I don't think you really lived through the late 90s/early 00s unless you attended some sort of gathering where someone made a video montage of pictures to "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" by Green Day. They of course didn't edit out the beginning of the song, so you had to awkwardly sit through the first few seconds where Billie Joe Armstrong messes up and says "fuck". Then you had to watch pictures of people as babies set to Billie Joe Armstrong singining abou dead skin. It was a rite of passage. Even Seinfeld used it.
So today let's watch the video for the song that helped a really unlikely band be the video montage band of the 2000s, 1997's "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" by Green Day, directed by Mark Kohr.
The video itself is a simple concept - Billie Joe Armstrong is in his apartment playing guitar, and we get various slow motion shots of people doing normal things like being in a pharmacy or driving a car. They seem to be having some sort of realization or remembering something. Each person sort of looks up and stares off into space as the shot progresses. We get young people, old people - all types of people. The other two members of Green Day, Mike Dint and Tre Cool, make appearances as these people.
"Time of Your Life" (as it was more commonly known as) was a really different track for Green Day to release, and I sometimes think it can be compared to the "Eleanor Rigby" by the Beatles in that both songs were essentially solo acoustic recordings by one member of a popular band with several people in it. They both also feature strings and in both cases putting strings on the song was the first time the band put them to use. That's about as far as I'll go with the comparison, however, for the sake of any angry Beatles fans.
This video is a pretty bold one in terms of its lack of relunctance to lean on a more concrete concept or repeat itself. When you break down the elements in the video, there really isn't any clue in this video as to what these people are thinking about or really what their emotions are. They simply are coming to some sort of thought and giving pause - it's probably a different thought for each person but we just don't know.
We, in turn, can project those thoughts onto those people, and because of the variety of people shown, we are going to probably have someone in the video that we identity with. Whether we think they are feeling regret or thinking that maybe they left the iron on is up to us. It's an interesting video for a band that up until that point was a punk band and didn't really have any ballads, let alone a ballad that would become as popular as this one did.
