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When I Come Around Song Meaning ( See Actual Lyrics)
"When I Come Around" is a love song. It's a love song for people who think that love is bullshit. Don't believe me? Try taking a trip back in time to the early 1990s…
Green Day's big breakout album, Dookie, hit the scene in 1994. Today, it can be tough to remember the early nineties. They were so blurry and angry and depressing. But think back, way back, and dare to recall that as of 1994, we were on the declining edge of the whole grunge era that had ripped the music industry so unceremoniously out of the 1980s.
Grunge was over because Kurt Cobain was dead. It had been on the down slope for a while. If Cobain had lived, it would have ended anyway as Nirvana followed bands like Pearl Jam and Sonic Youth into ever more experimental territory. However, the era officially ended with a shotgun blast, and from there, music fans began to see bands like Green Day on the scene, who were still angry and grungy (punk was one of the major influences of the grunge music scene, after all) but were a little less depressed about the whole thing.
That the guys were coming out of that era with something old (punk), something new (a sense of humor), something borrowed (grunge), and something distinctively green was obvious with the first single off Dookie, "When I Come Around."
This tune was definitely a child of grunge, but it wasn't dying like grunge. Although the singer isn't exactly depressed, he is in a state of pissed off apathy that makes him into a total jerk. The key to the emblematic nature of the song, however, is that the pissed-off jerk doesn't care that he's a jerk, and he doesn't want to, or intend to change for anybody: "I heard it all before / So don't knock down my door."
The attitude in this song perfectly represents what a lot of people were feeling at the time. Life sucked, so it was okay to be an asshole. You saw this in songs like Nirvana's "Negative Creep," ("I'm a negative creep and I'm stoned!"), and in Stone Temple Pilot's "Sex Type Thing" ("You wouldn't want me have to hurt you too, hurt you too?")
The world seemed so fucked up that it was impossible to care about anything without getting hurt. It was better to be safely insulated as a self-proclaimed asshole than to have to risk anything personal out there in the big bad world. So smart people just got all "whatever," and "fuck everything."
This was not a good era for relationships. All our generations' home lives ever taught us was that falling in love and getting married meant screaming and fighting and hating. It was hard to even start to have good relationships with people, because even though it was cool to be depressed, it more of an angry loner sort of depression than the unlucky-in-love type.
The story in "When I Come Around" is about a couple in a fight. Some people say that it's about a fight that Billie Joe had with Adrienne. Whatever the truth of the matter, its definitely about the singer being sick of fighting with the object of his questionable affections, so he bails out (ed. note: there are no genders mentioned in the song, and although we fully support sexual ambiguity, the singer will henceforth be referred to as a "he" and the subject will be referred to as a "her."
As in the "When I Come Around" video, the singer is walking around his neighborhood: "I heard you crying loud, / All the way across town / You've been searching for that someone, / And it's me out on the prowl / As you sit around feeling sorry for yourself." The singer can sense his girlfriend's misery, but he is not willing to cave in and go running to her.
The irony of the song is that the guy can't escape his girlfriend's feelings of sadness and anger, but he's also not willing to give up on being an apathetic jerk: "I'm a loser and a user so I don't need no accuser / To try and slag me down because I know you're right." So basically, it's a song about a guy who insists on not giving a shit, even though he clearly does.
He's not telling the girl he hates her, or that she should fuck off forever. In fact, he's pissed off that she might be breaking up with him: "So looks like you been thinking about ditching me." All he's saying is that he's too fucked up by his own problems to make an effort. He can only offer her the fact that he will "come around," just like he always does.
"No time to search the world around / Cause you know where I'll be found / When I come around." This chorus is the perfect expression of the total teenage apathy you could find anywhere in the 1990s. It's the response of any and all jaded fuck-ups out there who encounter someone trying to care about them. "Yeah, yeah, I'll be around whenever." No promises, no swearing of eternal devotion, just the general feeling that if he wants to see her, he will let her find him.
Being the helpless jerk that he is, the guy tells her, "You may find out that your self-doubt means nothing / Was ever there / You can't go forcing something / If it's just not right." For many people, this is the best line in the song, because it says it all when it comes to relationships.
"When I Come Around" defines the relationships kids were having in the 1990s. It's like, we can hang out, and that will stay cool for as long as you stay cool. After that, I just won't be around anymore, and that will be it. However, of course, under all the carefully studied indifference, there is a lot of caring, probably too much caring, which is why it cannot be exposed. If all the pain of caring ever actually got out, it would cause some serious Columbine shit.
But what exactly is coming around, all you clueless kids out there in la-la land might ask. Is it coming around to a certain idea? Or coming around to not being made anymore after a fight? Or just coming around the places you're likely to be whenever you're there?
To answer this question, you might want to check out the video for "When I Come Around." In it, people are watching other people go about their daily routines. The video shows us a cycle in which the first watcher is ultimately being observed by the last person in the chain of people that are being watched.
And so we see how lives are randomly interconnected, and how they bump up against each other all the time in ways that seem strange, but that do form a pattern. That's why in this song, "coming around" refers to all of the above. That's how people come together in this life, by being in the same spot, by agreeing to hang out for a bit, and by being of the same mind.
Lives connect, but remember, this is the early 1990s, you can't really expect much out of human relationships. Romance is dead. It's weird if your parents aren't divorced. Hell, maybe they were never married. Maybe you never even knew your dad or your mom. So how are you supposed to get all lovey-dovey and serious when you know that love is bullshit and relationships are more painful than soothing?
Today, love is experiencing a slight recovery. We have figured out (somewhat) how to exist in the fucked-up-ness of modern life, but in the 1990s, "When I Come Around" was really the perfect relationship song. It said everything that needed to be said about love and hooking up. You're fucked up, I'm fucked up, if we're together all the time we're just going to fight. I like you but all I can really offer is that I'll see you when I come around.
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