Scene Report 001: Green Day in Berlin
Scene Report 001: Green Day in Berlin
Welcome to The Scene Report. Here is an introduction to a series of posts on Green Day in Berlin.
This is the Scene Report. I’m reporting the scene because I'm out here.
On June 11, 2024, a childhood prayer was answered: I was at a Green Day concert. No parents. Edible gummy. The setlist? Just Dookie and American Idiot. I took notes. What is to follow is an expansion of those notes.
This Green Day exposition is the introduction to my new column The Scene Report. I’ve created it to introduce my range that exceeds astrology. The gist is this: This is the Scene Report. I’m reporting the scene because I'm out here. And I want to share my experiences with you.
I have automatically included my Good Horoscope subscribers on the list to The Scene Report. If you would like to only receive astrology writing, and not the new stuff, I understand. I didn’t listen to any new Green Day albums after I turned 14, so I get it. That being said, rock music’s target market is teenagers, and I am hoping that you all can grow up with me. I should mention here that it’s Dookie’s Saturn return and the EU’s Saturn return. And Billie Joe Armstrong and Berlin are both Aquariuses. So come on.
What I have to say about Green Day’s performance in Berlin will be revealed to you over the course of the summer, in bite-sized installments. Ultimately, I intend to print an edition of the final text as a traditional fan zine, with proceeds going to either Berlin Legal Fund or a fund for those suffering from war crimes.
The current political climate in The United States and Germany contextualizes Green Day’s concert in Berlin in a way that has kept me toiling for ages. The text is long. Part of the editing process involves breaking it up into chapters. Soon I’ll start sending them over, one at a time.
Last weekend, a recent academic article found me: “Only Rock’n’Roll?” by Tobias Becker. It was published in an academic journal on the culture of conservatism, in the German Yearbook of Contemporary History. In the essay, Becker shows how rock music is not inherently progressive or rebellious. While the genre of rock music contains elements of rebellion, it reflects the conformity and consensus behavior of the masses (Aquila).
The contribution shows that, inasmuch as rock is rebellious at all, it can be directed against a mainstream culture which is perceived as conservative just as much as against one which is perceived as progressive. (De Gruyter Oldenbourg)
At the Green Day concert in Berlin, I remembered my childhood intuition: the aesthetic of teenage rebellion was a grift all along. Green Day and rock music, mosh pits of my youth, presented an outlet for frustration and a vague notion of rebellion, yes, but at the end of the day, it’s not about liberation, but commerce.
American Idiot was a war album released three years after 9/11. What does it mean to perform and anti-war, anti-censorship album in Berlin, in the middle of a censorship crackdown, a crisis of free speech? One day after EU elections revealed a shocking-not-shocking conservative heel spin? The whole thing felt reminiscent of the final scene of Cabaret: performers sing and dance at the Kit Kat Club in Weimar Berlin while Nazi soldiers brutalize citizens outside. A glittering image reflecting protests in Berlin happening here and now.