Modern Rock No. 1s: Green Day and "Longview"
Green Day brings punk rock to the mainstream with "Longview," a song about teenage malaise, a never-ending struggle between overcoming boredom while lacking the ambition to try
Green Day - “Longview”
Weeks atop the Billboard Modern Rock chart: 1 week (June 11, 1994)
Previous Modern Rock #1 hit: Live and “Selling The Drama”
Billboard Hot 100 chart toppers during this time:
All-4-One - “I Swear” (4 total weeks beginning 5/21/94)
Make no mistake about it: It is going to be very difficult to be “objective” in my reviews of certain bands going forward. My teenage years, the time in everyone’s life when music becomes imprinted on their very souls, were largely influenced by many of the bands and songs that will be featured here in the coming weeks and months.
And, in fairness, they’ll be the bands and songs that are imprinted on many of your souls as well. After all, when these songs were released, they no longer belonged to just the underground few who looked for something different (alternative) from the mainstream. As of mid 1994, a lot of these songs were mainstream, making waves on both alternative rock and pop radio. If you were between the ages of 10 and 30 during the mid 1990s, odds are good these songs were a big part of your musical experience, even if you weren’t an “alt rock” fan.
Green Day is on the Mount Rushmore of ‘90s alternative bands that shaped and influenced both my musical palette and, indeed, parts of my life. They wrote songs about teenage frustrations, the perils and pitfalls of relationships and friendships, growing up, becoming political, and being responsible while at the same time not giving a fuck about anything. Their catalog is the lived experience of humanity, jumbled into sets of two- or three-minute songs. Like life itself, the band’s catalog can be pulse-pounding and frenetic at times, muted and reflective in others. They spoke to me on a level that maybe didn’t impact my day-to-day existence, but at the very least, their songs gave me fodder to consider everyone else’s lived existence.
Oh, and in 2021, they changed my life.
It’s interesting because I think the themes of many of their songs transcend generations. I’d argue that my own teenage kids, if they’d take a moment to listen to dad’s old music, might find something to take out of songs like Green Day’s “Longview,” the band’s first single off their multi-platinum album Dookie and the first of three Modern Rock Tracks #1 hits spawned from the album.
My hope, of course, is that they’re not finding inspiration by smoking, one of many things Billie Joe Armstrong points to in the song that keeps him locked in a prison of his own making. But he does speak to a larger issue that plagues a good number of kids in their teens: What should motivate me to move forward with life?
It’s fascinating to think about this as a parent and a grown adult. As I reflect on my life and the choices I made, I could easily sit back with 30 years of hindsight and say I always did everything in my power to advance myself, to find jobs, to have my entire future mapped out. The reality is, though, that I really didn’t do a lot of things for myself as a teenager. My parents cleaned the house and did the laundry, cooked the meals and drove me from place to place. They tried to motivate me to get a job in my teenage years, and when I did, I found plenty of excuses to call off or get out of it. I did my homework and got good grades, but admittedly did that while doing the bare minimum to get by.
And why should teenagers bother getting a job? It sounds awful.
Call me pathetic, call me what you will (We will)
My mother says to get a job
But she don't like the one she's got
So teenagers are stuck indoors with nothing but the same old things to do. In the ‘90s, when Green Day was inspired to write the song, it was channel surfing on cable TV or waiting for the phone (that was plugged into the wall) to ring so you could make plans to do something. I personally sat around and watched the tube, changing the channels for an hour or two and finding nothing. I waited for the phone to ring, and it didn’t.
These days, it’s the same problems, but with different devices. In fact, in most cases, the TV and the phone are likely the same device, and even with infinitely more things to peruse and do to make the time pass, it can still feel like each day is no different than the last. And with the digital world overtaking so much of our kids’ day-to-day activities, that feeling of isolation and malaise is probably even worse now. Trying to imagine teenage Green Day writing “Longview” in 2025 would be such a wild experience, sitting around and watching for Discord notifications while idly chatting with AI and listening to nothing in particular even though you have literally billions of songs and shows at your fingertips.
Regardless of the realities of the time period, “Longview” is ultimately a song about passing the time by getting high, which was one of the real-life inspirations for the song, according to Armstrong and bassist Mike Dirnt. In a 2005 interview with Guitar Legends magazine, Armstrong laid out the context for the song:
“I guess it was just living in the suburbs in a sort of shit town where you can’t even pull in a good radio station. I was living in Rodeo, California, about 20 minutes outside of Oakland. There was nothing to do there, and it was a real boring place.”
What’s remarkable is how energizing “Longview” is when the subject matter is exactly the opposite, and it was that untapped potential energy that exploded in a kinetic frenzy once U.S. audiences became wholly invested in the post-grunge movement. I talked a bit about post-grunge when I reviewed Live’s first MRT chart topper, “Selling The Drama,” but it will merit additional review as I go through this and upcoming #1 hit songs.
“Post-grunge” took on many forms in the mid 1990s. Live’s “Selling The Drama” was more polished grunge with acoustic flourishes, something tangential to Nirvana but sonically similar. Bands like Soul Asylum and Gin Blossoms were the earliest acts to push post-grunge in that direction.
I’ve talked a bit about Nine Inch Nails and “Closer,” a song that peaked in the top 20 of the Modern Rock charts and spawned another branch of post-grunge: industrial rock. This emergence would not only catapult NIN to the mainstream, but would bear fruit for acts like Tool, Rammstein, and others of that ilk, throughout the ‘90s.
Green Day was the first to introduce punk rock to the zeitgeist. Admittedly, punk rock existed in many forms dating back to the 1970s, but by its very nature resisted (both intentionally and unintentionally) any push to the mainstream. Punk’s aesthetic always revolved around ignoring the world, marching to its own beat, and giving a hearty middle finger to the establishment in whatever way it could, usually loudly and unintelligibly.
What happens, though, when punk rock adequately and intentionally describes the mainstream? That’s the trap that befell Green Day as they emerged from the underground to become one of the champions of mainstream punk and pop-punk. It’s hard to stay underground when the things you’re singing about and rising up against mirror the experiences of the majority of your potential audience.
Pop Matters reflected on Green Day’s mid-1990s emergence when it reviewed the band’s greatest hits album in 2001, especially related to songs like “Longview”:
“This unknown band called Green Day playing this tense, fast, sloppy song that was unlike even the wasted poetry of grunge. They were ugly, snarling kids with zits glaring in the harsh light of the video. The singer’s nasal whine was unmistakably a throwback to some of the old records the college station played when waxing nostalgic. They were unmistakably punk and it was bizarrely exciting.”
Armstrong summed it up best in an interview with VH1, recounted on this video from Elias Whitfield:
"I was just in a creative rut. I was in-between houses sleeping on people's couches. It's a song about trying not to feel pathetic and lonely. I don't think that masturbation was really seen from the point of view that I was looking at it. In songs like 'Turning Japanese' it always seemed more about people pulling a pud or something. I was coming from a lonely guy's perspective: No girlfriend, no life, complete loser."
You could call it luck, the positioning of Green Day being in the right place at the right time, but whatever cosmic forces brought “Longview” into the mainstream in 1994, it clicked with audiences and exploded. The video was omnipresent on MTV and it became an airplay juggernaut, peaking at #1 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart for one week and #36 on the Billboard Radio Songs chart, which tracks songs played across all genres of radio. That it became a top-40 hit across all genres is remarkable, especially given the pointed lyrics, frequent language edits, and overall theme of malaise and indifference.
The song itself is solid, beginning with a great bassline Dirnt admits was constructed initially while he was high on LSD. The back and forth between Armstrong reviewing the malaise of his current situation through the verses (potential energy) and the explosion of wanting to get out of that situation in the refrain and bridge (kinetic energy) works wonderfully well in this track. You feel the frustration while also respect and identify with the relative indifference toward bettering the situation.
While I love this song a lot, it’s arguably not the best song on Dookie, and I’ll be considering at least two others going forward that are, in my opinion, musically better than “Longview.” But while I may not hold it in the highest of high esteems on Dookie, “Longview” is still a banger from start to finish, and what it lacks in being a perfect 10 musically, it makes up for with a window into the soul of so many teenagers who want so badly to be doing something else, but lack the wherewithal to make it happen for themselves.
Rating: 8/10
Chart Check
Other notable MRT chart songs from this time period
This week on “Chart Check,” Beavis & Butt-Head “review” Green Day’s chart-topping hit, STP climbs back into the top 10, Tori Amos sings about cornflakes (I guess?), the Gin Blossoms fall away, and Spin Doctors release a song I’m 100 percent certain I’ve never heard.
“Longview” by Green Day, as “reviewed” by Beavis & Butt-Head:
There’s not much of a review to talk about here, but it was comical to watch Beavis struggle with Butt-Head’s interpretation of having “a TV inside of a TV.” They really did like the part of the video that involved couch destruction, though, and that alone is worth a hearty chuckle or two.
“Big Empty” by Stone Temple Pilots (#7):
Originally released on the soundtrack to The Crow, “Big Empty” was included on the band’s Purple album and quickly found a #7 peak on the Modern Rock Tracks chart in the early summer of 1994. The song has a slow, methodical vibe comparable to the band’s earlier hit “Creep,” and stands out among the harder-edged songs released on the band’s first two albums.
“Cornflake Girl” by Tori Amos (#12):
Former Modern Rock Tracks #1 artist Tori Amos cracks the top 15 one more time with “Cornflake Girl,” a song that must have featured more prominently on my radio stations of choice in the mid 1990s than “God” did, as it’s the one I remember hearing first from her back catalog. It’s a pretty good track, another that I’ve since added to a variety of 1990s playlists I’ve created over the years. It peaked at #12 behind Green Day and remains one of her biggest overall hits.
“Until I Fall Away” by Gin Blossoms (#13):
Former Modern Rock Tracks #1 artist Gin Blossoms get back into the top 15 with “Until I Fall Away,” another song built from the same jangle-rock, grunge-adjacent formula that worked for it’s chart-topping hit “Found Out About You.” This one lacks the biting edge that “Found Out” had, but it still became a staple on both alternative rock and mainstream radio stations. Though it was never released as a commercial single and thus was ineligible to chart on the Hot 100, it peaked at #13 on both the MRT chart and the Pop Airplay chart, signifying the band’s crossover viability and success.
“Cleopatra’s Cat” by Spin Doctors (#22):
Spin Doctors found paydirt early in the 1990s with two mainstream pop hits: “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” and “Two Princes,” both of which charted in the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100. It’s interesting that neither song charted on the Modern Rock Tracks chart, as they’re both reasonably close to several pop-adjacent rock songs that were popular at the time. Whatever the reason, Spin Doctors finally made a brief splash on the MRT chart with “Cleopatra’s Cat,” a song I swear I’ve never heard before typing this paragraph. It’s not bad, either. I could see why this never made it to pop radio given the vastly different vibe it presents from their Pocket Full of Kryptonite singles, but it was neat to see them pop up on the alternative charts. “Cleopatra’s Cat” peaked at #22 on the MRT chart, one of two singles to chart there before the band left the chart limelight for good.