Longview
by Green Day
- 144
- BPM
- Bb minor
- Key
- 3A
- Camelot
- 39
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
Mike Dirnt wrote the bass line that opens "Longview" one night while high on LSD. The song takes its name from Longview, Washington, where the band first played it in the spring of 1992. Their friend and roadie Kaz Hope suggested the title. They had planned that tour with a punk booking guide, and it listed the Cafe Forum, the Longview venue where they played.
The lyrics describe a day of sitting around the house with nothing to do. Billie Joe Armstrong later felt guilty about the line "My mother says to get a job, but she don't like the one she's got", because his mother, a waitress, liked her work and kept serving diners long after her son could pay for her lifestyle.
Radio in the United States received it on February 1, 1994, and a physical single followed on May 23. It was the band's first single to top the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. Mark Kohr directed the video, set in a dim basement of a broken-down house in Oakland where the band used to live. Armstrong sits on a couch watching television and finally tears it apart, feathers flying. MTV played it heavily, and it was nominated for three MTV Video Music Awards in 1994.
Longview runs at 144 BPM, the tempo of dubstep and trap counted in half time, and hardstyle. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.67 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 417 ms. It is in Bb minor, Camelot 3A, which shares its notes with Db major and mixes cleanly with Eb minor and F minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.