American Eulogy

[gloria123]

this is one of my favorite songs off of 21CB

i love hearing it live and hearing mike sing

[Karen.]

Eulogy is, without a doubt, the climactic event of 21CB....

Wow - almost 2,000 words! Thanks for sharing. You've definitely made me think more about the song. So many of the lyrics stand out, it's hard to pick a favourite line.

Performance wise, I love the AAF version with Nobody Likes You at the end.

I'm definitely going to re-read and re-watch now!

[farley drexel hatcher]

One thing I really want to see more of, is Billie and Mike singing together, or Mike sharing vocals with Billie. I miss the harmonies of the really early stuff and I would love to be able to distinguish Mike singing back up again in that style.

And yeah, this song still gets me when I hear it. I was ecstatic when they played in London in 2009; i'd been to the show the night before and they hadn't played it, and I didn't want to miss out on it. The ending gave me goosebumps, specially with Billie adding 'nobody likes you' just as it finished. Perfect moment.

[Guest Billies Angel]

i love this song

its so fucking Awesome

[justcause]

The part where Billie Joe screams "Christian and GloriA!" and the line "deny the allegation as it's written, FUCKIN' LIES!" are both filled with such power and emotion.

I love those parts too, and the brooding power of 'I am a nation without bureaucratic ties' that leads into 'deny the allegation', and spits in the face of 'I am a nation, a worker of pride, my debt to the status quo' from Breakdown. It's like the first iteration is of compassion and empathy with the working class hero and how he finds himself bound and betrayed, but here it snarls 'I am not one of you, I am free'.

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light. -

what to annihilate, this old age - back and forth, tell me a story into that goodnight, on the one hand a yearning for something sweet and pure, the story by candlelight, the childhood trustfulness and hope. On the other hand, the resistance against being lulled into a stupor, the summoning of that rage, the reaching for Gloria's light and undying love.

And after that moment of quiet, standing aside from the noise of the world, this song plunges full-on into the chaos of it - shit, dense with metaphor after metaphor, ramped-up anxiety, vulgarity and venality and frenzy, an all-fronts assault on the citadel of self, the sanctuary of the soul.

Wave after wave of onslaught, and 'I don't wanna live in the modern world' as some kind of tormented mantra, till the storm subsides into 'See the Light'.

[radiofriendlyunitshifter]

THE best song on 21st Century Breakdown.

[Bastard of 1967]

... tell me a story into that goodnight, on the one hand a yearning for something sweet and pure, the story by candlelight, the childhood trustfulness and hope. On the other hand, the resistance against being lulled into a stupor, the summoning of that rage, the reaching for Gloria's light and undying love.

And after that moment of quiet, standing aside from the noise of the world, this song plunges full-on into the chaos of it ...

Right from the start, Eulogy answers its own question -- that pleading return to innocence is answered, and indeed, rebuked, by what follows immediately after. Ask me what the theme Song of the 21st Century is, and I'll tell you it's Hysteria, Mass Hysteria.

[oda]

Yes yes! i love this song so much!

[in_your_face]

This is definitely, one of the best songs Billie has ever composed! This fast number is soo damn powerful. I wanna hear more of this type on their next record.

[Karen.]

This whole conversation is making me feel like 21CB is so underrated. I'm falling in love with it again.

[rback57]

I LOVE this song. It is a REALLY kick-ass song; it's just so powerful. And Mike's part is awesome.

One of my favorites.

[Sweet Armataged Chump]

[DecanoLP]

American Eulogy is the best song on "21st Century Breakdown" and one of the best songs they have ever written. The whole thing is so powerful and emotional... Unfortunately, I can't express my love for this song in my own words. I'll leave this and all the interpretations to the others

"There's a disturbance on the oceanside

They tapped into the reserve

The static response is so unclear now

Mayday, this is not a test!

As the neighborhood burns

America is falling

Vigilantes warning you

Calling Christian and Gloria!"

This is my favourite part, especially live. I'm so glad I was able to hear it in Hamburg. The transition from 21 Guns into American Eulogy is epic!

[greendaytone]

Just reading this thread is giving me a new level of appreciation for this song, as KMH said above. It really is a masterpiece, and a song that unfortunately might not get the wider recognition it deserves.

Am i right in thinking this was one of the first written after American Idiot? I seem to remember reading that somewhere, might be wrong though.

Ben's (Tre's Busted Drumkit) essay is fascinating, i'm looking forward to reading Michael's twist on it.

[pasalaska]

It will forever be 'American Eugoogly' in my heart.

The Dublin sound check people will understand me here

this absolutely amazing - it's made me see little bits in the lyrics that I've just never picked up on, or have wondered about.

I never even thought of Katrina, for instance, but it just fits so perfectly into the lyrics now that you've pointed it out.

Brilliant breakdown of the song, thank you so much for sharing

[bollard_11]

It will forever be 'American Eugoogly' in my heart.

The Dublin sound check people will understand me here

I thought, well a few of us thought, he was making a Zoolander reference

[pasalaska]

I thought, well a few of us thought, he was making a Zoolander reference

I'm pretty sure it must be, seeing as we all thought that too

[insomniaticnimrod]

i actually like this song a lot

and i love when Mike sings in it

[oscar is a nimrod]

I love this song! It is so great to go absolutely crazy to!

When I first listened to this song I overlooked it's brilliance because for some reason I didn't like the repeating choruses . Now one of my top three on 21cbd!

[TheSaltOfTheEarth]

I think this song is an absolutely masterpiece and should've gotten much more recognition then it did. The lyrics are even more amazing and thought-provoking than usual (which is saying something) and I love the fast-paced-ness (sorry, I'm not very articulate right now) of it, it reminds me of some of their older stuff a bit.

Am i right in thinking this was one of the first written after American Idiot? I seem to remember reading that somewhere, might be wrong though.

Yeah, I'm pretty that Billie said the first thing from 21st Century Breakdown written was the Mass Hysteria part of this song.

[A Killjoy from Detroit]

One of my favorite songs off of the album. The part where Billie screams GloriA is powerful as well as fun. I love Mike's part. there is so much passion behind the "I don't give a shit about the modern age" and the not wanting to live in the modern world. i would like to understand the meaning behind it better.

[Tubbie Head]

I love this song since the day I first heard it, everything is just great!

But, I now love it even more since I heard it live, at the sound check, unfortunately they didn't play it much during the tour, but I think they always played it at the soundchecks... And it was the first song and first time I saw Green Day live so you can imagine my feelings every time I hear or see that song in videos! It was just overwhelming to be there seeing Green Day for the first time, and hearing that song which I loved!

It started off with Billie singing "Sing us the song of the century, that sings like american eulogy" as we got to our standing places at the balcony, I just couldn't contain myself with excitement!

They even had the background images during the song, which I thought was amazing <3 So beautiful to see...

So, this song is now one of my favourites.. I love Mike singing too and every element of the song is fantastic, I think =D

And It is sooo great live, I think it even tops Minority!

[Bastard of 1967]

Simply put, this is the best song on 21CB, and Green Day's second-best song behind JOS.

I've owed a detailed reply here for days now...now that we've finally bagged the new house lemme see what else I can add to this discussion (and that totally fucking awesome essay you posted).

[Edit] I've had a few more thoughts since I first posted this yesterday and have woven them in below -- most significantly, I think Static Age and Eulogy are actually bookends for each other. Let me know what you think! [/Edit]

Before zooming in on details, I want to start from a different "big picture" interpretation of 21CB's loose storyline than yours -- not that I don't think yours is equally valid, I do...and I do think all your observations are very well supported in the lyrics. I think it leads to many of the same places as mine do, but I take a different route to get there. Doing so, I pull in some different and maybe unique meanings, interpretations, and pieces of Billie Joe's psyche that we don't necessarily get when we start from a reference point of Christian and Gloria as two separate characters. I know that this makes 21CB seem to more closely resemble AI, but I also believe this was intentional -- indeed, Billie is on record saying that the albums were intended to be bookends for each other. On AI, we get the concepts of rage and love, and in 21CB, we get similar concepts of the nihlist and the torchbearer. We also get a few other key concepts that look more at "what comes next" as opposed to AI's focus on "look at the bleak shithole we're in right now" -- the Bastards of 1969 as the past and the Class of 13 as the future, the 21st Century Breakdown itself where the mistakes of the past collide with hope for the future, and of course, the Song of the Century as the album's prologue and (almost!) epilogue.

So I start from the perspective of Christian and Gloria being two sides, or more particularly two diametrically opposed thought processes or choices of action of the same person. That person I think is an autobiographical Billie Joe Armstrong who, after having saved himself at the end of American Idiot, looks at the incredibly uncertain future that lies ahead for himself, his children and family, our nation, and indeed the world. Simultaneously he asks himself and us whether that return to innocence that he pleads for in Song of the Century is even possible. Is there anything still genuinely worth fighting for to the point where one is willing to put one's life on the line for it, or should we all just give the fuck up and start an apocalyptic revolution that'll torch the whole joint and let us rebuild on whatever ashes remain of our twisted, foresaken society? I agree that this has some parallels in JoS and St. Jimmy as being alter egos of one messed-up little dude in American Idiot who is trying to decide who he is or who he wants to be -- but for the reasons I just described I think the similarity ends there. 21CB goes much, much deeper.

Like you I originally looked at 21CB as featuring Gloria the troubled torchbearer -- the light, the optimist, the leader of the revolution -- and Christian as her equally-troubled love interest and maladjusted nihlist with a destructive streak the size of an eight-lane highway. Then (as I think I posted awhile back in the H&H thread) I read Angeline's musings about the album, these characters, and their relationship. I took particular note of her GDA editorial comment that when you "piss off an angel she becomes a winged fury." It wasn't until recently (in the H&H thread) that I put the pieces together for myself and came away with a completely different, and I think deeper way of looking at 21CB. I think that "furious angel" is exactly what we're getting here....two sides of the same person, two different ways of looking at the world. Rage and Love becomes the Torchbearer and the Nihlist. And Billie scatters a hint in the lyrics that this is what he's getting at:

(From iVLG!) Gloria, viva la Gloria, you blast your name in graffiti on the walls

(From H&H) I'm not fucking around -- G-L-O-R-I-A

We at first *think* that iVLG! just introduces Gloria and puts her up on her pedestal, and that Christian's Inferno does the same for Christian (introducing him to us in a fit of rage)...but then that makes H&H redundant. We already know that Christian wants to "burn it all down," he told us that back in Inferno. What I think that last verse in H&H tells us is that it's now *Gloria* who has gone postal, not Christian, and she's "blasting her name in graffiti on the walls" just like she promised -- except now, she's exploding in the rage that we thought all along belonged to Christian exclusively -- and she's looking for a target for that rage. Demolition? Self-destruction? What to annhilate? Again, piss off an angel and you get a winged fury...and our characters who at first seemed separate and distinct turn out to be one and the same. They're more than just characters in a story; they are metaphors for two different conceptual ways of looking at and reacting to what Billie Joe sees as being wrong with our world.

This in turn leads me to look at the entire album as a digest of one man's internal struggle to decide how he fits in this crazy fucked up world, and what if anything he can do to fix it. He wants to learn how to recapture that sense of peace and security that we knew in childhood, that part of us that existed so vibrantly before the lobotomy, before we were misled and mind-fucked by so-called heroes who turned out to be cons, before we met all the deceivers and cheaters...before we discovered what an awful and unsafe place this world really is, before those beautiful songs of yesterday were buried six feet underground, drenched in gasoline, just waiting for some spark to come along to ignite them and free us from our self-made prisons, the resulting apocalyptic fire being the means to that end -- if we ever make it through. Other lessons flow from this as well -- in particular, where "Do you know your enemy" (KYE) becomes "You are your own worst enemy" in RHS. No redemption can happen until we start pointing the finger of blame at ourselves individually and collectively, until we fix what's wrong between our own two fucking ears, until we actually let ourselves feel the wrong in this world rather than medicating ourselves into oblivion in order to make the pain go away. Prescription drugs aren't going to help us. Nonprescription drugs aren't going to help us. And the religious zealots that had and continue to have such a huge role to play in creating the mess we're in now (the very song title "Christian's Inferno" itself calls our attention to this!) are certainly not going to help us get out of it. We need to clear our own conciences, see the light, decide for ourselves what's worth fighting for -- what's worth dying for -- and then act accordingly.

With this perspective in mind, I can try tackling American Eulogy now.

I look at Eulogy as the last step of a reality check that begins to take form in The Static Age. It's the protagonists' (please note the apostrophe placement) reaction to finally reaching full, concious awareness of what's wrong with the world, the consequences of it, and the recognition that it's impossible for one person alone to fix. This awareness starts to emerge in the Static Age, but it's still (like that song's musical style) vague and fuzzy. It's the first of two "wake up!" moments that I think Eulogy bookends as the other. Static Age first begins exploring the thoughts that there's something fundamentally wrong with our nerve-wracking political discourse supported by an advertising mind-fuck that dominates the mass media. It's the "hey, wait a minute....", like waking up after a foggy dream -- and then both the love and the rage that builds in the song like a pressure cooker finally bursts free at the key change. Our protagonist/s are now fully awake, they know what they want, and they're pleading for insight about how to achieve it. "All I want to do is I want to breathe, batteries are not included"...show me what's real, without all the fucking noise, just get to the point! 21 Guns then adds another thread, rhetorically and directly asking if (in light of the epiphany in Static Age) there's anything truly worth fighting for anymore...and also makes the point that whatever is worth fighting for by definition *must* be worth literally dying for, otherwise what's the point of fighting for it at all? Why are we paying lip service to the world's real problems on the one hand while at the same time medicating our consciousness away so we can pretend those problems don't exist?

Now, finally, we get to Eulogy itself, the other bookend for the Static Age. There's no more fuzziness, no more pretending away what's real -- and rather than fighting with themselves, the two sides of our furious angel are now in lock-step with each other. Sing me a song of the century, it begins. "Tell me what this is all about." As you observed, it's begging for a path to recapture that "brighter side of life" that once was so vividly present, but is now invisible....yet our protagonists now being fully awake and aware, Eulogy immediately rebukes itself with its own answer: The song of the century is hysteria, mass hysteria. THAT is what this world is all about now. And now it's time for the rage to release -- not just from Christian's perspective, not just from Gloria's, but from both of them at once.

As you also observed, the first target of that rage is the mass confusion, fear, and panic that's being actively stoked by the media -- particularly by the political pundits of the day. Next up is the Bush administration in particular and their (in)action in responding to Katrina. And I think that that second verse of Mass Hysteria is one of the most, if not THE most, fucking brilliant piece of writing to have ever come out of Billie Joe's pen. "True sounds of maniacal laughter, and the deaf-mute's misleading the choir, the punch-line is a natural disaster and it's sung by the unemployed."

Let me focus on that lyric a little more....I actually think the "deaf-mute" is a reference not to Dubya but to his sidekick who did the real behind-the-scenes damage: Dick Cheney. He was always in his "undisclosed location" (you couldn't see him, you couldn't hear him, and he steamrolled anyone who dared disagre with him -- thus the "deaf-mute" analogy), pulling Bush's puppet strings while the media bought his WMD bullshit and seemingly gave the administration a blank check to run the whole fucking world into the ditch. And THEN....and THEN when it came time for the government to do what it was supposed to do -- come to the aid of a part of our own country that desperately needed relief -- it stood on the sidelines and shrugged while over a thousand members of the country's perpetual underclass -- "the unemployed" -- perished in a flood, proving once again that the class war that started in the 60's is still alive and well today. If we couldn't laugh at this and say "it's not as bad as they're telling us it is, it's just a bunch of [outcasts] trying to stoke up misplaced anger", we'd have to cry....and thus the joke/punch-line metaphor.

LOVE your interpretation of "tapped into the [oil] reserve." I hadn't thought of it in that particular frame of reference before and I think you nailed that perfectly.

I have nothing to add to your excellent digest of Modern World, except that, again, I think we need to read both the "Christian" viewpoint and the "Gloria" viewpoint together into each verse rather than separately. They're BOTH the "last of the rebels". Gloria is the "Last of the American Girls", she's the one who's prepared to go on strike for the cause, regardless of what it costs her. Remember she's the one who wears her overcoat for the coming of the nuclear winter, she's the one who goes on a hunger strike for the ones who aren't even at the dinner table, she's the hero for the lost cause....so she's the one with the impulse to buck the authority and strike at the direction of the union even if she hurts herself by doing so. Christian's viewpoint is the more cynical one -- that viewpoint sees the union leadership itself as corrupt, using the strikers as pawns in a game that won't benefit anyone except the leadership, and leave the people who are actually taking the front-line hits worse off than they were at the start. The characters respond by first throwing their hands up into the sky in frustration (in 21 Guns); then in Eulogy the rage turns outward when they both lash out at the world -- "I'm gonna light a fire into the underground" -- the underground where those memories of yesterday, of our long-forgotten hope for the future (the Class of 13 reference again) are dead and buried, drenched in gasoline (another refinery reference?) and ready to ignite, primed for revolution. All someone has to do is strike the fucking match and light the fuse.

The fuse fizzles though -- the problems are too great for any one (or two) persons to solve on their own; the revolution won't start because no one else will follow. Our protagonists ultimate solution: isolation. By the time See the Light comes around, I see *both* characters as the shell you described as being exclusively Christian's. That shell is the debris left behind by the internal struggle for redemption, the surrender to the task that's too much to bear, and the "take it off the grid" escape that forms the last verse of Eulogy.

Especially in light of current events, I think Eulogy establishes Billie Joe Armstrong as a sort of modern-day prophet. By "prophet" I don't mean someone who tells us what's to come -- that's an oracle, not a prophet, and the only guess that Billie ventures about the future is (in See the Light) that "the ever after/is in the hands of fate." A prophet in the true sense of the word sees and then tells you what you need to hear -- which is never what you want to hear. We all want our leaders to tell us that everything is fine, that everything's going to be OK, that we'll win that war on terror, that we can balance our budget without causing any pain, move along, keep shopping, there's nothing to see here. A prophet tells you all about that pain. He tells you about reality and shows you how your leaders are feeding you bullshit. I think that's the point and purpose of Eulogy in the album, and one of the overall points of 21CB as a whole. And...I think so many of us struggle with the album as much as we do specifically because it makes us uncomfortable, because it's telling us exactly what we don't want to hear.

[greendaytone]

haha, good repost indeed. Fascinating, insightful stuff from both. I am leaning towards the idea that they are the same person. Scitzophrenia prevails in Billie Joe's lyrics and on (/off?) stage persona, which also lends itself towards this idea.

I'm honestly blown away by the depth you guys find in the music. I listen to the music on a much more superficial level than that, more about the sound to me. It's great to be able to understand the story more with insights like this.

[Tubbie Head]

Oh my God yes, thank you Tony!

[...]

Amazing interpretation! I loved to read your post, you should probably write a book with the stories of American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown, from your point of view!

Ohh yess another one! I always love to read your thoughts about the songs!

You should join "Tre's Busted Drumkit" and make a book together