‘When September Ends’: What happens when a song becomes a meme?
Over 20 years ago, Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, also known colloquially as “the guy from Green Day”, wrote a song called ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’. It became one of the biggest hits off of one of his band’s biggest albums, 2004’s American Idiot.
Flash forward a generation, however, and that power ballad—inspired by Armstrong’s painful childhood memories of his father’s death—is now arguably the cultural footnote to a popular seasonal internet meme.
“It’s like, when Jesus was born on December 25th, people go, ‘Hey, it’s Christmas time!’”, Armstrong recently responded when asked about the long-running meme. “When the Easter bunny comes, it’s ‘Hey, it’s Easter!’ Or when September comes, people go, ‘Hey, it’s that guy in Green Day!’”
The photos and words can vary across the family of ‘September’ memes, but essentially the joke is always the same: “September is ending, somebody wake up the guy from Green Day.” Armstrong has generally laughed it off, but usually with an undercurrent of clear annoyance, not so much for being memed as merely a “guy” from a band, but for the repurposing of a very serious song for immeasurably unserious intentions.
Not even the Boomer musicians are immune to this meme-ification of a once canonised pop anthem. The first line of Simon and Garfunkel’s 1965 classic ‘The Sound of Silence’ has been routinely plucked and slapped onto pixelated jpegs to communicate a sense of impending doom: “Hello, darkness, my old friend.” The same concept has carried over to video memes, as comedically downtrodden characters enter into some pathetic scenario with Simon and Garfunkel setting the musical tone.
Ironically, when Art Garfunkel tried to sum up the meaning of the Simon-penned song before a televised performance in the mid-1960s, he said it was “about the inability of people to communicate with each other”.
That’s clearly not a problem that has been solved over the subsequent 60 years, and it’s part of the reason why many people now resort to the simplified universal pictograph language of memes to get across shared concepts, as it’s a lot easier and safer than tip-toeing into the arena of nuanced person-to-person communication.
Of course, there are countless other examples of songs transformed into cultural shorthand. Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ is perhaps the ultimate case study: the Rickroll meme turned a once-forgotten 1980s single into an immortal digital prank, cementing Astley in internet history and weirdly reigniting his career along the way.
Likewise, Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star’ has been endlessly recycled, warped, and remixed into surreal meme formats, so much so that it’s often difficult to remember it was once just a chart-topping summer hit. Even Eminem’s 25-year catalogue of memorable verses has been reduced in some corners of the internet to a simple mention of “Mom’s spaghetti”.
The through-line in all of this is that songs rarely remain in the emotional container their creators intended. That’s been the case through the entire history of art, really, but as pop culture continues to consume itself at a faster and faster rate, the likelihood of your own favourite tear-jerking break-up song turning into a lazy punchline only increases.
There’s comfort in millions of people still “getting” those Green Day jokes every September, I suppose, particularly in a time when very few cultural touchstones still resonate outside of small echo chambers. But if musicians actually start writing songs with a knowing eye to their potential future memeification (not making any accusations toward ‘Pink Pony Club’ here), we could be in for a mighty rough patch.
