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Jesus of Suburbia Song Meaning ( See Actual Lyrics)
Maybe it's because no one wants to believe it. Maybe it's because everyone thinks that if we ignore it, the fantasy of the suburban American dream will prevail, but whatever the reason, it is extremely rare that a piece of media revealing what it is really like to be a teenager in America today fights its way into mainstream culture.
Thus, in, say, for example, the mid 1990s, a movie like ultra-weird, neo-realist "The Doom Generation" never gets anywhere near the recognition it deserves, and gritty yet ultimately feel-good favorite "Suburbia" garners rave reviews, leading to a stream of goofy teen movies to the effect of the ghastly and apparently never-ending "American Pie" series, that portray the woes and perils of teenage existence as being roughly sum-upable in terms of 50s-style dating upsets and dealing with quirky but ultimately loving, together parents.
And then, suddenly, on to this unbelievably homogenized, squeaky-clean scene comes a song like Green Day's Jesus of Suburbia. Along with an amazing video, this song delivers some hard truths about what it's like to be young in the world. Nuclear family life is totally fucked up. By the time you're in junior high, you're partying, getting high, fucking your brains out, and doing basically whatever you feel like, because, as the song says "No one really seems to care," "and I could really care less."
In part one of the song, you get this perfect picture of what it's like to be growing up totally disenchanted and disconnected in the suburban wastelands. You're raised by TV, and nourished by the worst crap imaginable ("soda pop and Ritalin") just to keep you quiet and not bothering the savagely clued-out zombies that are supposed to be passing as your parents. As soon as your old enough to wipe your own ass, you start getting out and getting wasted as often as you can, and you have this horrible feeling that everything is totally screwed, but for some reason, you can't quite drum up the whole giving-a-fuck-ness required to do anything about it. After all, "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."
The total apathy that seems to be a fact of modern life is caused by a social structure that feeds us pre-packaged belief systems while simultaneously discouraging thought about what and why we believe, and in fact, anesthetizing us against free thought by burning our brains out with mass-scale commercialization of every aspect of our pitiful existences. The whole concept of 'Jesus of Suburbia' refers to the new modern religion of worshiping consumerism, as we see in part two, where 7-11 is "the center of the earth," and holy scriptures are found at the mall, the chosen place of worship for capitalist culture.
At this point in the song, the hero of "American Idiot," St. Jimmy, is beginning to move out of apathy into being pissed off, because he realizes that the whole American dream / suburban lie, that "home is where your heart is," is total bullshit, and everybody's different and this massive corporate government effort to make us all look the same and think the same and act the same is seriously fucking shit up: "'Cause everyone's heart, / Doesn't beat the same, / We're beating out of time."
In part three, a sort of weird transition happens, because St. Jimmy goes from not caring, to not caring if anyone else doesn't care, because he's pissed off. "Everyone is so full of shit! / Born and raised by hypocrites," and the only thing he doesn't care about anymore is conforming to the lame-ass pseudo-culture that's been forced down his throat his whole life: "Land of make believe, / And I don't believe, / And I don't care!"
In part four, St. Jimmy takes on a prophet-esque role and begins to exhort others to wake the fuck up: "Dearly beloved, are you listening?" Finally starting to think for himself and care about shit, St. Jimmy asks himself if there's actually something wrong with him: "Are we demented? Or am I disturbed?", "Am I retarded or am I just overjoyed?" Because he's opened his eyes to what's really going on around him, suddenly St. Jimmy isn't "how he's supposed to be" anymore, and the song sarcastically asks if maybe he should be in therapy, society's solution to the 'problem' of anyone who's not wildly happy to spend their life on the couch, watching Fox and eating McDonald's.
"Tales From Another Broken Home" is the last part of the song. St. Jimmy has finally decided to stage a prison-break from the gulag of the mind that is Jingletown, U.S.A. Maybe the most significant verse in the whole song is,
To live and not to breathe,
Is to die in tragedy,
To run, to run away,
To find what you believe,
And I leave behind,
This hurricane of fucking lies,
I lost my faith to this,
This town that don't exist
St. Jimmy realized that living and not breathing, that is, not doing what makes us human, which is caring enough to DO something about our shitty lives, is a disastrous mockery of existence. So he has to get out and discover who he really is and what actually matters to him.
The way this song parallels America's religion of choice and its rampant consumerism is a brutal condemnation of a way of life that was supposed to be about beauty and love but has, since the time of the ancient Romans, really always been about worshiping the almighty dollar. Some hard-liners have criticized Jesus of Suburbia as being anti-Christian, but when carefully understood, the song absolutely condemns a society that sacrifices its children for all the wrong reasons.
Having lost his faith in the big flashing neon holy trinity of corporations-government-and-the-media-amen, St. Jimmy leaves the world he's been sold out to - the supposed safety of "home" - before he loses his life, as well.
Jesus of Suburbia is an epic song that ranks up there with the likes of Bohemian Rhapsody and November Rain. Green Day borrowed elements from all over the musical map to create this piece. Like all great works, Jesus of Suburbia employs these intertextual references to connect itself with musical traditions that have been calling out of the darkness for decades, trying to get listeners to feel something important.
Green Day employs piano riffs reminiscent of November Rain to give the song an epic feeling. They also use a classic riff from Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire close to the point where the lyrics read "And I walked this line," thereby paying tribute to one of the great voices of the American blues and country music, and evoking the long-standing tradition of speaking out of the misery and depression of society's disenfranchised elements.
The lyrics also bring to mind snatches of "Jesus Christ, Super Star," Simon and Garfunkle's Sounds of Silence, and most notably, David Bowie's Buddha of Suburbia, which chants, "Down on my knees in suburbia / Down on myself in every way / Day after / Day after / Day / Day after…" going on and on and on like that as in part three of JOS. All these referents mark Jesus of Suburbia as part of a musical dynasty of rebellion and dissent. Some people think this style of composition is nothing more than copy-cat rip-offery, but the fact of the matter is that every single great writer does it.
Jesus of Suburbia is the most complex and ambitious song that Green Day has ever written. It assures "American Idiot's" position as a classic, and proves that those lazy punks from the Bay are on the way to being permanently remembered as monster rock-stars and some of the greatest chroniclers of alternative history and society that America has ever produced.
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