‘She’: The song Billie Joe Armstrong never gets tired of singing
Coming from the stadium-slaying Green Day of today, cloaked in pyrotechnic fire, with a T-shirt cannon in one hand and a $20 hot dog in the other, politics and calls to activism fall flat. As much of a defender I am of latter-day Green Day, the attempts of Billie Joe Armstrong and his mob at political commentary come across as precisely what they are: an angry millionaire who has long since lost touch with everyday people desperately trying to deny what he is. The real crying shame about this is that when they formed, Green Day were as legit as any other punk band of their day.
They were a bunch of working-class kids from Oakland whose options were to succeed in music or, in their eyes, rot. Billie Joe Armstrong, the son of a waitress and a truck driver, was a high-school dropout whose only real source of joy and purpose in life was the band he formed with his childhood best friend, Mike Pritchard. When they were teenagers, they found solace in the same Bay Area punk scene that gave the world Operation Ivy and Jawbreaker.
Not only were they finding their feet as musicians there, but they were also getting their first real political education. As any scene built around DIY ethics should be, the Bay Area punk scene was deeply political. This being America in the late 1980s, there was a whole lot to be angry about, and while it wouldn’t influence their music quite as overtly as it would for the likes of Rancid, it still found its way into their music in more subtle ways.
Including one of their most famous and beloved early songs. When making a list of his life in 15 songs for Rolling Stone Magazine, Armstrong writes about “a girlfriend named Amanda, this Cal student. I learned a lot about feminism through her. She gave me an education that I think was very timely for me. I was just a dumb kid, high school dropout. She was telling me about the way women have been objectified for so many years, and I was just listening.”
It’s something anyone with empathy experiences. Whoever you are and whatever you’re going through, there’s always worth in shutting up and listening to the experiences of others. Not all of us turn that experience into a beloved punk rock banger, though. Inspired by everything he was learning from her, Armstrong wrote the song ‘She’ in tribute. He goes on to say, “I wrote this as a love song to her, but it was also about learning about her activism. When it says, ‘Scream at me until my ears bleed,’ I was kind of going, ‘I’m here to listen.’”
It’s a genuinely heartwarming high point of Dookie, its parent album that, underneath its sunshine punk-pop sound, is a desperately bleak listen at points. Hidden among songs about Armstrong’s decaying mental state, ‘She’ is a song about the way that love doesn’t just give us emotional support, but it can also give us meaning too: Armstrong resolving to support the person he loves any way he can.
Dookie ended up being the single best-selling punk album ever made, so those are songs that he’s had to perform a lot. Yet, as he explains, it never gets old for him. He says, “That song just feels so good to sing. I’m really proud of it; it’s very stripped-down, simple, three chords. It’s kind of a cult hero. It’s one of those songs that wasn’t a single, but it had a life of its own. Those are the special kinds of songs.”
The fact that even the Green Day concerts of today still kick into high gear when Mike Dirnt unleashes that bassline shows something important. Deep-down, under the bells, whistles and godawful recent albums, the Green Day of old is still in there, and still as inspiring as it was in 1994.
