The story of Saint Jimmy, the character of “Jesus of Suburbia” (Green Day) video is the expression of a generation in confusion. The song is a hymn of the teenagers who are misunderstood by their parents, telling the story of a hypocrite society who prefers turning on to psychiatric controls than facing the real problems. Beside this sociologic aspect of the American society, the song also incorporates elements specific to youth: indecision, facing new challenges in life, friendship, relationship, or dating.
The love story appears here as a negative thing, an aspect from which teenagers should stay away: “To fall in love, we fall in debt” (Green Day). The song exposes the youngsters as distrustful people, locked in their own worlds, not allowing anybody in. This indicates the results of a society that lacks the warmth and naturalness of sharing feelings. From this perspective it also illustrates a lack of affective communication, because the teens are afraid of exposing their real feelings, considering that they might get hurt.
This is the expression of disunited families who affect the social development of children into teenagers and later into adults. The representative of a generation, the character of Green Day’s song has problems in accommodating to his peers and in developing stable relationships because he considers that nobody believes in him, because he also does not believe in anybody, rejecting the values of the society he lives in: “In the land of make believe/That don’t believe in me” (Green Day).
In this world, the romantic relationships are founded on superficiality, shallowness, and are sustained with drug and alcohol consumption: “alcohol and cigarettes/And Mary Jane to keep me insane/Doing someone else’s cocaine” (Green Day).
Actually, the song expresses love through a metaphor of disillusion. It is love the feeling that determines youngsters to start consuming alcohol and drugs, which leave them in debt. This is a transgression of how hove is perceived and of how the teenagers understand to express it, or of how they chose to suffer.
The song shouts with despair and disappointment of a broken heart and disillusion. Entering into a relationship involves risks and the protagonist of the song is very much aware about this aspect, which suggests that he has been there. He knows that any relationship will end in disappointment and this will lead to finding the comfort in drugs and alcohol.
Any relationship is doomed to an end, it is “a lost highway”, where “signs misleading to nowhere”, just like a lost hope for ever finding the real love. In fact, the hope seems to never have existed, because the story expresses a perpetuated disappointment. It seems to be an endless story, told over and over again, through generations, wherein the disillusion is inherited from parents to children: “Hearts recycled but never saved” (Green Day).
The song expresses the self-incertitude, which also generates the feeling of distrust in everybody. This conception, entrenched in mind, does not leave any space for a normal relationship to develop. Not trusting anybody, not even oneself, determines shallow relationships, based solely on the physical aspect.
Although the song does not express the sexuality openly, it can be guessed from several lyrics: “Doing someone else’s cocaine” – this verse can be interpreted in its actual, literal sense, but also in its metaphoric, figurative sense. In the first case, the verse expresses the consequences of falling in love and suffering out of broken heart. In the second case, for the figurative sense, the verse can signify cheating, having sexual relationships with someone else’s girlfriend. Either way, the verse is transgressive, indicating an unbalanced lifestyle of youngsters who follow wrong paths in life.
Relationships are born out of rage and are the expression of a punk culture, located somewhere between the shopping mall and the strip club (Green Day), which for sure influences the children and teenager’s development. This punk culture is centered on the idea that they, the teenagers, are the victims of a society that does not care about them: “City of damned lost children with dirty faces today/No one really seems to care” (Green Day).
The protagonist of the song cannot find love as he cannot find home: “It says home is where your heart is/But what a shame/Cause everyone’s heart doesn’t beat the same/We’re beating out of time” (Green Day). These verses imply that one cannot find love, not the place to call home, because he cannot find somebody who thinks and feels the same as he does at the same time. It seems that he cannot correspond to anybody; he cannot find the perfect timing for developing a proper relationship.
The story teller cannot face a serious relationship, because he cannot commit to anything. His life has no roots, he is always running away from something, towards something else that he will be soon running from, in order to find his destiny: “To run, to run away/To find what you believe” (Green Day). He adventures in a quest for finding a purpose in his life (“Customer Reviews, American Idiot”) but because he does not know what he is looking for, because he has no target in his life, his quest seems endless and pointless. This suggests that he is not willing to let anybody inside his heart. In the end, he is just a confused teenager, who needs to be shown the way he should follow. As there is nobody there to guide him, he creates his own path in life, making his own mistakes, in a rebellious manner.
Rebellion and rage seem to be at the center of defining the relationships in “Jesus of Suburbia”. The protagonist is the expression of a cocky generation, agglomerated with teens that consider themselves the center of the universe, and who can believe that they can have any girl they want just because they expose a cool, sad, and mysterious look. In fact they are scared, shy, insecure, frustrated and all these feelings break down in rage against themselves.
Analyzing the production and consumption of popular culture, Harrington and Bielby questions whether the rock and roll is the authentic voice of teen aguish and rage, or if it is rather ventriloquism, a manipulation from the elders (204). Osit also suggests that teens tend to transfer specific emotion needs from their parents to their peers (172). These perspectives indicate that sexual and romantic relationships that teens develop, are in fact an expression and a reflection of their parents’ conceptions about love, which in this case are based on the same features: mistrust, fear of commitment, shallowness, disillusion.
Gender roles are suggested in the story, according to this explanation. Moreover, women are seen as deceiving, somebody who cannot be trusted and whose sole purposes in life are to be sex partners and to desolate man, by cheating them, determining them to start drinking or consuming drugs and taking the wrong ways in life. They are perceived as temptations that suck the life out of young men, leaving them hallow, mistrustful, disappointed and angry.
The song and its message sustain the teenagers’ agenda, as they are ignored by their parents while they are growing up. It indicates how a broken home can affect teenagers and their sexual, romantic relationship development. While they try to appear invulnerable, in fact they are deeply affected by what is going on around them and they inherit the insecurity and the lack of trust in people from their family.
Works Cited
Customer Reviews American Idiot. Amazon. Accessed 8 April, 2012, retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/American-Idiot-Green-Day/product-reviews/B0002OERI0?pageNumber=6. 2004. Web.
Green Day. Jesus of Suburbia. American Idiot. Reprise. 2005. Record.
Harrington, Lee & Bielby, Denise. Popular Culture: Production and Consumption. Massachusetts, Blackwell Publishers, Inc. 2001. Print.
Osit, Michael. Generation Text: Raising Well – Adjusted Kinds in an Age of Instant Everything. New York, Amacom. 2008. Print.
