Why Green Day
A while back, that five-questions meme went around and muffinkath7, who I know from my Roswell fandom days, asked me why Green Day - what made me fall so hard, get so involved in a new (to me) fandom? At the time, I gave her a short version of the answer: that they made me feel empowered, that I liked the music, and that there was a healthy dose of lust involved. :D There is, of course, a long version, and as I know I made at least a dozen "Why Roswell" posts over the course of my involvement in that fandom, it seems only fair to throw it all onto paper about Green Day, too, if only so that I can smile at it years from now. :-)
The very, VERY long version, muddled with personal stuff and longwinded explanations and possibly TMI in places, who knows .
I've been meaning to do this for a while, but I finally started writing it down today because I had this little epiphany: that ultimately, the reason that I've been so travel-itchy is that as much as I love it here - love this house in particular, love my suburb/city, love the city of Halifax itself, feel absolutely spiritually grounded in certain places like Peggy's Cove - I am always going to be "from away." Almost three years here has taught me that I'll never quite fit in, and at the same time, I wouldn't fit back in Ontario either. I can't even FATHOM moving back to Ontario even though it's where the rest of my family is and where I grew up and all of that. (Even though there are days that I *desperately* miss Toronto.) But it's very much of the past for me, and aside from it being a very bad health move (allergy & breathing wise) to go back, it would feel like a major step backwards no matter what the reason I went back. In other words, it's not an option. Not now, and probably not ever.
So where does that leave me? Well, it leaves me with a bunch of loosely-connected facts: the fact that I basically mentally skipped my twenties and am doing all that sort of stuff now; the fact that I've started over from completely fucking scratch; the fact that my friends are all either way younger or way older because the women my age are mostly dealing with young kids; the fact that I'm 33 and *don't* have a significant other or any children; the fact that I'm divorced; the fact that I'm a recovered depressive. These all add up to the same thing: I don't fit in. I am outside the "normal" operations of society.
It's not a place in which I've ever been before. For most people who consider themselves misfits or outsiders, it starts in school, especially in high school. My HS experience wasn't totally trouble-free or anything but I wasn't an outsider. I wasn't in the super-super-in group either, but if I'm honest, it's because I chose not to be. I had an in, I had the chance, and when I tried it for a while I didn't like the petty, backstabbing sort of atmosphere so I stopped hanging out with those people and stuck to my fellow geeks. Thing is, I went to the regional centre for the Enhanced program, which I was in, and my HS was, in a word, snotty. But if you excelled at something - anything - you were considered okay, and those of us in the Enhanced program were automatically assumed to excel at academic studies. Which we did (those of us who bothered applying ourselves, anyway). So it just wasn't an issue for me like it is for a lot of kids. If anything, I was more of a golden girl. My biggest problem would have been sexual harassment and that is a different post altogether, lol.
So there's that part: being an outsider - being aware of being an outsider - in a way I never was before, drew me to more punk and punk-influenced music because it meshed with how I was feeling better than it had since my brief goth-and-punk phase in the 7th and 8th grades, before I got into metal (also a separate post, ye gods).
The next part would be music itself. Anyone who's friended me for any length of time will have figured out that I'm a music freak. It defines a huge part of who I am now, and it defined a huge part of who I was growing up. Those who've been around a little longer also know that there's this huge chunk of musical (and personal) history just...missing...from my head, which corresponds roughly to 1993-2003. Anyway, I was a year and a half old when I started dancing; four years old when I insisted that I wanted to take dance lessons (ballet) and also when I asked for my first record. It was Rod Stewart's You're In My Heart and I still have the 45 somewhere.
The radio was always on in my house, usually to a Top 40 kind of station. When my parents had friends over, or my godparents, and their kids/my cousins too, after a while the music would go up and we'd all be dancing. Us kids would crawl upstairs eventually and collapse all on one bed, because the same thing happened if we went to someone else's house instead. I went to concerts in the park from around the age of five or so, and I went to my first rock concert at nine. Didn't get to go to another one until I was 11, and then that summer when I was 12, my best friend and I went to our second concert together, unsupervised this time (drop off/pick up), and that kicked off a glorious habit of going to whatever concerts I could manage to get to and pay for, right through the beginning of university. I LOVE live music, passionately. I love *rock* music. My father brought me up to worship the combination of guitars and drums and I love him for it.
And then, musically, there is that blank space I mentioned due to severe depression. Note that it starts a year before Dookie was released and ends a year after Shenanigans was released, and that right there pretty much explains why I completely missed being a Green Day fan before American Idiot. I remember falling for Longview when it came on the radio, and when I first began to catch up on their back catalogue there are a tonne of songs that I knew all the words to, but didn't specifically recall hearing before.
November 2000 was the next concert I went to, which incidentally was the night after I'd written my first ever fanfiction too. Roswell began the reignition of my interest in music, because whatever else you can say about the WB, they know exactly what they're doing when it comes to music. Getting involved in that fandom signalled the upswing of my personal life, too, but of course there are hills and valleys both in that kind of journey and I crashed pretty hard when my company went bankrupt and I lost my job. The music associated with the show is pretty much all I remember from that period, plus Matchbox Twenty because that's when I fell for them thanks to a Rosfriend, and I didn't start getting interested again until I'd moved to Halifax and started putting my pieces back together.
I have not, to this day, heard American Idiot on the radio. Upon discovering the utter crap that passes for radio stations here, I essentially boycotted them all and listened to what my online friends said was interesting, or to my old CDs. I didn't have any RL friends here yet at that point. I spent a fair bit of time in the Land of Dreams chat room (before it started HATING ME) and I used to have a habit of tossing out random lyrics mid-chat. Some people tried to identify them, and other people tossed out their own lyrics in response. One night, a newer poster replied with some lyrics from AFI's Silver and Cold. I thought they were gorgeous so he sent me the song. And a whole bunch of others, lol. We got to be friends and traded music, and he's really a huge part of what threw me back into being music-obsessed, for which I'm thoroughly grateful.
One of the songs he sent me was Boulevard of Broken Dreams. That one I *had* heard on the radio since I'd only just started working at Staples (as a temp first) and then, we'd had a little radio on in our area. I thought it was pretty, and I really liked the guitars at the end of it. I loved the AFI songs he'd sent me, along with a whackload of other stuff, and I mentioned all that in an email to cookie2697 who said that if that's what I was getting into now, I'd probably like Green Day's album because the whole thing was good. And while Anne and I don't always love the same music, we have a decent feel for what we like that the other is liable to like, so I bought the album on the strength of one pretty song and her recommendation.
I think it was right around the "Representative from California" part in Holiday on the first listen-through that I fell in love, and when Whatsername trailed off into silence I just kind of sat there for a while, in total awe. That album formed an instant emotional connection with me, deeper than any music had touched me since before the end of high school. Hell, deeper than most people since then had gotten. And that was how and when it started, with the music.
Then I went looking for their back catalogue and for more information about the band, and with everything I read and listened to, I got pulled in deeper. They're three guys who are all on the goofy side of gorgeous, which is my personal preference in finding guys attractive, and they have attitude coming out the wazoo, even now when they're older and have families and toe the line a little more. They still know how to have fun. I was learning all this stuff, appreciating them more and more and falling deeper and deeper for the music, and then I saw them play live.
Game. Over.
For the first time in my life, I went to a concert alone, in a foreign country, in a place I'd never driven to before, using a ticket that I paid for in cash the night before at a Starbucks where I arranged to meet the seller that I'd found on craigslist, which I'd never used before, either. Oh, yeah, and because I'd gone down to Boston early enough to catch a different concert with mockingbird39 the night before, I technically jeopardised my job because I was just shy of finishing my 90 days probationary period after being hired on full time and therefore wasn't eligible for vacation time yet, so I actually played hookey. My immediate supervisor knew and was covering my ass (unspecified personal appointment for which I would be unable to procure a doctor's note, heh), but still. If I'd been found out, I could have been canned. What convinced me to go in the first place was two things: the Rob Thomas concert the night before, at the Avalon (small club, and I adore MB20 and have managed to completely miss seeing them in concert ever so I was dying to go), and when I was whining about wanting to go to see GD to the same person who'd introduced me to AFI, he finally said something along the lines of, "You have a car. You have enough money. You have somewhere to stay. You want to go. Fucking find a ticket and GO." So...I did. And the entire, surrealistically fantastic weekend sunk me into full-blown obsession, because if you love live music the way I do, you cannot see a Green Day concert and not get sucked in. They absolutely *rule* live.
It was after the concert that I started looking for somewhere to post, wanting to chat with other obsessed people, and I went through a few places without finding a home until the Idiot Club opened and I also rather bewilderedly discovered that hey, you can actually meet people and there's fandom-related stuff right here on LJ. *facepalm* I originally joined to keep in touch with existing friends, and it never even occurred to me to look for any other purpose. So I'm extremely grateful that jenbly's screencaps are well-known enough to have other people elsewhere linked to them, and OMG I'm never going to live down saying thisI'm equally grateful that looking_spiffy is the biggest tease that ever lived and left a snippet of sexy fic in the comments in one of jenbly's cap posts. Because without that, I wouldn't even have found the fandom stuff on LJ, and I doubt I would have found the inspiration and the inclination to write bandfiction, either, which has rejuvenated my writing abilities in general, and afforded me a lot of fun and allowed me to make a lot of friends and have a lot of new experiences. Plus, poor koneko41 would probably still be scratching her head and wondering who the fuck it was that randomly friended her. :D
In conclusion, it's really the synergy of a number of things that created a place inside me for a Green Day obsession. What sealed the deal and, truly, has made me into a lifelong fan if not necessarily a lifelong obsessee (we'll see on that front!), is the live experience, and the band members themselves. They were on top of the world with American Idiot, and they got there because they believed in who they were as individuals and as a band, because they wrote and played from the heart, because they were always and only exactly who they chose to be and doing exactly what they chose to do regardless of what anyone else thought or said about it, and because they never gave up. I've taken away a lot of things from their music and their personal/band history, but the most important parts sum up to this: life is going to throw shit at you, and sometimes you're going to take a direct hit and go down. Take the time you need to relearn how to breathe, and then get the fuck back up and keep going, because the only person you need to answer to is yourself. It was a message I needed to hear that came at a moment when I needed to hear it, and I did.
(*smooches* to those who made it this far. Dear Lord but I am long-winded lately!)
Aaaaaand once again, Tas demonstrates that she is totally incapable of brevity unless it has a 100 word limit. *grins* Fortunately, there is the LJ-cut and I know how to use it! *whispers* Also, the conclusion has a bit of bolding at the beginning so you could always skip the details. ;-)
The very, VERY long version, muddled with personal stuff and longwinded explanations and possibly TMI in places, who knows .
I've been meaning to do this for a while, but I finally started writing it down today because I had this little epiphany: that ultimately, the reason that I've been so travel-itchy is that as much as I love it here - love this house in particular, love my suburb/city, love the city of Halifax itself, feel absolutely spiritually grounded in certain places like Peggy's Cove - I am always going to be "from away." Almost three years here has taught me that I'll never quite fit in, and at the same time, I wouldn't fit back in Ontario either. I can't even FATHOM moving back to Ontario even though it's where the rest of my family is and where I grew up and all of that. (Even though there are days that I *desperately* miss Toronto.) But it's very much of the past for me, and aside from it being a very bad health move (allergy & breathing wise) to go back, it would feel like a major step backwards no matter what the reason I went back. In other words, it's not an option. Not now, and probably not ever.
So where does that leave me? Well, it leaves me with a bunch of loosely-connected facts: the fact that I basically mentally skipped my twenties and am doing all that sort of stuff now; the fact that I've started over from completely fucking scratch; the fact that my friends are all either way younger or way older because the women my age are mostly dealing with young kids; the fact that I'm 33 and *don't* have a significant other or any children; the fact that I'm divorced; the fact that I'm a recovered depressive. These all add up to the same thing: I don't fit in. I am outside the "normal" operations of society.
It's not a place in which I've ever been before. For most people who consider themselves misfits or outsiders, it starts in school, especially in high school. My HS experience wasn't totally trouble-free or anything but I wasn't an outsider. I wasn't in the super-super-in group either, but if I'm honest, it's because I chose not to be. I had an in, I had the chance, and when I tried it for a while I didn't like the petty, backstabbing sort of atmosphere so I stopped hanging out with those people and stuck to my fellow geeks. Thing is, I went to the regional centre for the Enhanced program, which I was in, and my HS was, in a word, snotty. But if you excelled at something - anything - you were considered okay, and those of us in the Enhanced program were automatically assumed to excel at academic studies. Which we did (those of us who bothered applying ourselves, anyway). So it just wasn't an issue for me like it is for a lot of kids. If anything, I was more of a golden girl. My biggest problem would have been sexual harassment and that is a different post altogether, lol.
So there's that part: being an outsider - being aware of being an outsider - in a way I never was before, drew me to more punk and punk-influenced music because it meshed with how I was feeling better than it had since my brief goth-and-punk phase in the 7th and 8th grades, before I got into metal (also a separate post, ye gods).
The next part would be music itself. Anyone who's friended me for any length of time will have figured out that I'm a music freak. It defines a huge part of who I am now, and it defined a huge part of who I was growing up. Those who've been around a little longer also know that there's this huge chunk of musical (and personal) history just...missing...from my head, which corresponds roughly to 1993-2003. Anyway, I was a year and a half old when I started dancing; four years old when I insisted that I wanted to take dance lessons (ballet) and also when I asked for my first record. It was Rod Stewart's You're In My Heart and I still have the 45 somewhere.
The radio was always on in my house, usually to a Top 40 kind of station. When my parents had friends over, or my godparents, and their kids/my cousins too, after a while the music would go up and we'd all be dancing. Us kids would crawl upstairs eventually and collapse all on one bed, because the same thing happened if we went to someone else's house instead. I went to concerts in the park from around the age of five or so, and I went to my first rock concert at nine. Didn't get to go to another one until I was 11, and then that summer when I was 12, my best friend and I went to our second concert together, unsupervised this time (drop off/pick up), and that kicked off a glorious habit of going to whatever concerts I could manage to get to and pay for, right through the beginning of university. I LOVE live music, passionately. I love *rock* music. My father brought me up to worship the combination of guitars and drums and I love him for it.
And then, musically, there is that blank space I mentioned due to severe depression. Note that it starts a year before Dookie was released and ends a year after Shenanigans was released, and that right there pretty much explains why I completely missed being a Green Day fan before American Idiot. I remember falling for Longview when it came on the radio, and when I first began to catch up on their back catalogue there are a tonne of songs that I knew all the words to, but didn't specifically recall hearing before.
November 2000 was the next concert I went to, which incidentally was the night after I'd written my first ever fanfiction too. Roswell began the reignition of my interest in music, because whatever else you can say about the WB, they know exactly what they're doing when it comes to music. Getting involved in that fandom signalled the upswing of my personal life, too, but of course there are hills and valleys both in that kind of journey and I crashed pretty hard when my company went bankrupt and I lost my job. The music associated with the show is pretty much all I remember from that period, plus Matchbox Twenty because that's when I fell for them thanks to a Rosfriend, and I didn't start getting interested again until I'd moved to Halifax and started putting my pieces back together.
I have not, to this day, heard American Idiot on the radio. Upon discovering the utter crap that passes for radio stations here, I essentially boycotted them all and listened to what my online friends said was interesting, or to my old CDs. I didn't have any RL friends here yet at that point. I spent a fair bit of time in the Land of Dreams chat room (before it started HATING ME) and I used to have a habit of tossing out random lyrics mid-chat. Some people tried to identify them, and other people tossed out their own lyrics in response. One night, a newer poster replied with some lyrics from AFI's Silver and Cold. I thought they were gorgeous so he sent me the song. And a whole bunch of others, lol. We got to be friends and traded music, and he's really a huge part of what threw me back into being music-obsessed, for which I'm thoroughly grateful.
One of the songs he sent me was Boulevard of Broken Dreams. That one I *had* heard on the radio since I'd only just started working at Staples (as a temp first) and then, we'd had a little radio on in our area. I thought it was pretty, and I really liked the guitars at the end of it. I loved the AFI songs he'd sent me, along with a whackload of other stuff, and I mentioned all that in an email to cookie2697 who said that if that's what I was getting into now, I'd probably like Green Day's album because the whole thing was good. And while Anne and I don't always love the same music, we have a decent feel for what we like that the other is liable to like, so I bought the album on the strength of one pretty song and her recommendation.
I think it was right around the "Representative from California" part in Holiday on the first listen-through that I fell in love, and when Whatsername trailed off into silence I just kind of sat there for a while, in total awe. That album formed an instant emotional connection with me, deeper than any music had touched me since before the end of high school. Hell, deeper than most people since then had gotten. And that was how and when it started, with the music.
Then I went looking for their back catalogue and for more information about the band, and with everything I read and listened to, I got pulled in deeper. They're three guys who are all on the goofy side of gorgeous, which is my personal preference in finding guys attractive, and they have attitude coming out the wazoo, even now when they're older and have families and toe the line a little more. They still know how to have fun. I was learning all this stuff, appreciating them more and more and falling deeper and deeper for the music, and then I saw them play live.
Game. Over.
For the first time in my life, I went to a concert alone, in a foreign country, in a place I'd never driven to before, using a ticket that I paid for in cash the night before at a Starbucks where I arranged to meet the seller that I'd found on craigslist, which I'd never used before, either. Oh, yeah, and because I'd gone down to Boston early enough to catch a different concert with mockingbird39 the night before, I technically jeopardised my job because I was just shy of finishing my 90 days probationary period after being hired on full time and therefore wasn't eligible for vacation time yet, so I actually played hookey. My immediate supervisor knew and was covering my ass (unspecified personal appointment for which I would be unable to procure a doctor's note, heh), but still. If I'd been found out, I could have been canned. What convinced me to go in the first place was two things: the Rob Thomas concert the night before, at the Avalon (small club, and I adore MB20 and have managed to completely miss seeing them in concert ever so I was dying to go), and when I was whining about wanting to go to see GD to the same person who'd introduced me to AFI, he finally said something along the lines of, "You have a car. You have enough money. You have somewhere to stay. You want to go. Fucking find a ticket and GO." So...I did. And the entire, surrealistically fantastic weekend sunk me into full-blown obsession, because if you love live music the way I do, you cannot see a Green Day concert and not get sucked in. They absolutely *rule* live.
It was after the concert that I started looking for somewhere to post, wanting to chat with other obsessed people, and I went through a few places without finding a home until the Idiot Club opened and I also rather bewilderedly discovered that hey, you can actually meet people and there's fandom-related stuff right here on LJ. *facepalm* I originally joined to keep in touch with existing friends, and it never even occurred to me to look for any other purpose. So I'm extremely grateful that jenbly's screencaps are well-known enough to have other people elsewhere linked to them, and OMG I'm never going to live down saying thisI'm equally grateful that looking_spiffy is the biggest tease that ever lived and left a snippet of sexy fic in the comments in one of jenbly's cap posts. Because without that, I wouldn't even have found the fandom stuff on LJ, and I doubt I would have found the inspiration and the inclination to write bandfiction, either, which has rejuvenated my writing abilities in general, and afforded me a lot of fun and allowed me to make a lot of friends and have a lot of new experiences. Plus, poor koneko41 would probably still be scratching her head and wondering who the fuck it was that randomly friended her. :D
In conclusion, it's really the synergy of a number of things that created a place inside me for a Green Day obsession. What sealed the deal and, truly, has made me into a lifelong fan if not necessarily a lifelong obsessee (we'll see on that front!), is the live experience, and the band members themselves. They were on top of the world with American Idiot, and they got there because they believed in who they were as individuals and as a band, because they wrote and played from the heart, because they were always and only exactly who they chose to be and doing exactly what they chose to do regardless of what anyone else thought or said about it, and because they never gave up. I've taken away a lot of things from their music and their personal/band history, but the most important parts sum up to this: life is going to throw shit at you, and sometimes you're going to take a direct hit and go down. Take the time you need to relearn how to breathe, and then get the fuck back up and keep going, because the only person you need to answer to is yourself. It was a message I needed to hear that came at a moment when I needed to hear it, and I did.
(*smooches* to those who made it this far. Dear Lord but I am long-winded lately!)
Aaaaaand once again, Tas demonstrates that she is totally incapable of brevity unless it has a 100 word limit. *grins* Fortunately, there is the LJ-cut and I know how to use it! *whispers* Also, the conclusion has a bit of bolding at the beginning so you could always skip the details. ;-)