A song named after a military funeral honour, released by a band already known for attacking a war, which its writer says is mostly about the damage he was doing to the people around him. David Bowie has a composer credit on it.
Here is what a 21-gun salute is, what Billie Joe Armstrong has said the song is really about, and why Bowie’s name is on the paperwork.
The Short Answer
A 21-gun salute is the honour fired for the dead. The chorus tells whoever is listening to put the weapons down and stop fighting, and Armstrong has framed it two ways: as a salute for someone who has fallen, and as a song about a person so lost in what they are doing that the only fight left is with themselves.
The Story Behind the Song
It appears as the sixteenth track on 21st Century Breakdown, Green Day’s eighth album, released in May 2009 and produced by Butch Vig. Reprise put it out as the album’s second single on May 26, on radio and download, with a CD single in July.
Like American Idiot before it, the album is built as a narrative with recurring characters, and this is its ballad. Armstrong wrote the lyrics and the band share the composition credit.
Armstrong told Q magazine in May 2009 that the song brings up the album’s themes and the salute for the fallen, done in an arena rock manner. It is one of the few times he has explained a title that directly.
Is it an anti-war song?
Partly, and that is the reading almost everyone arrives at. It came from a band whose previous album was an attack on the Bush administration, released while American forces were still in Iraq, with a title about gunfire and a chorus about laying down arms.
Armstrong has pushed back on it being only that. He has said he thinks a lot of people take the song as being about world peace, and pointed elsewhere.
What did Armstrong say it was about?
Himself, in a bad period. He told Rolling Stone that he had been living like a tortured soul, and that people in that state end up torturing everyone around them, family and friends included, while nobody understands what they are going through.
His summary of the song is a person who gets so lost in what they are doing that everything they do becomes an attempt to find their way back, maybe back to sanity. He added that sometimes you have to work out what is worth fighting for, because you might just be fighting yourself, and that the feeling of being lost runs through a lot of his writing.
That reading changes the chorus completely. Laying down your arms stops being a political instruction and becomes advice to somebody who has been at war with their own life.
Why is David Bowie credited?
Because of “All the Young Dudes.” Bowie wrote that song in 1972 and gave it to Mott the Hoople, and the resemblance between its chorus and this one was noticed immediately by reviewers at Q and Spin, both of whom made the comparison in print.
Rather than argue, the band credited him. Bowie appears alongside Green Day as a composer on the official credits, which is a rare example of a band settling that question before anyone had to ask a lawyer.
What happens in the video?
Marc Webb directed it, and it follows a couple who have robbed a bank and are holed up in a white room with the song’s lyrics written across the walls, waiting for the police outside.
The shoot-out was staged with roughly a thousand squibs, small explosive charges, embedded in the walls and furniture. The crew fired marbles from air guns to break the fish tank. The fish were swapped for rubber ones and were fine. The two actors, Josh Boswell and Lisa Stelly, came out of it bruised.
Nothing in the video is military, which has irritated some viewers who came to it through the title. The imagery is about two people whose situation has become unsurvivable, which fits Armstrong’s account of the song better than a battlefield would.
Why does it work as an arena song?
Because it was built to be sung back. Armstrong has said the song was not written for two people, it was written for about twenty thousand, and the structure shows it: a slow build, a wide chorus, and a melody pitched where a stadium can reach it.
An MTV News writer at the album preview called it a cell-phones-in-the-air anthem, which was meant as a description rather than a compliment and is accurate either way.
How does it fit the album?
21st Century Breakdown follows two characters through an America the band presents as coming apart, and this arrives late in that story as the moment where the fighting stops being worth it. The band also recorded The Who’s “A Quick One While He’s Away” during the sessions, which tells you what tradition they thought they were working in.
It became one of the most performed songs of the band’s later career, and was folded into the American Idiot stage musical.
Why it lasted
Because it holds two meanings without either one collapsing. If you hear a protest song, the words support it. If you hear a man describing his own worst year, the words support that too.
Armstrong has said he rather enjoys being misunderstood most of the time. This is the clearest case of it in his catalogue, and he built the ambiguity in.
Rock ballads travel by radio and by crowd, which means people carry them for years without ever catching the title; when that is where you are, our song lyrics search closes the gap.