Losers, Runaways & Idiots for the Jesus of Suburbia

"And there's nothing wrong with me

This is how I'm supposed to be

In a land of make believe

That don't believe in me"

Green Day, Jesus of Suburbia

Part 1: the Jesus of Suburbia

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In 2008, punk rock band Green Day released American Idiot, an album that revitalized their career and brought their music in a new direction. Called a "rock opera" the album followed a protagonist, sometimes called "the Jesus of Suburbia" as he becomes disillusioned with the failures of the American culture of middle class life: 7/11's, drugs, an inarticulate Christianity, war, and the end of the nuclear family. On his journey, beginning in the second track "Jesus of Suburbia," he encounters the persona "Saint Jimmy" and "Whatshername," as he finds space to redefine himself. 

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Middle // Class Jesus

"Home is where your heart is
But what a shame
Cause everyone's heart
Doesn't beat the same
It's beating out of time"

Green Day, Jesus of Suburbia

Part 2: City of the Damned

What does Queer sound like? Of course the question is performatively self-defeating, but also productive because it can get us somewhere. For me it has landed me in recent years listening to Danger Days: the True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys by My Chemical Romance as well as American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown. The former gets us closer to Rock-Pop, and Lady GaGa, among contemporary music that has some pretty promising queer developments (and may be the topic of other posts), while the latter occupies a contestable spot in Rock-Punk (or Pop-Rock or Pop-Punk, as 90's Punk Rockers might quibble). 

Sticking with Green Day's early 2000 album, American Idiot, specifically its first track in the formal storyline of the rock-opera (the 1st actual track just sets the theme/problem of the album) where the protagonist asks the question "how do I not be an American Idiot?" In the first version of this question, he means the straight, normal, middle class American dream-system which seems to have gotten him clogged in the works. Over the course of the track the answer seems to be the introduction of another question: "how do I become an American Idiot?" wherein he can pull the signature Punk/Queer move of aggressively deforming the normative into something...else, with questionable success.

This project mirrors what Green Day as a band was also looking to do with the album: something else. In early interviews and remembered in later ones, they offer the justification for the album as it arrived as something that would get them out of where they were and either towards doom (& retirement) or a less doom-filled place than they were currently. The success of the album in fact revitalized the band's popularity, spurred another decade of tours, a second album, a Broadway musical (now touring), and soon a movie produced by Tom Hanks. But isn't this just the same old system of normative success? Can we ever get away? If so, how? It's a good question. It is also a central question of Punk.

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Middle // Class Losers

"I don't care if you don't

I don't care if you don't

I don't care if you don't care"

Green Day, Jesus of Suburbia

Part 3: I Don't Care

Punk, like Queer, operates like an anti-identity. It self-consciously cannot exist as a category, because while reflecting many neo-liberal dreams by promoting "originality" and "individuality" in a community where all are "equal" or at least "equally different" it admits that failure is inherent in the project. Contrary to the industry punk of Hot-Topic general message of selling an identity, or perhaps as the ironic result of the failure of this message, Punk cannot create its own clothing, music, culture, or creed separate from industries of normativity. Punk can only antagonize, bastardize, and repossess.

Thus, there is no contradiction that Punk becomes popular with those who are "haves" in the Middle // Class, even the older professional age groups, despite the initial emergence of the movement among working class youth, or "have nots." The identity politics of Queer theory and the Post-Modern Marxist theories of late capitalism would articulate that the system of material & symbolic production would capture and abject members of the Middle // Class as much as anyone. The "straight" "normal" American capitalist dream is a place where no one can exist. Like the subject lost in the symbolic order or the struggling worker trying to get by in a life-style they can't afford, no one can feel "at home" or a "success" if they hold on that dream of totality. We all become lost, we all lose the human race. But there still may be a way to become good at getting lost, a way to better enjoy the ride to nowhere.

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Middle // Class Idiots

"Am I retarded or am I just overjoyed

Nobody's perfect and I stand accused

For lack of a better word, and that's my best excuse"

Green Day, Jesus of Suburbia

Part 4: Dearly Beloved

And yet we cannot blame the system for our problems, at least not a system external to ourselves. A new norm is (re)produced in our failed attempts at producing either the old norm or its alternative. The moment we try to abject the "straight" and say "they don't care about me" we inscribe their position as the specter of our own. If we carefully trace around the norm, we will find it perfectly outlined and placed in a tabernacle inside our identity which would make us forever bound to their existence, eternally outside and inside our bodies like a suppressed addiction or shadowy monster which may come back to police us at any moment. In policing our own borders against the uncaring-other, we attempt a sort of uniform charity which again neutralizes every-one/thing in our network in order to maintain an inversion to the norm. We become exactly what we are accused of being: the inverted, the broken, the perverted versions of the straight. Our antagonism becomes as confining as obedience would be. That is the nightmare if we actually could perfectly be Punk or Queer, but we cannot.

So do we care, if no one cares? Are we happy or angry with the system (or being it's shadow)? Are we perfect or are we accused? Do we have a name, or do we lack a better word?

What seems to be the answer is to play dumb. Post-Modernism promotes the pastiche, but we need not be so humorless. If we cannot escape or resolve the tension between the norm and the queer, the system and the punk which disturbs it, then we have to be on some level indifferent to both. By not trying to be one or the other, we can partially escape the cycle and open ourselves to wandering and discovering new unknown norms and unknown problems. But since we carry the cycle around with us, and it will continue to perpetuate itself (with all its symbolic, material, economic violence) we need be cautious check the game we are subconsciousness playing. Also, there is some fun in the game. The push and pull of wins, losses, and opposition can give us the material and the drive to keep going. It may seem cruel to laugh in the face of a desperate conditions, but if not then, when can we laugh? It's okay to play the idiot, sometimes.

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Middle // Class Runaways

"And I walked this line

A million and one fucking times
But not this time"

Green Day, Jesus of Suburbia:

Part 5: Tales from Another Broken Home

Playing is all well and good for those who aren't suffering under the intensity of violence in an unlivable life, but what about those who can't play around anymore?

One issue with theory is that it tends to universalize, because thought and language (which are its principle tools and materials) tend toward universalization, because they work in re-presentation. This is where Things may be useful. Not specific things, like shopping or alcohol, but Things in their logical impenetrability and their ability to launch out and swerve. In other words, screw words or destinations, just get out of here! We've discussed before how depression can cause cyclical thought, and the way out is just to do things regardless of the sense of them. Become a thing in motion, hurtling off into the unknown. Run away. Eventually you will have to look back, or at least look around, but by then you will have (1) gotten some distance from the old problems and (2) worked out your frustration so you can begin to tackle the new problems of wherever you have arrived at.

This is one sense of Dasein of Heidegger or Chesterton's Flag of the World. We discover our world and ourselves as an unknown thing every time we establish a time and place and a self. This may be reason to hope, because the symbolic order cannot possibly keep up with the universe as it tries to colonize it with meaning/representation/sense. If things are too static or the motions to repetitious, make a change, go somewhere else. You will bring things with you, but they will transform along the way. This may just be a flight into the a-logical, into hope, into fairy-land, but regardless of whether or not we seek the night, we may someday may find ourselves moving through it; plus, sometimes stepping on the gas is just damn cathartic.

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The Tempest of Identity in Green Day's 21 Guns

"Did you try to live on your own

When you burned down the house and home?

Did you stand too close to the fire

Like a liar looking for forgiveness from a stone [ / storm]?"

Green Day, 21 Guns

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I originally "misheard", or rather queered, these lyrics, which I understood to be mixing the images of fire and storms as the face of the ecology which the protagonist had attempted to isolate themselves from. Looking at them again, stones work just as well, but does different things.

In these readings of the lines above, we can see an inversion of the concept that walls of technology and the social which construct "house and home" do not divide the self from nature, ecology, or just simply every-thing else; or do not divide enough. We can see this in the retreat of the true/natural self from the ecology of the environment into the technological, from the technological to the biological, from the biological to the spiritual and perhaps even from the spiritual into languages, forms and nothingness. The effort to define the I as separate and independent becomes the act of looking at things as saying "No, that is not me." It would seem logical then that more than being ineffable, this methodology should lead to affirming an essential no-thingness; that's all that's left when you get rid of everything else.

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We can see in the image of burning down the house, a harmonic with Michel Serres's reading of Rene Descartes, in which the methodology of the Cogito is taken to be like reducing a home to ashes so as to get rid of all the para-sites, everything that lives WITH the self, in the self and as the self. Serres argues that this is as futile as it is violent, for in any new building which will replace the destruction all the para-sites return.

Taking the image of the fire, we see one level of the futility of this attempt to seal off the self by refusing the materiality and the ecology of the self, the fire is a thing and nothing is lost by burning it away; except forms. The mistaken identity of the hole returns, insofar as the intensification of matter to the point in which is transforms beyond recognition is read as an annihilation. Things become a fire and become afire, dancing with its own vibrancy, life, queerness and intense performative becoming. Things are trans-formed together in the fire. The fires of purgation become transfiguration, not a hellish insinuator into which things are disposed of and disappear forever. Eventually we must acknowledge the things our fires become, and this may be in part the captivating agency of the fire to arrest our attention to the point of "standing too close;" is it that we see ourselves already in it?

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Taking the image of the stone, we see another level of futility of trying to form an identity out no-thing. Stones have their own temporality, motion, transformations and agency (as this post is inspired by the recent environmental phenomenon I am experiencing in DC & Maryland I am called to think of the recent Earthquake). But stones also demonstrate the motion of things to resist motions. The "no" they articulate defeats many narcissistic attempts to see the world as submissive extension of the self, rather than a multiplicity of selves in their own right that have their own wandering paths. This "no" to certain becomings, and its adamant "yes" to others (explored in Jane Bennett's chapter on metals and minerals in Vibrant Matter) is an important concept to Queer Materialism, as queer things / persons are often performed as to aerial, too things and wispy to ever had moments of consistency. Things constantly transform, but at different speeds, different intensities. That this this is a "rock" or a "rock and roll" song is perhaps fitting, for we must "rock" if we are to be queer, or any-thing at all.

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Taking the image of the storm (the inspiration for this post, with the impending hurricane), particularly combined with the idea of living fire, we at the same time see an intense vision of the queer, molecular

(Deleuze and Guattari) and dark (Timothy Morton) ecology of things at work.

The darkness of storms is becoming apparent to me as the hurricane system descending on us not only says "no" to solar light but transforms power-lines into things which are no longer conforming electricity into a path to my apartment building (this has not yet happened, but I expect it to). In Morton's conception of "dark" however, which he acknowledges relates with a supposition of a "queer ecology", is that unlike the harmonious vision of nature in which things have proper rhythm, balances and normative forms, the ecology of things are more accurately dynamic, clashing and constantly deviating from norms. Watching a storm or a weather forecaster makes this apparent, weather is hard to predict and often surprises us in the forms it takes. It is imaginable how and why we might suppose a persona, Thor / Zeus etc., may be guiding it; not because of its sense of order and purpose but out of its apparent free will to "do what it will" rather than follow simple deterministic paths.

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The molar identity of the tempest as a "thing" is a funny, as it is so apparently an molecular ecology of many things that enter into, act as, and then leave the storm machine, and as it so emphatically a becoming rather than a being in a way which makes it no less an identifiable thing to be reckoned with. In these ways, molecularity and becoming, the storm is like fire a very clear image of identity as "transforming things." Clouds of atoms become the molecules which become my body, storms of electrons in the brain become consciousness, and the tempest of my books, apartment, caffeine, hormones, colleagues (new and old!) will become my professional-self this year. As I become-storm this weekend, I hope however that I do not trans-form too much and likewise that the "stone-ness" of my apartment (specifically the windows) is able to hold its own in the argument over which way things go.

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The queer identity of tempests and the tempests of identity have been in my mind, particularly in their queer register, since last year's "Tempfest" at George Washington University; and Jeffrey J Cohen's discussion of Margery Kempe's becoming-tempest in Medieval Identity Machines. Besides the tempest of weather which brings together and moves things / people (i.e. trans-forms them) there becomes a tempest of actors which in turn transform the lives / persons of the island.

In Sandman by Neil Gaiman, Dream has Shakespeare write 2 plays for him personally in exchange for releasing his genius: A Midsummer Nights Dream (as a way to help the world remember the fae as they leave Earth) and the Tempest. When Shakespeare asks Dream why he wanted this play and why he had the wizard destroy his staff, drown his books and abandon his island (of identity) when the story would have been more interesting if he had tragically persisted. Dream responds that he wants a story about a transformation in which someone is able to escape / change the things he is, because he (Dream) does not feel able. Morpheus's tragic self-blindness aside, this does open up how we are bound up in / as our things and that resisting the tempest of queer disorientation that forces us to change brings about unneeded suffering.

Like the eye of the storm, there is hole in the center of things / identity / persons that twists things in new directions and at times we break down and other times we can ride along with the storm and leave it relatively unchanged.

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A word on repentance, on "seeking forgiveness from the storm" : this has to do with orientation, and as Sara Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology discusses, a queer orientation is usually one that is directed towards things that move, slip and without a starkly defined sense of inside and out. In this way, repentance is like a constant re-orientation and that forgiveness ( to for (outwardly) give ) comes in releasing ones-self from "the lie" of separation and stillness; of an identity without transformation; of an ontology that is not overthrown by queerness.

That said, I am now stuck in some senses alone and still for the next two days as the hurricane passes. Still, I am sure we (all that is brought together to become this tempest) will be having an adventure.

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