Song meaning

Brett: "21st Century Digital Boy is just a song about contemporary young people who really grow up with so much technology and they never really have a chance to experience the richness of what culture has to offer because they don't really ever take up reading and so on."^[1]

It is about drugs and about Brett's family (he had rich parents who spoiled him so it's kind of autobiographical) and was inspired by Hetson's comments on Nintendo.

Inspirations

The last part of the song has been partially taken from the song "21st Century Schizoid Man" by King Crimson. This was also mentioned in the liner notes of Against The Grain: "Outro lyrics of 'Digital Boy' stolen from King Crimson 'Schizoid Man'."

21st Century (Digital Boy) also shows some resemblance to the song "American Society" by Eddie and The Subtitles.

Jay: "(...) the song is pretty "buried" in the track listing of Against The Grain (#13 out of 17). It wasn't that we thought it too slow, but maybe a bit too much like Eddie and The Subtitles "American Society"."^[2]

Eddie and The Subtitles was a punk band from Orange County, California. The song "American Society" appeared on their 1980 LP “Skeletons in the Closet”.

Rumors

Contrary to reports on the internet, Bad Religion did not write or perform the song live in 1988 and it was never written for the No Control album. According to Jay, it was written specifically for Against The Grain.^[3]

Against The Grain vs Stranger Than Fiction

Brett said they included the song on Stranger Than Fiction because Atlantic said they didn't "hear a single" in that album and thought the song was a hit so they asked the band to redo it. Brett commented "since we were selling out anyway I didn't see any point in arguing".

Brett says he prefers the Against The Grain version. The outro of this version has a guitar solo behind the vocals and Brett explained that on the Stranger Than Fiction one they forgot to do it and he thinks this may be one of the reasons that the old one has more energy. On the other hand, Hetson said that they re-released 21st century to improve it. According to him Brett wasn't happy with the Against The Grain version (!). Jay said the exact same thing: "(We re-released the song) because we were playing it every night since 1989, 1990. It wasn't that we weren't happy with it. I was thrilled with it. I thought it was a great fucking song. Brett just happened to think that we were playing it better than we played it on the record. He just thought it was the one song of his that had a snowball's chance in hell of being popular. I think one of Brett's quests as a song writer was to write a pop hit. That's hard to do when you're in a punk rock band. He always thought that song could be a pop hit, and he fought for it to get on the record and to be a single. I eventually got tired of saying 'that's not what we do.' That's what he wanted to do when he was a member of the band at the time and we all went 'well, OK, if you feel that strongly about it, we'll put it on the record.' We have a very democratic process which is that if 3 members vote one way, then it's going to happen, unless one member feels so strongly about it, then we all just concede and say 'that's cool.'"^[4] Greg Graffin said there is better drumming on the STF version and added: "Stranger than Fiction was a weird record; it was our first major-label record. We knew that a lot of new people would be hearing it, and so we just wanted to make sure that there was something from our history on there that showed that it was still relevant today."

Alternative Press said this song is considered by many Bad Religion fans to be their Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Videos

When 21st Century (Digital Boy) first came out on Against The Grain, Bad Religion did a video for it with live footage and some images of helicopters and stuff. It was shown in MTV's Headbanger's Ball back then.

When it was re-released on Stranger Than Fiction, Bad Religion did a video in which a toddler was staring at a TV screen while Bad Religion was playing on the TV (although it is known that to get the toddler to stare at the screen, the crew filming the video had to play a videotape of Barney).
Jay: "The director's idea was to somehow get us on a television screen, but to have us appear in a three-dimensional way. So we filled up a plastic swimming pool, like a 5,000 gallon swimming pool with water, green food dye, formaldehyde, and some toxic emulsifier. We had a friend of ours from Heal The Bay come down and look (...) He told us that he wouldn't get in that water, but we did anyway. It was just this thick green liquid, and we painted ourselves blue. The idea was we were all going to be static, like the background is. And the reason for us being blue and the water being green, is that when we would feed the picture into the computer it could differentiate between us and the water. So that way we could give ourselves some definition. When the second edit came in with the static in the back with us blue, we liked it so much we just left us blue."
The things in the background are ping-pong balls. Jay: "I still can't figure that out. We were in the middle of shooting, and like someone yelled, 'Oh yeah, throw in the ping-pong balls.' They like poured in a thousand orange ping-pong balls. I was like, 'What the fuck is that for?' I still don't know the meaning behind that."

References