Wake Me Up When September Ends

"Seven years has gone so fast / Wake me up when September Ends"
- Wake Me Up When September Ends, Green Day

My guilty pleasure song du jour is Wake Me Up When September Ends. If you've never heard it before, here's a video I found on YouTube. This clip is shortened from the original, longer video.



I try to pride myself of being a fan of "good" music, and I don't know whether this Green Day song qualifies or not, but whatever, I find this song incredibly catchy. Despite what the video shows, the song is about the singer's father dying when he was a kid (as the always-reliable-Wikipedia entry will tell you), which is touching in and of itself.

Interestingly, the song seems to have taken on two other meanings for some people. Often, people hear the chorus of a song and (sometimes incorrectly) derive the meaning from the chorus or from selected lyrics (like the Beatles' "Revolution", or like Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A."). One meaning is that people connect this song with September 11. It has been seven long years since September 11, 2001 and some of the lyrics combined with the quote that I led this blog post with seem to touch on the innocence lost in our nation and in the world since then. Another meaning was the awful aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. My high school composed a montage of images from Katrina and played them everyday in homeroom for while set to this song. Just the images set to the words "wake me up when September ends" was interesting.

Since I haven't done much else other than teaching for a career, the month of September has consequently always been kind of a benchmark month, from childhood through now. For me personally, this is my 9th year as a high school teacher, and recently I have grown increasingly unsatisfied with my life as a teacher. So September and the start of autumn, in general, evokes a wide variety of feelings for me - some happy memories of being a kid, playing soccer in Teaneck, etc... to now starting each school year and having to leave the wonderful summer months behind, and remembering the innocence of childhood... some of the lyrics reach me on that level as well. Maybe I'm reading too much into the song.