Green Day was just your slightly-above-average punk band before 2004 hit. Dookie, the band’s third album, put Green Day on the map and promised everyone there was greatness to come from these angry, eye-liner-wearing, 21-year-olds, but after releasing three more albums and two of them commercially flopping, things weren’t exactly looking up for these west coast punks. Then American Idiot happened, and I don’t care what Pitchfork says- this album is iconic, and today, it turns 15.
American Idiot was the first ever punk rock opera and concept album, and tapped into a lyrical sophistication that Green Day had not yet shone a light on. The album is emotional and deep, with plenty of room in it’s 10-minute songs to put on your best Billie Joe voice and scream into a hairbrush microphone.
American Idiot changed my second grade life. I might not have understood the meaning behind the political lyrics, but this album rocked harder than anything I had known. Around this time, I was going through a bit of a music video obsession, where every day after school I would log on to yahoomusic.com and go down the list of the Top 100 videos. Somewhere beyond the top 5, which included Britany Spears' “Toxic” and Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life,” two videos also near and dear to my heart, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” was the one that hypnotized me. I watched that music video every day, which was perhaps my small way rebelling; my favorite lyric being, “read between the lines, what’s fucked up and everything’s alright…” I think that’s where I learned the “f” word.
At some point after (the details of 2004 have gotten a bit blurry), I was in a CD store with my dad when I spotted a large, sturdy, Green Day poster, and I had to have it. I begged my dad for the poster, thinking to myself, wow, how punk rock am I? I remember my dad laughing in a puzzled sort of way as he paid for the poster. He’s a big Green Day fan, but probably couldn’t understand why his 8-year-old daughter was, too.
When I got home I leaned the poster against my wall- it had one of those cardboard backs. I stared at it for a while, and then shoved it to the back of my closet. Foreign drummer Tré Cool was looking into my soul, like he could devour me as an appetizer. To convince myself that I was in fact ready for the punk life, I would take the poster out and look at it every now and then...just not right before I went to bed. Monsters were real, and they now suddenly wore the face of Tré Cool.
I’ve come a long way since then, and so has the American Idiot album. This was the first time a punk band made a concept album, and there was no telling where it would go, that is, until everyone actually heard the tracks that lived on it. Billie Joe Armstrong, the front man of the band, told journalist Scott Rowley, “People were like, ‘What the hell are you guys doing?’ It’s like – Green Day, punk rock opera, concept record, nine minute songs – those words don’t really go well in the same sentence. So there was definitely some fear, but for me it was like, ‘People will just have to listen and then they’ll get it: it’s still Green Day.’”
The album follows the story of “Jesus of Suburbia,” an American anti-hero living a lower-middle-class life and realizing the political issues in the world around him. He leaves his small town and moves to a city, where he meets “St. Jimmy,” (who’s probably a drug dealer?), falls in and out of love, and eventually goes back home. It’s a story everyone can relate to, and everyone can head-bang to.
The point of the story is not the main character’s coming of age, but his inner thoughts and resistance in becoming an American idiot. Each song is soaked in the blunt vision of America that so many people were beginning to project at this time. Everyone felt how tense the country was, and then Green Day made a rock opera about it, and it never went away.
In fact, it won the 2005 Grammy for Best Rock Album, was turned into a hugely successful Broadway production, and is on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
The album’s cover is simple to the eye with complex symbolism to give it some oomph and match the sound of the album. The band aimed for the cover to be “at once uniform and powerful,” and with the help of artist Chris Bilheimer, that is exactly the kind of cover they made.
While listening to the record, Bilheimer took note of the “She’s a Rebel” lyric, “And she’s holding on my heart like a hand grenade.” From there, he created a rioting arm grasping a heart shaped grenade. Immediately, the question of what happens to the hand, and what happens to the heart, is provoked.
At the very start of writing for the American Idiot album, the band asked themselves how they could progress without selling out, or without copying another band’s progression. They asked themselves how they could get out of the ‘verse, chorus, middle-eight’ formula to come up with something that could be different, yet still successful. Thus, American Idiot was born.
Billie Joe revealed that it was a challenge, but that's what keeps the band going. “That’s what we need to do every single time we put out a record,” he said. “Find a new challenge, new territory.
Today I celebrate several things: punk rock, freedom of speech, the concept album, and the fact that we still have American Idiot to go back to as we look for a glimmer of hope in this world that somehow just keeps getting darker.
Don’t be an American idiot. Celebrate it.