#and there are FOURTEEN of them plus blue beetle which could be good

[arunneronthird]

"honestly one of the best dceu movies out there" is not the compliment u think it is

[oneweekoneband]

GUEST POST: Alice Lesperance on “Coming Clean”

There are songs that mean something to you. There are songs that mean...something, to you. There are songs that feel important, significant, crucial to you, and sometimes you don’t even know why. There are songs that mean something to you before you can even really grasp what that something might be.

In 1999, I was eight years old. I was living in a small town in Alabama, where it’s hot and sticky almost always but the sweet tea is cold and saccharine. I had a pair of little sparkly jelly shoes, the kinds with a tiny heel and the straps going all across my toes. My parents drove a white Volkswagen Beetle, a 1970s original, that didn’t have air conditioning. In my small town there were two places to buy music: FYE (which, I was amazed to find out a few years ago, still exists) and Walmart. I used to beg my mom to drive me to FYE when she picked me up from school; I would fumble through the shelves with my little kid hands while she shopped the meagre plus size section next door at the JC Penney’s. At that time, FYE still had listening rooms and headphones to sample the music before you bought it. On this one particular day, it was summer - the heat was at its peak at a very humid 103 degrees - and my dad had just bought me a Playstation. Now, the original Playstation came out in 1994. We had never gotten one because I was a Nintendo girl through and through - and to this day, though I still have that same Playstation, the only games I play are Zelda and Donkey Kong. But we bought the Playstation for one exciting reason: it could play CDs. I know! This was very exciting technology. You would put the CD in there, and a blue screen would come up on your TV, with the album title and the track numbers. I remember the track numbers were in colored bubbles that vaguely looked 3D.

So on that day, that stupidly hot day, in 1999 at the FYE in Alabama, my mom told me I could pick out two CDs. Now, nearly twenty years later, I can tell you pretty confidently that the choices I made on that day are more or less completely sufficient in summing up who I am as a person: the first choice, ...Baby One More Time, released that year, and Dookie, released the same year as the used Playstation we had just bought.

This isn’t an essay about Britney Spears or ...Baby One More Time, so I won’t delve into the significance of that album, but I will say that I remember being very fascinated by Britney’s pose on the front cover - how did she get her legs to bend like that? But anyway. Dookie. I’m not even here to talk about the album, I’m here to talk about a song.

In 1995, the year after Dookie was released, Billie Joe Armstrong came out as bisexual in an issue of The Advocate. He has since, I am told, retracted that statement and of course our understanding of our own sexualities and identities are changing all the time and who I am to begrudge him that? But that interview in The Advocate was so crucial, so important to me. I didn’t read it in 1995 or even 1999, of course. Do you know where you can buy The Advocate in small town Alabama? Literally nowhere. And even if you could, I wouldn’t have been caught dead with it when I was eight, nine, or fourteen years old. I read this interview years and years later, when I was 16 or 17, posted on a now-defunct LiveJournal community. What you need to know about this interview is that Green Day was touring with Pansy Division, and in the middle of Pansy Division’s set at one particular show, people in the audience started hurling bottles and homophobic slurs. Here are the most relevant bits:

“I think Pansy Division is the kind of band that saves people’s lives,” Armstrong says matter-of-factly. “They’re catchy, and they’re really educational. They’re honest about their sexuality, and that saves lives.” ...Armstrong’s response was to stop his band’s show in the middle of a set and address the audience. “You’re all fucking pathetic,” he told them. “There you were, three songs into their set, really enjoying them. And then you figured out from their lyrical content that they’re gay, and now you’re afraid of them. And that’s what it is, you know. You’re afraid of them. Well, I hope you all know that Pansy Division is the future of rock ’n’ roll.”

Further on down in the interview, he talks about his own experiences with sexual identity:

“I’ve gotten letters because I wrote this song on Dookie called “Coming Clean”, about coming out.”

Like I said, I didn’t read this interview until long, long after I heard “Coming Clean”. The truth is, I don’t think I would have ever realized what the song was about, until someone told me or I read that Advocate interview. But after well-loved favorites like “Basket Case” and “Longview”, “Coming Clean” was my favorite Green Day song from Dookie.

And, to return to the scene, I remember sitting in my purple Britney Spears inflatable chair with the grey plastic Playstation controller in my hand, going to bubble #11 and feeling like this song was good, and it was angry and it means something to me.  I was 17 when I read Billie Joe talk about coming out of the closet, coming clean, and I had just realized that I really wanted to kiss girls (”Seventeen and strung out on confusion”). This was the time when I would sit in my room late at night after my parents went to sleep and I would watch literally whatever was on LOGO at the time - a channel I don’t think my parents knew we had - and I would slouch over gay fan fiction on my old PC desktop. I would revisit Dookie, and “Coming Clean” and it was still so good and so angry; Now, I’m 26 living in Brooklyn with my girlfriend writing this essay, listening to “Coming Clean” and it (still/always) means something to me.

Alice Lesperance lives in Brooklyn with her girlfriend and their cat. She writes about music, films, dead media and dead women. She’s written for The Youngist, Autostraddle, and Scalawag, and is the founder/editor-in-chief of Shakespeare and Punk. Find her on tumblr at @shakespeareandpunk.