American Idiot

Reeling from the extreme cognitive dissonance of Trump’s first few days in office, Chad and I did the only logical thing. We went to a Green Day show.

It was a hot Cape Town summer evening. The Offspring and a fantastic South African band called Fokofpolisiekar (which in Afrikaans means exactly what it sounds like) opened. To wild applause, Billy Joe opened with The American Dream Is Killing Me and later changed the lyrics of American Idiot, shouting, “I’m not a part of the Elon agenda.” Even though I’m too old for the mosh pit, it was a night of cathartic release in the midst of mind numbingly awful week.

But when I started asking South African friends what they thought I experienced a different kind of cognitive dissonance.

While I, and all of my American friends who attended, loved Green Day’s performance, almost every South African I asked was disappointed. One even called it a “3 out of 10.” This is an admittedly small sample size, but still - I was gobsmacked.

After I got over my initial righteous indignation, I realized this might be explained by a theory I have been quietly nursing for a few years. A hypothesis, really, about karaoke in South Africa.

***

I love karaoke. 

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a terrible singer. But my head is so chock a block with song lyrics that I’m convinced it’s why my memory of pretty much everything else in my life is so terrible. And something about belting out an Aerosmith power ballad really just lights me up. I’ve done karaoke stone cold sober in the middle of the day while Chad and horrified friends looked on. I find it utterly irresistible.

There’s a great karaoke bar just up the street from our place here in Sea Point, whose proximity can be a bit dangerous if I’m not careful. When it first opened, a few of my girlfriends and I became regulars (VIP, baby!) mostly because it was always empty. We had our choice of songs, no wait and no judgement - a dream come true. Then it started to get popular and fill up, and I watched the international music selection change.

Now that the place is consistently packed, I never cease to be disappointed by the fact that it’s mostly just the crowd pleasers, all Greased Lightning and Bohemian Rhapsody. I hear how obnoxious this sounds as I type it, but I have always understood the karaoke assignment as finding the song that’s not the obvious choice. The one that you kind of forgot you knew from that live album only circulated via burned CD, but that you’re so stoked to hear now, all these years later.

I bet you’re thinking, “wow, I wouldn’t want her in charge of my party playlist,” and you might be right about that.

While there are about a zillion albums locked in the folds of my brain, the ones that came out - or, in the case of Bob Dylan, that I “discovered” - between 1992 and 1995, when I was 12-15 years old, are the ones most firmly lodged in my heart and soul. I didn’t fully realize this until my brother Nico shared this article suggesting musical tastes solidify around age 14. I basically adopted this as scientific fact the moment I read it.

Stick with me here.

Following the 14 year old music theory, South African friends or even just karaoke bar strangers in my age group who share my taste in music might love the same songs. Not so. Even if we share a love for certain bands, we often wildly disagree on their best albums. And my oblique references to back catalogue stuff, or music only performed live and passed reverently from hand to hand, usually fall on deaf ears.

I think this has something to do with apartheid. Part of it, of course, is the music bans: we know the apartheid government actively censored South African and international music that opposed the regime, including liberation struggle music from neighboring countries. As recently as 1985, when Stevie Wonder dedicated his Oscar to Mandela, the South African Broadcasting Commission briefly banned all of his music. Generally, though, by the time apartheid was ending, there were few censored songs or artists.

My admittedly shaky hypothesis is that the music gap is more about the international boycott on South Africa, which prevented most international artists complying with the boycott from performing here.

I was 14 in 1994 when Mandela was inaugurated. Like me, many of my friends here were coming of age as formal apartheid drew its last cancerous breaths, but the boycott only officially ended in 1993. Meaning in those crucial years when my brain was calcifying around Green Day’s Kerplunk and Dookie, the band wasn’t coming to South Africa to perform (as it turns out, this January 2025 show was their first ever in SA). Those earlier albums may not have even made it over here, onto the radio and into stores, until years later. Leaving so many of my South African friends unimpressed by the show where they played more songs from their earlier (mid-nineties) albums than the early-oughts American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown.

I posit that this also explains my “karaoke in SA” conundrum.

OR.

It’s just that I am the American Idiot.