9/10/24 Dispatch: On Green Day's 'Bobby Sox'
In which Billie Joe Armstrong proves his bicon bonafides once again.
Since we started off with a bang(er) last week, I thought I’d continue the tradition by sharing another favorite tune: Bobby Sox by pop-punk outfit Green Day. I’m not a fan of the genre historically, nor can I un-hear the Weezer influence on this number, but I’m drawn to the song regardless for the clever lyrics and title. Let’s break it down.
On first listen, as least for a bisexual such as myself, the song seems to be a switch-hitter anthem. I take it as a plea to anyone who’s listening; a dating profile that offers suggestions for what to do on said date. Movies for the girls; a slightly more goth agenda of cemetery marriage for the boys. Who’s interested?
But there are other ways to hear this song. Perhaps the lover is nonbinary, capable of inhabiting both genders at once. We’ve still got the plea, the proposal – do you wanna? might you? – but this isn’t for any old stranger; this is for someone specifically trans. They can be Billie Joe’s boyfriend or girlfriend; they can switch off at random. (After the opening verses, we move from boyfriend to girlfriend several more times throughout the song.) And they can be more (or less) than a paramour – they can be a “friend,” a “world.”
Or, and Billie Joe has confirmed this, the song could be a hetero duet: a boy and a girl trading verses, each asking the other to be theirs. I like the egalitarian implication, but this interpretation appeals to me less – why settle for mutuality when you could have queer longing? After all, Billie Joe’s question is never answered, only left hanging; similarly, despite the perspective switch, it’s only Billie Joe’s voice in our ears.
Which brings me to the question of the listener: Is Billie Joe asking us to be his girlfriend and/or boyfriend? A form of queerbaiting taken to its hilt – no longer using queerness to pique the listener’s interest in his music, but rather turning the listener themself into the object of said music? Making us – implicating us, if you’re a homophobe – into the song’s inamorato/a? Are we who all the love songs are about? Possibly, but only if you take the title (Bobby Sox) to be a concept, not a person.
Personally, I do just that. Now, I don’t think Billie Joe is singing to me – I prefer to think of him as bisexual, not delusional – but I do believe that Bobby Sox is not a name in the style of Bobby Jean but rather a vaguely genius encapsulation of the song’s ethos. A title that isn’t titular, I suppose – a label akin to those we slap on abstract art or poems.
There’s a lot going on with this title; the lifting it’s doing is heavy heavy. Bobby is a boy’s name (though if we’re going by the Springsteen track as our example, I should mention that that song’s subject is likely, but not definitively1, a woman: B. Jean) – but bobby socks are a feminine clothing item2.
Further, “sox” connotes the baseball teams (white, red), which in turn connotes the euphemism of batting for a certain (or both!) team(s). Bobby sox, then = queer yes, and. (Also, if we’re being persnickety, the ‘x’ at the end of ‘socks’ could refer to the tendency among a certain breed of queer to rebrand folks as folx… but given the song’s aforementioned switch-hitting sentiments, I prefer to think the x was placed there for the baseball allusion alone.)
Going back to Springsteen for a second – though the track is much more indebted to the Blue Album than to the Boss, I like to think the name is no accident. Much has been made of the gender ambiguity of Bobby Jean, and if Billie is the bisexual he’s claimed at various junctures to be, then it seems likely he’d have a vested interest in settling the matter once and for all. Bobby Sox, then, is the queer rejoinder to Bobby Jean, cementing the older song’s status as avowedly homo. It’s a beautiful artistic endeavor… even if it only exists as such in my head.
But on to the lyrics of Bobby Sox.
Do you wanna be my girlfriend?
I’ll take you to a movie that we’ve already seen
Or sit at home and watch reruns
There’s no other place I wanna be
Oh, this is such a good song about love. Yes, there are hints of this generation’s disturbing tendency to stay indoors (a la “netflix and chill”) rather than enter into the unpredictability of public life, but it’s also a sweet and simple portrait of domestic bliss: In Billie Joe’s world, love is boredom unpunished. All we’re doing is watching reruns (later, we’re driving each other crazy and boring each other to death), but there’s no place we’d rather be. Desire should fail in these conditions, or at least seriously wane, but instead the song gives way to screaming: Do you wanna Do you wanna Do you wanna. And besides, Billie Joe has said that he wrote it for his wife – to whom he’s been married for a full 30 years. Imagine wanting to ask that question three decades out of the height of your honeymoon phase? Love in the queer world of Bobby Sox is quality time with one’s partner, one’s bobby soxer; it’s making up activities – that cemetery marriage3 sounds as convivial as it does intense – for the fun of it, the unfettered freedom.
And love, or queer love at least, is teendom: Watching reruns and using the term “boy/girlfriend” are the purview of adolescents, which isn’t to say juvenile, merely unspoiled. Not innocent, either – show me someone hornier than a teenager in a relationship – but pure, or at least, hard won. (There are dead friends in this song, after all!) And hell, pop punk is itself a proudly adolescent genre… which has been the reason I’ve not found much pleasure in it – often the insights are at the level of a sixteen-year-old’s – but which is the reason this song lands the punch it does. We’re young and in love, even though, like Billie, we’re 52 (or, like me, 31). It’s true – I’ve been with my partner seven years and I still see them as “my world, yeah.” The world may be larger than a teenager’s – but it’s also the size of a three-minute tune, a pair of frilly white socks, a question answered with a (what else!) kiss. Yes!
The song (intentionally?) eschews pronouns
Traditionally frilled and white, the very picture of teen femininity