Boulevard of Broken Dreams

A slight change of plans, I will still talk about pop culture nostalgia next time, I promise. In my previous column I focused on how nostalgia is one of the underlying forces of American politics over the last 50 years. My goal was to try to explain the forces that have been in motion for my Millennial cohorts and younger people, so try to show that there is an arc to history, but it isn’t always a smooth one, with the competing forces of progress and nostalgia pushing and pulling each other along for decades. Reading Charlie Wells’ book, What Happened to Millennials, I was struck by a section early on (pg. 7) where Wells discusses when Millennials were portrayed as the most nostalgic generation ever. Wells posits this more as a symptom of timing with the rise of social media than anything else. “We aren't some sad, mournful group of people; we were coping with a transition as any other generation might, it's just that the internet made it more visible,” he writes. But I do think it is a topic worth exploring as part of this series, because I think Wells himself repeatedly uses nostalgia to better connect with his audience. 

My first semester of college was defined by two albums, both released the month I started school. The first was A Hangover You Don’t Deserve by the band Bowling for Soup, released September 14, 2004, featuring their cover of “1985,” and the second was Green Day’s American Idiot, released on the following Tuesday (back when music was released on Tuesdays and not Friday). Both bands were led by men born within a month of each other in 1972, making them classic Gen Xers, but both truly speak to me and a lot of other Millennials. 

“1985” is of course, a nostalgic song written by Gen Xers about a time when they were teenagers, about a woman named Debbie who has grown up and no longer recognizes the pop culture of 2004, with her high school aged kids (Millennials), calling her uncool because she is fixated on the past, with the catchy pop punk chorus calling out “Springsteen, Madonna/Way before Nirvana/There was U2 and Blondie/And music still on MTV.” Most Millennials I knew in 2004 liked most of those acts, and it was a cute way to poke fun of ourselves. 

American Idiot, the following week, was also kind of a nostalgia play.  The band’s previous album Warning, had been a disappointment upon its release in 2000, likely due to a combination of two factors. One, Green Day’s 1997 album Nimrod had a huge crossover hit “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” and Warning leaked on Napster 3 weeks before release. Before American Idiot, my most recent thoughts about Green Day was buying their greatest hits album in the fall of 2001, a marker that they were unlikely to become a vital band in my life again, already moving into a nostalgia act. In fact, I have recently talked about this with some Millennials older than me, and for many of those who followed their love of Green Day into punk music, American Idiot is either the first Green Day album they skipped or the last one they bought. So to have Green Day come out with a highly political punk rock opera was unexpected. Even more unexpected is that it was also good. Very good. American Idiot merges themes of teenage loneliness and isolation (a frequent topic for Green Day songs), with center left politics, with lyrics calling out dysfunction, the Bush administration, the War on Terror, and the rise of corporate consolidation. While only the title track and “Holiday” are directly political, the entire album speaks to the dissatisfied teens and young adults. 

Both of these resonated with a large swath of my generational cohorts because of how much our adult lives differed from what was promised in our childhoods. Charlie Wells rightly points to the events of September 11, 2001 as the Millennial coming-of-age, something akin to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the death of teacher and astronaut Christa McAuliffe in the Challenger disaster, or the Parkland high school shooting in 2018. These events were all tragedies that took center stage in mass media, and while all very different from each other, only 9/11 launched a war that, according to Brown University’s 2023 Costs of War report, was the cause of death for an estimated 7,052 US military combatants, over 8,100 US military contractors, and more than 14,800 US-allied coalition troops, with the worldwide death toll around 4.5 million people total, and cost about $8 trillion dollars (it would take one person working the average 2023 average American wage 120 million years to pay for the War on Terror. They would have had to start working on that wage 60 million years before the existence of Tyrannosaurus Rex). So even in 2004, Millennials were experiencing a less bright future than the post-Soviet collapse promised by luminaries like Francis Fukuyama and Thomas L. Friedman, as well as the Dotcom boom/bubble of 1995-2000. Since then, Millennials have experienced such dramatic upheavals as the Great Recession, the rise of the far right in the West, a global pandemic, at least 10 genocides, and more mass shootings in the United States than it is possible to count.

So why wouldn’t Millennials be nostalgic for our lives pre-Y2K? Why so many of us are Disney adults, video game players, have no kids, do not own a home, and feel like our careers never really started? As I write this, I am still without full time work after being laid off over a year ago, and it feels like I can only get hired for the same kind of work I could have gotten while still attending high school, the biggest requirement being that I am over 18 and can show up on time. At this point, it feels like any major disaster could wipe out everything I’ve worked for, and I know a lot of my cohorts feel the same. So it is easy to hold onto the stuff that made us happy as kids, because it feels like that is the most stable thing in our lives. I have higher expectations for Toy Story 5 than I do for the economy. So far, Toy Story has yet to really disappoint me. 

I think it would be difficult to find people who disagree that we were better off in 1985 or 2004 than we are in 2026. This kind of nostalgia remains relevant, and you can either choose to fully escape into it, or use it to remind yourself that there can be new good things. While I still await this moment’s American Idiot (maybe it is Andor season 2, maybe it is One Battle After Another, it is harder to tell with such a lack of monoculture today), I will continue to look forward, in spite of how easy it would be to escape in to rewatching shows that started 20 years ago or longer. Even if it’s a lonely road, it’s “the only one that I have ever known.” 

▶ Podcast in my ears: Blank Check

▶ Current reads: Outlaw Planet by M.R. Carey, Absolute Wonder Woman by Kelly Thompson and Hayden Sherman

▶ Album on repeat: American Idiot

▶ Find me: https://linktr.ee/silberwhatever