Leaderboard

After 8 years of listening to Hitchin' a Ride I finally realized what "eating crow" means. I just watched a clip from the Late Show with Stephen Colbert and the title was something like "Mitt Romney eats crow" and I thought about how weird a coincidence it was, and looked it up. Apparently it means something like "admitting you're wrong after taking a strong position on something", a feeling I know all to well. I never bothered to look it up, I just accepted it like "yup, Billie literally eats crows". As a non-native speaker I learn something new about Green Day's lyrics every day, not necessarily just complex lyrics from 21st CB but the "easier" ones as well, and my appreciation for Billie as a song writer just keeps growing. When I started writing two years ago I really learned to appreciate every little clever line I never would have been able to come up with.

Was watching school of rock today, and besides all the great refrences in there it made me insanely happy to see the drummer kid wearing a warning shirt at the end of the movie. A really young kid wearing a shirt for one of their lesser-known albums, pre-American Idiot! (2003). Cool

Thank you both, good to know this has more meanings. I currently study English at uni and although I'm sometimes overwhelmed with having to think about language related stuff nonstop, I like learning new idioms and also the differences between British and American expressions. I enjoyed learning English from the beginning, but I have to say that discovering Green Day helped a lot to develop my interest in the language and majorly contributed to the fact that I never had to study for any English tests at school

I think they are both uniquely American. I've certainly never heard them in British English before. Eating crow makes sense as an idiom, sort of like 'eat my hat', because I imagine crow (the bird) doesn't taste great. It's just not something I've ever heard of before And until I found out it was an American thing, I thought the dying in threes line was one of the weirdest on the new album. I like the line though, especually now it seems less weird (but I still don't get why dying in threes is a thing?).

To be honest, I never knew that either, thanks for sharing! I just never stopped to think about that line I guess, but "Billie literally eats crows" made me laugh

yeah, not having to study for English tests is a side-effect I just thought about it a while ago, their lyrics cover so many topics - I got a huge vocabulary just from them. I remember how surprised my teacher was that I knew all those religion-related words at the young age of 12. It's a 'Murcan saying that celebrities always die in threes.

Yeah Hmm, I remember all of them being hard to understand for me back then, and now it's easy, so it's hard to say... But I think you're right that Billie was the easiest one to understand because of his y'knows and stuff I'm with you, I guess we don't have it here... Or it's not widespread, I don't think I've heard about this superstition before.

i don't know, maybe I'm just oblivious to it @Marki. what do you think?

you're just like me! Hitchin' is one of my fave songs, I've known it since I was 12 but it took a couple years till I understood what it really was about. It's a great wordplay - he's using all those phrases that make sense even if you take them literally. (it's kinda weird, but what the hey, nonsense poetry is cool ). I don't even know how I figured it out the truth. I think I somewhere read what's "cold turkey" and then looked up the rest. I still think it's amusing to pretend that line is about food though.

I was just about to post this! I was upstairs and mum messaged me to say Green Day was being played on the snooker

There's also the instance where they just gave him the shirt and said, here kid, wear this because your character is supposed to be into punk music, and he's like okay cool! I hope it was his own idea but know way to really know. Yeah, GD was fuckin huge in the 90's before all the AI stuff came about, and very rough around the edges people would listen to it, it was heavy. AI made a lot of people shut their eyes to the band with the drastic change but in the midst brought a completely new wave of kids to the dance and a lot of old school metallers and punks retreated back to their heavy roots. They will continue to say that is when Green Day was awesome but truthfully, they have just given us so much since. No doubt though, Dookie was just as big as AI on radio and stuff, Nimrod got a ton of airplay too. Wonder, based on his age if that kid was into the old music, most likely was, or if JB just handed him the shirt or something, also a possibility.

Oh wow, I thought it was fairly common across Western nations in general

Haha, in an English test where I had to talk about my personality I quoted the chorus of Walking Contradiction. Not sure if it has been a good idea though. School is not interesting ---> you don't learn anything GDC is interesting ---> you learn a lot of things (and have fun) Do you see? I just learned some logics stuff.

Yeah, GDC gave me more than school did lol And same - I read a lot of articles and watched interviews, both helped a ton. Btw, is it only me or is Billie really very easy to understand? I don't know what it is, maybe it's just that he speaks relatively slowly and uses (used) so many filler words but I've always found him very easy to understand when he's talking, of course. Singing is a different beast.

Not quite. It's a superstition across a lot of nations that bad things, not only deaths, tend to happen in threes. I personally believe it since it has happened an eerie amount of times in my life.

Yees, I though about that as well, you really learn a lot of vocabulary just from the lyrics. My classmates were always in disbelief how I knew all these words because they knew I really didn't study When I was 15, after I saw Green Day live, I had a bit of an obsession phase and decided to watch every single interview I could find online, which helped me a lot - at first I could hardly understand what they were saying but it got better really quickly. And I'm pretty sure being on GDC helped as well, you learn a lot here (and not just language related things ).

God, I just knocked over my chair while dancing on Let Yourself Go. I need a psychologist.

Oh wait, dying in threes means something too? I thought he meant that when they died, they'd die together. You know, as friends because Billie, Mike and Tré are three people I'll look it up, thanks!

If you're talking about the film with Jack Black, I vaguely remember that, one time, when he called the drummer, he said "Mr. Cool" or at least "Signor Cool" (in Italian). Maybe it's a reference to our crazy Trè. Oh, and that film got me into Ramones...

Yes! Caught that yesterday too! Right at the end during the credits.

There's a new thread for this performance here:

@End Of The World check out dookiefied songs on YouTube. It's pretty cool.

I was thinking about a weird thing. How would songs from Dookie/Insomniac sound if they were recorded with the same mixing of RevRad (clean and clear). Or the contrary: what if songs on Uno, Dos and Trè or RevRad were mixed in a Dookie way (raw sound, more distorsion and noise in general). I'm curious about songs like Let Yourself Go, Ashley, X-Kid. Maybe the production is so important that could change your opinion on a song. If GD will release something like that in the future I'd be happy.

Look at him posing

larger unwatermarked versions Figured I share while I wait to photos to upload on GDA... I apparently have a scary number of Green Day photos.

This is literally the most bizzare thing I've ever heard. You've got acool walmart aparently

I heard a live version of who wrote Holden Caulfield in a Walmart.

Ironically heard American Idiot at a Trump rally

This is a very nice photoshoot

At a graduation. "Good Riddance". Do these teachers even know what the song is about?

Here is a scan of the Kerrang poster (click for full resolution)

That;s because no one knows what the fuck Billie Joe is saying. When I first became a fan I couldn't for the life of me figure out where the whole "rage and love" came from. Then I listened to JOS again and finally heard "I'm the son of rage and love" and not the "Imma sunna raichu la" or whatever the hell I though he was saying.

Getting my hair cut today at a new salon and the American Idiot cast version of 21 Guns came on the radio and me being the goober that I am, I had to explain to the lady cutting my hair about the song and how I had been to see the musical in London recently, blah, blah, blah. Then WMUWSE came on and I just kept my mouth shut.