Review Summary: Green Day's revival stops just short of being an absolute genre classic, but does enough to earn its status as a modern-day classic, and is a damn fine listen in its own right.
Green Day. These days, you either love them or hate them (mostly hate them. It’s in fashion.) From pioneers of the punk-pop movement and rightful heirs to The Descendents, the group has apparently grown into the personification of all that is wrong with radio-friendly rock music these days. And whether you are a furious denigrator of the threesome’s reputation or a staunch defender of their role in modern pop-rock, you can blame it all on one album: 2004’s
American Idiot.
One of the biggest modern music phenomena this side of a Simon Cowell production,
American Idiot not only re-launched Green Day’s faltering career, but became Generation Me’s equivalent of
Nevermind. If you ask a rock music fan between the ages of 14 and 24, they will probably name this album as one of their entry points into the genre. It is
that important. However, musical relevance isn’t everything, and
Idiot might have still sucked, even while influencing millions of kids worldwide. Fortunately, it does not, and instead asserts itself as one of the seminal releases of not only the band’s career, but the modern-day rock scene as a whole.
To understand how
Idiot came to be, one must first hark back to 1998, and the release of
Nimrod. Despite the commercial force of acoustic tearjerker
Good Riddance, that album’s attempt at experimentation fell flat, with Green Day achieving only a modicum of the success they had experienced with their previous two albums. Undeterred, the group soldiered on with their maturity process, releasing the much less ambitious
Warning three years later, to the collective disinterest of the music world.
The gigantic ‘meh’ the album was greeted with still did not discourage Billie Joe Armstrong and Co., who, unwilling to return to the previous status quo and figuring the situation could not get much worse, thought ‘why not’ and decided to go out on a limb. The resulting product, a concept album and punk-rock opera called
American Idiot, would come out in 2004, and exceed even the band’s wildest expectations.
However, this success was not immediate. The first few singles from the album were generally ignored, and only
Boulevard Of Broken Dreams and
Wake Me Up When September Ends would be able to cause a stir – and then, only from horrified fans unable to digest the (gasp!) acoustic guitars and (double gasp!!)
eyeliner! All in all, it seemed this latest experiment from Green Day would go the same way as the other two, and that the band would never again recapture their relevance.
But then,
something happened. All of a sudden, punk fans started to embrace
American Idiot, too, and the album steadily began to acquire its rightful place in 21st century music history. And rightfully so - it is a bloody good album.
Green Day’s sound in
Idiot can best be described as a more mature version of what My Chemical Romance would put out a few years later with
The Black Parade. The album joins heavy guitars and fast, punky rhythms with more acoustic, poppy moments, the whole joined together by a dramatic sheen which stops just short of being overblown – in that regard, the band would not jump the shark until their next album. The final product is a thoroughly satisfying, if not entirely perfect, representative of the modern-rock genre.
The album’s early goings are particularly strong. The first few songs build towards a crescendo, achieved about midway through on the excellent
Give Me Novocaine, and showcase all the different styles the band will touch upon on this album. The title track starts us off on a high note, being the sort of lively, punky cut the band has become known for, and helping ease listeners into what comes next: a multi-layered, eight-minute cut called
Jesus Of Suburbia, which would have been unthinkable not only in Green Day’s previous albums, but in any album from a punk rock band until that point. The ensuing songs are significantly more understated, but do not lay off on the variety, running the gamut from the
Warning-esque pop-rock of
Holiday to the flat-out radio concessions of the infamous
Boulevard of Broken Dreams, the eerie atmosphere of
Are We The Waiting and the irrepressible punk assault of
St. Jimmy. An apex is reached, as noted, on
Give Me Novocaine, a track that perfectly marries the band’s new-found acoustic maturity with a
Brain Stew-esque chorus riff to give us this album’s absolute highlight.
Unfortunately, a high point inevitably implies a downfall, and in that regard, the latter half of the album does not hold a patch to the early tracks. For this portion of
American Idiot, the earlier status quo is turned on its head:
nothing here is interesting, aside from
Wake Me Up When September Ends and a couple of (very punctual) moments in other songs. Instead, we are left with blatant filler like
Extraordinary Girl and
Letterbomb (almost, but not quite, saved by its chorus) and cute, but inconsequential, tracks such as
She’s A Rebel and
Whatsername. A nadir is reached on the hopelessly dull
Homecoming, a failed attempt at recreating
Jesus Of Suburbia whose sole saving grace is a criminally short rollicking segment that sees Billie Joe at his most nasally bratty since around 1992. Sadly, this portion is over in literally thirty seconds, leaving us with the wasteland of ideas that is the rest of the song – and of the album’s latter half as a whole.
As noted, however, not
everything’s bad. Paradoxically, it is in these songs that the band insert their most interesting details – such as the tribal/industrial intro to
Extraordinary Girl or the child-sung intro to
Letterbomb; it is only a shame that they are inserted into such pedestrian tracks. Elsewhere,
Wake Me Up When September Ends may be hideous overplayed by now (and not at all Green Day-esque), but it is nonetheless a solid song, that perfectly encapsulates what the band were aiming for on this opus.
In the end, then,
American Idiot manages to overcome its risible concept and over-dramatic overtones to establish itself as a solid guitar-pop/rock album. While it stops just short of being an absolute genre classic, it does enough to earn its status as a modern-day classic, and slip in right behind
Dookie in the pecking order of the Green Day discography. If you only listen to one Green Day album in your life, it should be that one; but if you are willing to reach out a little further (or have a lower tolerance for loud guitars) then this one is a damn fine listen, too.
Recommended Tracks
American Idiot
Jesus Of Suburbia
Are We The Waiting
Give Me Novocaine
Wake Me Up When September Ends
