Green Day
American Idiot
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Green Day
American Idiot
Reprise, 2004
RiYL: Screeching Weasel, The Who, The Clash |
But first, there’s the miserable title track, a noxious bit of sloganeering that only timing identifies as an anti-Bush number. The lazy riffing is something Green Day had grown past by Insomniac, and the lyrics are fuzzy and mediocre. The song’s best line is thieved from a decade-old Cracker song, for pete’s sake! And the suggestion that the interior journey of the album’s central St. Jimmy is somehow a reflection of Bush’s America is weak indeed – Billie Joe, certainly you know that kids watch TV, smoke dope, and mope under Republicans and Democrats alike? Leave this one of your iPod and you’ll all be better off, sports fans. The rest of American Idiot is pretty impressive stuff, mixing Dookie’s slap-happiness, Insomniac’s thrashy dirge, nimrod’s rapid stylistic shifts, and Warning! ’s acoustic moments and introspection sometimes all in the course of one song. Idiot has as focii two near ten-minute epics, a pair of suites that introduce and ultimately close the storyline sequence. “Jesus of Suburbia” and “Homecoming” aren’t really single songs as much as medleys; Green Day’s songs come perilously close to repeating themselves already. Repeated melodies here would just slow things down. What they do have is little songs like Guided By Voices curiosities or Abbey Road side two residents, some of them are the best things the album has to offer.
The frantic “Rock and Roll Girlfriend” is an agreeable return to Lookout! Roots in the midst of a lot of navel-gazing. “I Don’t Care” dramatically shows our hero making his epic aimlessness into something approaching a philosophy in addition to being a heck of a sing-along. The similar “Nobody Likes You” shows how far along Green Day have come as a band. Self-parody is one thing, but making self-parody serves a larger narrative function – this is heady stuff for snot-nose punks from Gilman Street. Billie Joe’s attempts to tie everything together lyrically cause a lot of repetition for a record that’s still pretty short for a concept LP. I could do with one fewer chorus of “we care”/“we don’t care”/“why don’t you care?” for one thing. Also, okay, the hero’s name is St. Jimmy. We get it. Where’s “Ivor the Engine Driver” already?
It’s also somewhat disingenuous the way the album is constructed. At its heart, American Idiot isn’t a political album at all, it’s an album that makes much more sense for such hooligans-turned-family-men to be making. If you take nihilism as your way of life, St. Jimmy discovers, what happens when you find something (or someone) worth caring about? Jimmy can’t handle the crisis of faith that mid-album’s “Extraordinary Girl” presents, but maybe the unnamed narrator can; Idiot doesn’t end with “The Death of St. Jimmy” but rather with the hopeful “Whatshername.” Earlier tracks like the group-therapy soccer chorus “Are We the Waiting?” and “Give Me Novacaine,” where the narrator begs Jimmy to make him feel nothing at all, are misdirects – these characters aren’t looking for someone to tell them what to do, they’re waiting for someone to try and fail, so they’ll be forced to work it out for themselves.
American Idiot has its weak points – that awful title track, no pauses between songs (come on, we need a little time to process all of this) and Billie Joe’s longtime tendency to pull up just short of saying what he really means. Nonetheless, evolution this constant in a “punk” band is more or less unheard of since Sandinista! -era Clash, so take it while you can still get it. That said, Combat Rock was a better record than Sandinista! – I certainly think Green Day can move forward wearing their ambitions just a little less obviously on their sleeves. You know, right next to their hearts.
MARK T.R. DONOHUE | Mark T.R. Donohue is a prolific freelance writer whose areas of expertise include Rockies baseball, video games, genre television, English soccer, and pub rock. He lives in Colorado, where he cultivates the largest and creepiest private collection of Alyson Hannigan memorabilia in the Mountain West.