"Longview" is a song by the American band Green Day that was released as a single on February 1, 1994.
This song appears in the album "Dookie", memorable third musical plate of this band that was a musical influence for other groups linked to the commercial Punk-Pop. An album that may sound simple, and even without so much production hand, but that has an interesting power that has its representativeness from the beginning of the first track until the end of the last piece. Thanks to the brutal and surprising success of this album, Green Day started their way to worldwide stardom in the best possible way.
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One of the most brutal episodes of this discón, is when a very acute and at the same time representative thematic of the North American youth of the 90's appears: The boredom and the feeling of being a loser in front of the life. That song is "Longview", whose title was based on the name of a town where the members had their best friends, and was credited to Mr. Billie Joe Armstrong. "I was in the middle of a creative rut and at the same time sleeping on any couch, with no home and no place to go. This is a song about that, about not feeling pathetic or thinking about loneliness" the author of this song would mention in an interview with the VH1 network.
It was more than clear, this song talks about the extreme boredom. Its lyrics refer to several intense episodes, such as sitting at home all day without doing anything at all. It even makes reference to drugs, especially marijuana, which was no longer even an escape route to fun, but appeared as a habit of the everyday and flatness of his life.
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Regarding the latter, in relation to drugs, it is said that the mythical bass solo of the intro was interpreted by Mike Dirnt under the effects of LSD. This would be confirmed years later and even the bassist declared that it was written on an LSD "walk" with Armstrong in order to remember what things they did under those effects. Unfortunately, the next day when the effects of the acids had worn off, the bassist didn't even know the notes of the bass riff he had created. "When Billie told me I had to do something remarkable on "Longview," I knew that on acid it was going to be very difficult. I stood against the wall with my bass and came up with an idea. Then I said, 'Bill, listen to this, isn't this the weirdest thing you've ever heard? "After that, it took me a long time to get to play it live, but it made a lot of sense when I was stoned," Mike Dirnt would point out to Rolling Stone in 1995.
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That's how "Longview" became the band's first single to be released on a major label, Reprise Records, and with it the band's emergence from musical anonymity. Although the song was not a big hit, as "Basket Case" would later become, it did help the band to take off and start to be played little by little on the radio.