Green Day

Twenty years have gone so fast

Wake me up when September ends

2024 is a year of major celebrations for Green Day. It marks the thirtieth anniversary of "Dookie", for many the absolute masterpiece of the Californian band, one of the undisputed cornerstones of pop-punk, as well as one of the best-selling records of its genre in history. Meanwhile it's twenty years for "American Idiot", the power trio's seventh album, perhaps less celebrated by critics than the other anniversary album, but largely responsible for the classic status now attached to Billie Joe Armstrong's band in the collective memory.

The sales figures for the two records alone would be enough to confirm their at least comparable stature: around 15 million for "American Idiot" and around 20 for "Dookie" – though the latter had the advantage not only of ten extra years on the shelves and cult status even at the time, but also of a release date in an era when the record industry wasn't yet in decline. In truth, from several points of view, "American Idiot" could even be credited with greater significance.

Green Day are in fact one of those bands who "lived twice". And by two lives we don't simply mean staying power over time, the kind of longevity and creative variety that has undoubtedly made them the most eminent band of the entire genre (no offence to the cocky Offspring or the still-undying Blink-182). Rather, we mean their ability to be genuinely trans-generational, to leave an equally deep mark on at least two waves of young people, a full ten years apart, both furious at society and the political class. And to do so, moreover, with two records of almost opposite character.

The Green Day of "Dookie" were barely in their twenties, using melodic flair and punk riffs to mock California's comfortable classes, capitalism, politicians and the star system with irreverence and charm, having the time of their lives without ever taking themselves too seriously. The same attitude, you might say, as the little monkeys flinging balls of shit over the valley on the album cover.

After further successful records, including the never-praised-enough "Nimrod" and the already militant "Warning", everything changes with "American Idiot". The band's attitude, its members now past thirty, shifts radically. Billie Joe, Mike and Tre still dress like punks, but between tight dark jeans, black shirts, red ties, heavy black eyeliner and studded belts, it almost looks like a uniform. The same happened on the stages of the monstrous world tour supporting the album: huge red flags, looming logos on black banners worthy of a military campaign, with the unforgettable grenade-shaped heart from the cover art reigning everywhere.

The enemy to be fought, the American idiot par excellence and embodiment of all national ineptitude, is George W. Bush, who, amid social divides and senseless wars (the Iraq War above all), defined the first decade of the new millennium. Bush Jr. thus became the direct target of political invective and punk anthems as blunt and biting as the band had ever written. History's usual cycles mean the album's twentieth anniversary falls, of all times, just as the shadow of the tycoon who exacerbated the absurdities of the Bush era looms once again over the United States and the democratic balance of the entire world.

It wasn't just political charge, though, that let Green Day's fire catch on with a new generation. There was also the revamped aesthetic mentioned above, which brought the band closer to the chart-topping emo-core movement then in full swing (Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, Paramore, Thirty Seconds To Mars, Taking Back Sunday, Panic! At The Disco), turning them into a genuine touchstone for the scene. And a far richer sound than before. The new Green Day didn't stick to punk jabs and catchy choruses, however seasoned with acoustic tones and power pop tricks already on the earlier "Warning": with "American Idiot" their repertoire expanded to include ballads and long suites full of unpredictable twists.

The story told by "American Idiot", that of Jimmy, a kind of suburban messiah ("Jesus Of Suburbia", to quote the title of one of the album's most emblematic tracks) chasing the dream of the big city to escape the narrow-mindedness of his hometown, gives the record the shape of an old-school rock opera. And it thus elevates it to the last great title of the genre (sure, even within punk alone there's Fucked Up and their "David Comes To Life", but their numbers fall well short of what's needed to enter the collective memory). A kind of suburban "Quadrophenia" for millennials now orphaned of the "American dream" their forebears once lived – and, in some cases, even appreciated by those very forebears. If you wanted to slap another label on the songs of "American Idiot", it would obviously be that of the protest song: and here too, this would count as one of the last great collections of the form.

Suites, ballads and kicks in the teeth

And to think the story of Green Day's seventh album started out with an entirely different horizon in mind. The follow-up to "Warning" was originally meant to be called "Cigarettes And Valentines", but when the masters of the twenty songs recorded up to that point were stolen in November 2002, the band decided to abandon the project and dive into something completely new. Producer Joe Cavallo, recalling a conversation he'd had with Billie Joe Armstrong a decade earlier, suggested this might be the right moment for a "punk-rock opera" to crown the band's "Beatles-esque arc". So Armstrong and co. got to work – but first, they got listening: "Sgt. Pepper's" was the guiding model, but other classics from not long after quickly joined it. "Ziggy Stardust", "Tommy", and above all "Quadrophenia", which chimed well with the band's ambitions: a concept album built on roaring guitars and power chords, centred on a hot-headed young man's coming of age – a figure well represented by the mod in the Britain of the Who, but clearly, in Green Day's California, better identified as a punk (a term that, incidentally, already appears in the title of one of "Quadrophenia"'s tracks). As if the grandeur already inherent in those records weren't enough, the band's hunger for grandiosity was further fuelled by rediscovering the great rock musicals of the same era: "Jesus Christ Superstar" and "The Rocky Horror Picture Show", but also "Grease" and, going further back, Bernstein and Sondheim's "West Side Story".

The intoxicating concept vision wasn't yet fully formed when its first fruit came to light: a suite of almost ten minutes, built by stitching together fragments of songs conceived for "Cigarettes And Valentines" with new ideas thirty seconds long or so each. "Homecoming" now sits almost at the album's close, but it was the nucleus around which the whole project coalesced. It opens with the death of a key character – that St. Jimmy who turns out to simply be the more combative, strictly punk alter ego of the protagonist, Jesus Of Suburbia – and closes with the latter's decision to return home, changed forever by the record's events.

"Jesus Of Suburbia" arrived shortly after, and it's another nine-and-a-bit-minute suite, conceived by Billie Joe Armstrong with the goal of creating "the Bohemian Rhapsody of the future". Just a few chords, almost all in the most basic key in the world (C major), one hefty riff with a sharpened fifth, and a shift to G major just before the end: hardly a display of harmonic sophistication. Nor does the focus seem to be on odd-time contortions: apart from a single passage in 3/4, the track is entirely in 4/4. But rhythmic shifts are everywhere, and rarely do twenty seconds pass without some variation in dynamics – sometimes an extreme one. In a rollercoaster of power chords and piano, acoustic guitar and chimes, the song's different sections chase one another in a constant bid for the most memorable melodic hook. Released as the album's fifth and final single, unlike its predecessors the track failed to chart in the US – almost impossible for a song of that length anyway – but it did break into several European charts, reaching, for instance, number seventeen in the UK, where it stayed for four weeks.

The other four singles fared better, two of them becoming genuine instant classics. "Boulevard Of Broken Dreams" and "Wake Me Up When September Ends" are the ballads that replicated the success of "Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)", the 1997 evergreen taken from "Nimrod" that has since become a staple for every beach guitarist (whether or not they've ever learned a barré chord). The former, hit with plagiarism accusations aimed at the Gallagher brothers (fuelled mainly by the "Boulevard Of Broken Songs" mash-up created by DJ Party Ben), does indeed share essentially the same chord progression as "Wonderwall" and a very similar BPM, but it plays on a resolute grandeur absent from the Oasis track, and – beyond an equally recognisable intro – boasts far greater dynamic range across verse, chorus, solo and coda. It's also an extremely evocative song, able, thanks to the guitar effects and the drums' slow pace, to conjure a boulevard haunted by wind, sand and broken dreams, lost in some dusty corner of the United States.

"Wake Me Up When September Ends", on the other hand, was accompanied by a long video, a kind of mini-film that exploits the temporal distances implicit in the lyrics to tell a painful love story, interrupted by a voluntary departure for the war in Iraq. In the sequence of tears and arguments that breaks up the song, the future soldier's words: "I did it for us! [...] I thought you'd be proud of me. That of all people, you at least would understand why I'm doing this". This introspective touch adds a social dimension to the political one and amplifies the track's already tormented nature, built on an epic nostalgia that resonates with an emo mood and heightens its intensity with one of the many sly Beatles-esque touches scattered across the record – in this case, a minor plagal cadence at the end of the chorus, which by placing an out-of-key minor chord (iv) in the middle of a classic IV-I resolution "delays" the harmonic resolution and adds a further wistful, aching note precisely on the key line, the one containing the song's title.

Reaching number two and number six on the US charts respectively, these two songs weren't matched by the rawer "American Idiot" and "Holiday", which peaked at sixty-one and nineteen respectively, but they did well on numerous European charts (in Italy the title track reached number thirteen: the band's best result to date, if we exclude the number-one exploit of "The Saints Are Coming" in 2006, alongside U2). The former is the album's opening track, its lead single and its political anthem: a driving combat-punk number, a direct descendant of The Clash (Green Day had, in fact, recorded a cover of "I Fought The Law" at the start of 2004), packed with stop 'n' go dynamics, railing against media ills that have grown exponentially worse in the twenty years separating the Bush era from today:

Don't wanna be an American idiot

One nation controlled by the media

Information age of hysteria

It's calling out to idiot America

In terms of political vehemence, "Holiday" only doubles down, staging the daily life of those who, having stayed in the United States, receive news from the Iraqi front in the form of empty lies, dirty money, coffins and flags. There are jabs for everyone, from the Democrats who back the war for their party's economic gain to ordinary citizens whose apathy toward the conflict is mocked as the "holiday" of the title. But particularly cutting is the attack in the middle verse, sung without guitars and aimed directly at President Bush:

Sieg Heil to the President Gasman

Bombs away is your punishment

Pulverize the Eiffel Towers

Who criticize your government

Bang-bang goes the broken glass, and

Kill all the fags that don’t agree

With ringing chords and a decidedly punk-rock attitude, "Holiday" is also the moment where the protagonist Jesus Of Suburbia arrives in the city, having left behind his miserable suburban life in the previous track, and now sees a chance to abandon the passive, self-destructive approach that had defined him until then, rejecting ready-made ideas, meeting new people and fighting for them.

The deep album tracks – the other songs on the record, not released as singles – are the ones that most explore the album's narrative framework and contribute to the sense of cohesion needed for it to work as a rock opera. Paired so as to flow into one another, the tracks revolve around a trio of characters: Jesus Of Suburbia and his alter ego St. Jimmy, plus the feisty Whatsername, who is drawn to St. Jimmy and captivates the protagonist with her determination.

The "Are We The Waiting"/"St. Jimmy" sequence is among the album's most contrasting: the former, as the title suggests, stages a moment of waiting, corresponding to Jesus Of Suburbia's doubts about his choices, which leave him proud but alone; the latter instead marks St. Jimmy's eruption into the story, his fiery personality gradually coming to dominate the protagonist's own. Much of "Are We The Waiting"'s character comes from the drum pattern that opens the track and carries its entire structure: a sparse but thunderous pattern, in which the toms take the lion's share and the strong snare accent falls between the second and third beat, both rare choices in punk, where everything usually runs on in-your-face kick-snare beats accented on the third beat.

"St. Jimmy" course-corrects, however, suddenly breaking the stagnation with a skatepunk assault that harks straight back to the band's earliest days. Like his entrance, St. Jimmy's persona is brash and overwhelming: he's the messiah of revolt and nihilism that Jesus Of Suburbia can't be on his own, "the patron saint of denial, with an angel face and a taste for suicide".

My name is Jimmy and you better not wear it out

Suicide commando that your mama talked about

King of the Forty Thieves and I’m here to represent

The needle in the vein of the establishment

The radiant, folky feel of "Give Me Novacaine"'s verse shouldn't be taken at face value: the arrival of its thunderous chorus makes clear the song thrives on contrast, with Jesus Of Suburbia seeking relief from his own ills and St. Jimmy offering "novacaine", a fictional drug whose name recalls a local anaesthetic (novocaine, or procaine) but whose effects, as described in the lyrics, are far more devastating.

Even more impetuous is the following "She's A Rebel", a restless slice of punk-rock (with a power-pop chorus and accompanying harmonic tricks) that introduces the character of Whatsername and gives a home to the heart/hand-grenade on the cover:

She’s a symbol of resistance

And she’s holdin’ on my heart like a hand grenade

[…]

She sings the revolution

The dawning of our lives

She brings this liberation

That I just can’t define

Well, nothin' comes to mind

Just as combative but more idealistic than St. Jimmy, Whatsername still carries her own contradictions and fragilities, which surface in "Extraordinary Girl," one of the most eclectic tracks in the record's context. Opened by a tabla intro courtesy of Tré Cool, the song soon flows into an Eastern-tinged verse with a sixties flavor (thanks, on both counts, to well-played exchanges between D major and D minor chords) and a chorus made vivid by a key change – at least until the final line, where D minor reappears to once again cloud the song's mood.

The transition into "Letterbomb" is more delicate than usual, with Riot Grrrl figure Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre) voicing Whatsername off-mic. The track, however, is true to its title and ranks among the most explosive on the record. Set against the backdrop of the breakup between Whatsername and Jesus Of Suburbia/St. Jimmy, the lyrics fire off a volley of accusations at the protagonist and his hypocrisies – accusations easily reinterpreted as criticism not just of the fictional character, but of self-proclaimed prophets of revolution in general, who, unable to turn their denunciations into concrete action, end up feeding nothing but their own ego. Musically, the song fits an elegant power-pop structure – verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge, solo, and even an outro – into a muscular punk-rock sound, spicing up the chorus's tail with an unexpected sharp fifth and giving Tré Cool another chance to thunder away on the toms around the bridge. As destructive as it gets, verging on incendiary, the song still leaves a sliver of hope open:

It's not over 'til you're underground

It's not over before it's too late

This city’s burnin’, it’s not my burden

It's not over before it's too late

Back home, having settled the score with his unruly, egomaniacal double, the protagonist opens a new chapter – one of building, of responsibility, of adulthood. In the closing "Whatsername," Jesus Of Suburbia looks back on the girl who had inspired him and made him fall in love, only to realize he can no longer remember her name. The track, which on streaming platforms vies for the title of the album's most-loved non-single, opens reflectively with a moderate tempo and palm-muted, muted chords. But verse after verse it builds a crescendo that, passing through pensive, almost Midwest-emo guitar flourishes, arrives at full intensity, complete with layered instrumentation and a choral bridge.

Revolution at High Volume: From Rebellion to Myth

Released at the height of the Loudness War, when musicians, producers and labels tied to mainstream rock competed release after release to see who could master at the highest, most compressed volumes, "American Idiot" was accused by audiophiles of having badly sacrificed dynamic range in the name of an overly dense sound. The general public didn't seem particularly bothered, rewarding the album with three weeks at number one on the US chart (two in the UK), 143 weeks in the Top 200, and a 167-date world tour – the longest of the band's career. Thanks to its ambition and, in part, to its deliberate classic-rock nods, the record managed not only to win over most of the longtime fans (those who didn't turn their noses up at its perceived "commercial" turn) but also, as already noted, a new audience of young listeners who were just then discovering emo-pop sounds: played on old-school rock radio stations that put its singles alongside storied hits of decades past, "American Idiot" also reached the ears of many older fans, who were more than happy to see this band of no-longer-quite-so-young musicians had the grit to carry on in continuity with artists who had by then become legendary.

Uniting not one, but two, three, perhaps even more generations is a rare feat that very few rock albums released after 2000 have managed to pull off. By elevating its post-9/11 anger into a universal cry that crosses eras, "American Idiot" achieved just that. Over time it has turned into a contemporary classic that doesn't age but evolves, growing richer year after year with the anxieties and dreams of everyone who encounters it.

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22/09/2024