Green Day – American Idiot

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When was the last time it felt like a rock album took over the whole damn world?

For the most part, rock music has not been the defining music of the past two decades. There were exceptions along the way: The Suburbs winning the Grammy for Album of the Year felt like a coronation moment for indie rock. In Rainbows started a conversation around music commerce and distribution that helped shaped the industry we’re living in now…for better and for worse. Albums like Viva La Vida and Stadium Arcadium kept rock on mainstream pop radio and seemed legitimately inescapable for months and months.

But none of those albums hit every marker of a true-blue, world-conquering, era-defining blockbuster – the type of album rock ‘n’ roll used to serve up regularly, before hip-hop and R&B and big-tent pop took its crown. No rock album has checked all those boxes since 20 years ago this weekend. Since American Idiot.

Before this album even came out, it felt seismic – and “seismic” probably wasn’t what anyone was expecting from Green Day at the time. The band had followed a path of diminishing returns (commercially, at least) ever since they’d set the world on fire 10 years previous with Dookie. That album was a bedrock pop-punk classic, an album that laid the groundwork for a sound that became the go-to music in every teenager’s bedroom during the late ‘90s and early 2000s. But Green Day themselves weren’t really part of that turn-of-the-century dominance. While bands like Blink-182 and The Offspring were carving out household name status for themselves, Green Day were making increasingly commercially unviable records, like 1998’s all-over-the-place Nimrod, or 2000’s underrated folk-meets-pop-punk gem Warning. Depending on who you ask, the Green Day that existed at the outset of 2004 were already has-beens, coasting on past glories. They already had a greatest hits album out, after all, and arguably their most enduring song was an acoustic tearjerker that you couldn’t get through any graduation ceremony without hearing at least once. While other bands were carrying the torch Green Day had lit, the Berkeley punks were somehow already elder statesmen. It felt like their chapter of the story was over.

But Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tre Cool proved to be cannier than anyone had given them credit for. For their first album in four years, the boys in Green Day carefully fashioned a career reinvention for the ages. The result gave rock ‘n’ roll maybe it’s last monocultural moment.

Legend has it that Green Day wrote American Idiot after the master tapes for the album they had been making – called Cigarettes & Valentines – were stolen from the studio. Fan chatter in the years since has cast some doubts on that story. Cigarettes & Valentines never leaked online, nor has the band ever tried to drum up some nostalgic good will by revisiting, re-recording, and releasing the songs that supposedly would have made up the tracklist – even for a new 20th anniversary super deluxe reissue of American Idiot. Some fans theorize that Cigarettes & Valentines became Money Money 2020, an album the Green Day guys made in 2003 as a new wave side project called The Network. Other theories say we’ve already heard most of Cigarettes & Valentines – in the form of not-so-great American Idiot b-sides like “Shoplifter” and “Governator” – and that the “our album got stolen” story was a way of spinning underwhelming material into a mythic origin story for what followed.

Regardless of what’s truth and what’s fiction, the story around the disappearance of Cigarettes & Valentines generated a lot of interest for American Idiot. Who doesn’t love a “lost album” story, or a tale of a band motivated toward a breakthrough by a seemingly massive setback? The origins of American Idiot kick-started a powerful narrative for the album, and that narrative quickly snowballed into a cascading avalanche of positive momentum. Even before anyone had heard a note of music, this album had lore and mystique around it – an aura that only grew once the band shared actual details about what was coming.

The album title. The instantly-iconic cover. The black-and-red color scheme, and the way the band pivoted their clothes and style to match it. The sense that Green Day had cooked up something angry and political, and was planning on sharing it with the world less than two months before a contentious presidential election. The fact that American Idiot was a rock opera, an art form that had all but died out since the halcyon days of The Who and Pink Floyd. All these factors built up buzz and curiosity around American Idiot. It didn’t hurt that the title track and lead single was a superb shot in the arm for Green Day’s career, pairing the band’s well-established knack for melody with a kind of zeitgeisty urgency we hadn’t really heard from them before. “Don’t wanna be an American idiot” was the kind of broad political statement that felt like it could become a rallying cry in a fraught political moment. Maybe, if Green Day played their cards right, it could even become a generational anthem.

“American Idiot” wasn’t a massive hit when it arrived in early August 2004, but it did its job. When the album of the same name dropped a month and a half later, itsold 267,000 copies in its first week – a career high for Green Day – and then proceeded to linger in the top 10 of the Billboard 200 for a year, en route to six-times-platinum status. American Idiot also netted the band their first-ever nomination for Album of the Year at the Grammys (they lost to Ray Charles) and a Record of the Year win for “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” the album’s bombastic power ballad centerpiece. (“Boulevard” remains the band’s biggest hit, a number 2 smash kept from chart-topping glory only by 50 Cent’s “Candy Shop.”)

American Idiot had a long, long tail. In addition to “Boulevard” and the title track, the album spawned two other top 40 singles: “Holiday,” an anti-war protest song that peaked at 19; and “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” a grief-stricken ballad about Armstrong’s late father that went all the way to number 6. Despite being a 2004 album, Idiot ended up the fourth biggest-selling LP of 2005, behind Mariah Carey’s The Emancipation of Mimi, 50 Cent’s The Massacre, and Kelly Clarkson’s Breakaway. In 2009, a staged musical version of the album started previews in Berkeley, California, before moving to Broadway and becoming a Tony-winning smash. And you can hear echoes of American Idiot in a lot of bands that followed, from My Chemical Romance’s two-years-later rock opera classic Welcome to the Black Parade, to 2010s emo/pop-punk torchbearers like The Menzingers, all the way to current up-and-coming bands like Cold Years.

Even Green Day themselves can’t seem to escape the shadow of American Idiot. It took the band nearly five years to release a follow-up, and when they did, with 2009’s 21st Century Breakdown, it sounded like a self-conscious attempt to replicate Idiot’s massive success, right down to the rock opera conceit. They’ve been chasing that high ever since, trying to recapture pieces of Idiot’s larger-than-life scope (2012’s ill-advised trilogy), its zeitgeisty political trappings (Revolution Radio, released shortly before the 2016 election), or its career reinvention narrative (2020’s zany, glam-infused Father of All Motherfuckers). None of those albums even scratch the surface of what made American Idiot so special, nor do they recapture the magic of Green Day’s pre-Idiot music. This year’s Saviors is handily the best Green Day album in two decades, and it gets there by being a collection of short, catchy, fun pop-rock songs that have more in common with the lightweight charms of Dookie than the rock opera bombast of American Idiot. And Saviors will still end up being the third biggest Green Day story of 2024, after a dual Dookie/American Idiot anniversary tour and the backlash the band received for playing a modified, MAGA-dissing version of “American Idiot” on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.

This fate isn’t entirely surprising: If you’re an artist who sticks around long enough to earn the “legacy” tag, you’re eventually going to get to the point where your old work overshadows your new work. Then again, when you have two earthshaking albums in your discography, and you somehow manage to space them out a decade apart, perhaps the fade-out into irrelevance isn’t such a bad thing. Green Day already cheated death once; what were the chances that they were going to do it again?

These days, of the two landmark Green Day albums, Dookie is undoubtedly more admired by the music world at large than American Idiot. Where that album gets praised for its melodic splendor, its youthful zest, its crass immaturity, American Idiot gets dinged for its overexposure, for its self-seriousness, for its not-so-deep political messaging. I get all that: It’s easy to develop disdain for these kinds of gargantuan, inescapable albums once their moment has passed. But I’ll tell you what: Hearing American Idiot for the first time as a 14-year-old kid, before it got overplayed and before it broke Green Day – and maybe rock ‘n’ roll in general – it ruled. I didn’t know enough about rock history back then to know everyone Green Day was cribbing moves from here, and I’d say my ignorance played in American Idiot’s favor. Because to my ears, this album sounded like it was breaking all the rules: telling an ambitious album-length story; incorporating nine-minute-long, multi-part songs; flipping the bird to the president and his followers. Young me thought American Idiot was bold and edgy and unapologetic.

33-year-old me doesn’t really think any of those things, but I still love this album, and not just out of nostalgia for the formative role it played in my personal musical development. I actually don’t hear American Idiot as a “political statement” album at all anymore. Instead, when I run this record back, I hear a coming-of-age story that poignantly and eerily captures what it was like to grow up in the first decade of the new millennium. The political strife is still there in the songs: the aftershocks of 9/11; the weird feeling of slowly becoming numb to hearing about war on TV; that disaffected frustration of being pissed off at the establishment and not being old enough to do anything about it. But the songs, mostly, aren’t about those things. Instead, they’re about the usual trials and tribulations of growing up: striking up friendships with people who draw you out of your comfort zone, in ways good and bad; leaving home and trying to make it on your own for the first time; falling in love; getting your heart broken; landing at your first shitty, dead-end job and wondering if this is really all the world has to offer you. American Idiot grabbed a lot of people’s attention because of all the things I mentioned earlier – the Green Day comeback narrative, the political elements, the timing. But I’d argue it became one of those world-conquering, everyone-heard-it albums – the last one, for the rock genre – because the story in the songs felt so universal.

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