘Basket Case’ was a catchy tune, you could either sing along with it or dissect him talking about having panic attacks.
A lot of this slacker attitude may have come from relentlessly listening to bands like The Replacements, but even Paul Westerberg had to get his ideas from somewhere. The early punks made it their job to talk about alienation most of the time, but when looking at the original punks, many of them had acoustic guitars in their hands and sang folk songs. Bob Dylan was the embodiment of going against the status quo, but Leonard Cohen was from another planet entirely.
He didn’t always have the knockout hooks you expected from a pop singer, but his music is something that seeps into your bones after a while. Whether listening to his early work or discovering him vicariously through Jeff Buckley’s cover of ‘Hallelujah’, there is always a mystical quality to listening to his music, as if he’s taking out pieces of his heart and laying them out on the table for everyone to examine on ‘Suzanne’.
There probably wasn’t much room on a Green Day for any Cohen covers, but Armstrong felt absolutely gutted to hear about his passing in 2016, saying at the time, “I was just thinking, now Leonard Cohen? He’s the perfect angel. All these rockstars and amazing artists that die this year, and here we are, this week, with Leonard Cohen.” However, the reason why Cohen was held in high regard was that he was imperfect in many ways.
He never once claimed to be some kind of righteous songwriter in the same way that an artist like Bono can occasionally come off as, but when listening to his music, it’s undeniably human. He was looking to find the meaning behind why we were put on this Earth throughout his life, and while a lot of his best songs covered affairs of the heart, his final album, You Want It Darker, is still one of the greatest meditations from someone facing their death and wondering what will happen when they reach the other side.
Cohen isn’t someone that anyone should try to outright copy by any stretch, but his music has helped people like Armstrong look at their craft a little bit differently. Most lyricists can try to put their most personal experiences down on paper and make sense of them after the fact, but listening to Cohen’s music is almost like getting a crash course in how one can perfectly capture the beauty of the world in verse.
