Green Day were always innately suburban. THC and apathy themed their 1994 single "Longview"; their breakthrough album, Dookie, was a precocious jumble of power chords and smart aleck prurience, a blend of The Descendents and flinty Buzzcockian spark. They didn't have any answers-- they just wanted weed and entitlement. That cul de sac selfishness and bratty pose carried through to the sugar-pap mallpunks Green Day spawned on the backslide of the 90s; unfortunately, the trio's undeniable early flair for songcraft did not.
In 1999, pop-punk exploded with the arrival of Blink-182's Enema of the State, and the brand gleefully deteriorated from there, bottoming out in the young and hopeless days of a dollar-store post-millennium, where the suburban trash culture that Billie Joe Armstrong once dismissively skewered has blended dangerously with a shifty political climate, causing volatile upheavals in blue collar comedy and bicameral nimrods. Now Green Day are back to pull the pin on the grenade.
2000's Warning only scored the band two modern rock hits, and in contrast to the million-selling marks of previous records, was something of a commercial flop. By this point, their hit-making, image-cultivating offspring had bid them good riddance, and those disillusioned by Green Day's populist stature were no longer listening. If they had been, they'd have heard some of the grit and dynamics that gave birth to a much wider sonic palette on American Idiot, the band's first album since, and unquestionably their most ambitious to date.
As a songwriter, Armstrong's penchant for economy is still present-- he'll never be a wordsmith or a magic melody maker. But Idiot's slicing power chordage reaches to Green Day's old English and Cali punk influences with tingling fingers, adds acoustic instruments without sounding forced or contrived, and lyrically grapples with the cultural predicaments and awkward shittiness of "subliminal mind-fuck America," circa 2004: "Now everybody do the propaganda/ And sing along in the age of paranoia." Armstrong delivers the title track couplet like a command at the revolution day sock-hop, and its instrumental viciousness is enough to shatter punchbowl glass.
Like Bad Religion, whose recent The Empire Strikes First was not only a reaction to U.S. politics and culture post-9/11, but a powerful return to cynical form, Green Day's dissent and frustration has inspired a new strength of craft in them as well. Armstrong's frustration comes out in seething anger: The ragged, rousing "Letterbomb" is both a melodic powder keg and a blaring bullhorn promoting the destruction of complacency, while the album's title track is energizing and provoking in the way effective punk revivalism should be.
"Nobody cares," Armstrong screams shrilly in "Homecoming", one of the album's two extended set pieces, and the line gets at American Idiot's greatest feat, besides its revitalization of Green Day's songwriting. Rather than preach, it digs out the fuse buried under mountains of 7-Eleven styrofoam trash, the cultural livewire that's grown cold in the shadow of strip-mall economics. Armstrong's characters are just misunderstood and disaffected individuals, told to get lost by a nation of fair and balanced sitcom watchers. They're apathetic suburbanite kids, grown up to find that life in the longview sucks.
"Jesus of Suburbia" and the accompanying epic "Homecoming" are American Idiot's summarizing ideological and musical statements. Bookends, they respectively establish and bitterly conclude the record's storyline. Musically, they roll rapid-fire through vignettes of enormous drum fill rock, plaintive piano, Johnny Rotten impressions, and surprisingly strong harmonies. "Suburbia" references the melodies of "All the Young Dudes" and "Ring of Fire"; "Homecoming" surveys both the Ramones and the Police's "Born in the 50s"; and both songs owe their form and pacing to The Who. The album does drag on occasion-- the labored pacing of "Wake Me Up When September Ends" is a little too much, the price of ambition. But then there's "She's a Rebel", a simplistically perfect anthem of the sort the band's vapid followers (or their handlers) would likely muck up with string sections.
For all its grandiosity, American Idiot keeps its mood and method deliberately, tenaciously, and angrily on point. Music in 2004 is full of well-meaning but pan-flashing sloganeers whose tirades against the government-- whether right or wrong-- are ultimately flat, with an overarching sense that what they're saying comes packaged with a spoil date of November '04. Though they do fling their share of surface insults, Green Day frequently look deeper here, not just railing against the political climate, but also striving to show how that climate has negatively impacted American culture. Ultimately, American Idiot screams at us to do something, anything-- a wake-up call from those were once shared our apathy.
