I hate coming up with titles for things that I write. Unless I can think of a pun so stupid that I cannot resist using it, I generally put it off until the very end. Sometimes, just to get started, I'll put in some kind of placeholder. And that's how I came to the realization about a minute and a half ago that Green Day's 2004 masterpiece American Idiot came out at the midpoint of my life as it currently stands. It's weird to think that the album has been in my life now for just as long as it wasn't. It was already an album that brings back some strong nostalgia for me as is, but throwing that harrowing fact on top of it cranks things up a notch.
I previously wrote about Dookie on the 30th anniversary of the album and how important it was (and continues to be) in my life. Hell, it was important to a whole shit ton of people my age. But when follow-ups Insomniac and Nimrod came and went without creating as much of a buzz, Green Day seemed to hit the backburner for a lot of people. Things were getting darker in rock music. 7 string guitars and drop D tuning were bullying the likes of Green Day and The Offspring right off the rock radio waves and replacing them with bands like Korn, Limp Bizkit, System of a Down, and Slipknot. A lot of mainstream pop-punk of the early 2000s went quite nasally, even while nailing three-part harmonies. Bands like Simple Plan and New Found Glory were leading the charge.
That wasn't the case for me. Sure, I dabbled with other bands as they came along (as well as the required phase in high school where I got REALLY into Metallica), but Green Day retained their title of my 'favorite band' for quite a while. When they eventually lost that title (probably to Dave Matthews Band or something similarly important to a college freshman), it didn't have anything to do with the quality of their work. I listened to Insomniac, Nimrod, and the criminally underrated Warning constantly and thought that everyone else was stupid for not liking them as much as they should. But Nimrod came out when I was in 8th grade. Warning was my senior year of high school. By the time we were a few years post-9/11, it had been years since we last heard of Green Day. Sure, there was the standard Greatest Hits release and a collection of b-sides in the meantime, but as my junior year of college ended, my musical tastes had moved away to more important things (I think I was super into Bright Eyes and the White Stripes at the time).
As the summer went on, we started to get more details about a new Green Day album. I was living on campus for the summer so I had nothing to do but be perpetually online, scouring any message boards or chatrooms I could for news. And the more I heard...the more I got concerned. A political album? Well, that's nice and punk rock. It's going to be a concept album about a cast of characters? Uhh...sure? Oh, and the second song on the album is nine minutes long and made up of five 'sub-chapters'? What was I signing up for? Look, I could appreciate Tommy by The Who well enough at the time, but that's not what I was looking for when it came to new music from a band who spent most of their breakout album musing on boredom and jerking off.
Then the music video for the title track dropped like a nuclear warhead straight into my brain.
Remember, I was a white man going into my senior year of college. It was the time in my life where I had IMPORTANT OPINIONS and COOL THOUGHTS about basically everything. In my time at college, I had seen 9/11, two wars start in the Middle East, and what was looking like an inevitable second term for George W. I was pissed, but in the uninformed way where I didn't know exactly what to do with that anger. For the first time in my life, it wasn't just rah-rah America is the best country in the world by default bullshit in my head. The shine of flag waving had worn off, but I wasn't old or smart enough to know what to do past feeling like I was fed up.
As big as American Idiot was when it came out, there are a lot of detractors when it comes to looking back on the album. I guess it's not too hard to see how that kind of thing can happen. The 'dudes wearing black with caked-on eyeliner' look is definitely dated to that era, and it's not exactly like 'Green Day getting political' was the equivalent of something like Bob Dylan or Rage Against The Machine doing the same. But I think that's one of the reasons the album resonated with me so much. It felt like a bunch of ideas and feelings and thoughts that were jumbled up and sometimes not entirely fleshed out. But fleshing them out would rob them of their power. It sounded like a band who were feeling like I felt: pretty pissed seeing what was going on around them, and responding the way that they best could. For me, it was bitching to my friends in my dorm room about 'problems' that I look back on now and laugh about (not because those problems didn't matter, but because things have gotten so, so much worse in a lot of ways), and Green Day's was to make a great fucking pop-punk album full of piss, vinegar, and snotty attitudes.
I distinctly remember going to Best Buy on Tuesday, September 21 in the afternoon window I had between whatever my last class of the day was and evening rehearsal for our college production of Our Town. I picked up both American Idiot and Hot Fuss by The Killers on the same trip. And I'm glad that I eventually came around to listening to (and loving) Hot Fuss, but they had to wait for quite a while for that to happen because from that day through at least my college graduation the following summer, American Idiot was just about all I listened to when I was on my own. It never got to the point where it was a problem per se, but with the combo of 'American Idiot/Jesus of Suburbia/Holiday/Boulevard of Broken Dreams/Are We the Waiting/St. Jimmy all back to back to start the album off, it was really easy to get distracted on a walk to class or trying to read a book or do anything. My body is almost conditioned to take a mental step back from whatever I'm doing whenever I hear 'Give Me Novacaine' just because that's almost the first breath the album allows you to take in the entire first half.
The whole album was full of big ideas and huge emotions and that appealed to me as a 22-year-old emo kid about to face the real world for the first time. Out of the countless mix CDs I made that year (HUGE thing to do to show people how cool you were and how rad your taste in music was from like 2003 - 2006), I doubt a single one of them was completely American Idiot free and in some cases I might as well have just given everyone I knew an obligatory burned copy of the album on sight for about 8 months or so.
But it wasn't all just being the right album at the right time. Now that I'm sitting here at my desk 20 years later listening to the album with fresh ears, these are just good fucking songs. Strip all the nostalgia away and the first half of this album is still some of the tightest, catchiest Green Day there is, even if it trades in the rawness of Dookie and Insomniac for a bit more polish and 'oomph'. People may not hold the album in as high of regard as they should because on the spectrum of 'political records', it does lack actual bite and substance. But that shouldn't be held against the band just because the sound they love and have mastered isn't as lyrically powerful as Dylan's folk songs or have the 'tear your boss' head off his body' energy that Rage does. They're a pop-punk band who wrote a kickass album and that album just happened to be written at a time when the band was just as pissed and aimless with that anger as a lot of younger people in the US were. The songs rock. They're even better when played live. Hell, their follow-up album 21st Century Breakdown is essentially what amounts to a bunch of b-sides from American Idiot and the album still kicks more ass than you remember.
(Seriously, go revisit it. It's better than you remember and probably their last truly 'great' record. Here's a little reminder...)
My son just turned two years old and you can bet your ass I am impatient as hell for him to start being interested in any music that doesn't involve sharks, dinosaurs, or bees. In my perfect world, the same albums that were important to me will be important to him, but I already know that's not going to be true. He's not going to have American Idiot playing in the background of some of the formative moments of his life. All I can hope is that he has his own version of American Idiot, whatever that album is. Something that he can listen to and say "Yes, this is how I feel. I couldn't put it into words, but this sound is the equivalent to what is inside."
And this is why I'm most looking forward to when the US leg of the Saviors tour kicks off in a couple of weeks and makes its way to Chicago next month. Being able to hear these songs, these albums that have been such big parts of two vastly different parts of my life, played live and in their entirety is something I don't know how I'll react to. Being surrounded by thousands of other people who love these albums and have their own powerful emotional ties too is going to be something, that's for sure.
The good news is that at all of our ages, the pit is either going to be pretty tame or completely out of steam by the time we get to 'Welcome to Paradise.' All I know is that I'm prepared to pay a stupid amount of money to be as close as possible to the stage when it all goes down.
The US leg of the Saviors Tour with The Smashing Pumpkins, Rancid, and the Linda Lindas kicks off on July 29th. Tickets can be found here.
