Numerous people today have either listened to or used the song “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” by Green Day as a metaphor representing the closure of a certain event. This popular punk song is a perfect example of Stuart Hall’s “Encoding, Decoding” theory. The most common use of this song would be during the time of a graduation or as a soundtrack to a slideshow of pictures demonstrating a timeline of the past. Many people interpret this song as something that represents the offering of best wishes for the future. However, the intention of Billie Joe Armstrong, the lead singer for Green Day, was slightly different. After breaking up with his girlfriend who moved to Ecuador, he wrote this song out of anger towards her.
Based on the active audience theory developed by Stuart Hall, it has become more clear how “Good Riddance” is a good example demonstrating the disparity between the process by which the song is constructed by the producer and that by which the audience understands and interprets it. In a song that is commonly misinterpreted like this one, we are able to understand what Hall means when he establishes that this type of circumstance arises “from the lack of equivalence between the two sides in the communicative exchange.”
Despite Armstrong creating this piece with rather negative and personal intentions, it was not expected that the song would become popular due to its contrast with respect to all the other songs released by Green Day. When the song became well liked, it was surprising at first but not shocking that the audience “decoded” its meaning in a completely different manner. Without knowing the background information that was used when writing this song, one could interpret the lyrics “It’s something unpredictable, but in the end is right I hope you had the time of your life” as a literal implication for the appreciation of a past event.
Out of the three positions from which to decode something, the oppositional position is the most applicable to this example. Hall stated that they would “detotalize the message in the preferred code in order to retotalize the message within some alternative framework of reference.” In other words, the audience interprets the piece in a way that they prefer to understand it and ultimately continue to understand it based on a different viewpoint. Since the majority of the audience was not aware of the background information leading up to the lyrics of the song, the audience would naturally choose to decode its meaning using their own knowledge and apply it to themselves. In fact, this process of decoding would apply to almost any other song where the writer did not explicitly state their intentions in a public manner.