Green Day - American Idiot (2004)

I really like the album cover to this album, not just because the art references a lyric in a song that'll make you go "OOH!!" when you see it, but because it's stylistic and uses a memorable enough color scheme of just black, white, and red, that if you were to distort it via MSPaint to be as pixelated as possible, it'd still be instantly identifiable. I think that's a really good goal to have when making any album cover, but understandably difficult to nail on the head. Ah well, onto some bullshit that I doubt anyone will read, I guess.

"Do you like Green Day?" was an important question in my youth, around the time that the album came out, most notably asked by a girl my age I had over to play "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" in my room. The same girl that teased me "What are you, like, twelve?" a year later when I was fourteen, dammit! That's a HUGE difference and YES my mom said I'm mature for my age. To put that in perspective, we were -still- just in love with Green Day almost two years after this album dropped, it was -still- the "Is this person cool or not" test, and music doesn't really hold that same longevity/"cool"-factor in the mainstream anymore. Anyhow, if you said "no".. What in the world is wrong with you? But if you said "yes", then you were one of the coolest kids around, because, y'know, your musical identity is the most important thing in the world to you. Not "cool" like one of the popular kids that we hated for no reason, but "cool" like "I SEE PAST THE BULLS- BULLCRAP THAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD!! My mom doesn't let me say that word" or whatever, because "Holiday" was your favorite song, and anyone who didn't like it could shove their opinion up their ass. You could go into a room where one of your friends was having their birthday party, pull down your pants and shit on the cake, and it'd be perfectly fine and awesome as long as you were wearing a Green Day shirt, which, yes, I had one or two. My brother even got the hand on the album cover tattooed on his arm years later because the album had meant so much to him. It was a really interesting album when it came out because it spawned three types of fans, the first two of which often crossing over: The "hell yeah I'm PUNK, what're you gonna do about it, dad?!" crowd, the "man, I'm so sad.." crowd, and the "FUCK THIS, THIS IS GAY, THIS ISN'T PUNK, THIS IS UNTALENTED SHIT" crowd, the latter of which often being really intolerable to be around for that long in real life. Now, I'm gonna be forward with you when I say this (potentially controversial) statement, but I think this album is one of the most important albums to happen to the mainstream in the last (as of writing) twenty years, and if it were released today, no, it wouldn't be held up as some groundbreaking masterpiece, but you know damn fucking well that Pitchfork would be jerking off over it, indie or not, and that people who hate this album would suddenly call it "the one good thing on the radio". If you don't believe me, allow me to explain...

If a modern-day rock opera made it onto the radio now to the point where all the hot girls you could never get were listening to it and praising it, even its nine minute long songs that you thought would be lost due to length on the general public, you'd be shitting your dick through your nipples, saying "O-Oh, jeez.. I l-like that album, too.." in an attempt to impress them. Let's face it: The awkwardness of your teenage years never ends, you just get better at keeping your powerlevel in check, and for good fucking reason: Everything is pretty good here. Sure, you've heard "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" too many times in "Naruto" AMVs over the years for you to really enjoy it now, but when you look at a lot of these songs, what they're saying, what they try to accomplish musically, etc, it becomes amazing that this was ever -the- big album less than fifteen years ago on the radio, when pop stars and post-grunge one-hit-wonders flooded the radio after nu-metal's popular appeal had begun to wear off. It's an album that criticizes the government heavily, has songs that serve distinct purposes, and try to tell a (shitty) story in order to make a cohesive, pretentious but accessible album full of nonstop memorable riffs, lyrics, and (if you were lucky enough to experience it as a teenager soon after it came out, like I was) plenty of youthful, angsty memories attached to powerchords. I'd say it's a lot more respectable than most people tend to give it credit for, and I'd really like for that to change.

One of the most important things when it comes to a rock opera is to have a storyline that grips the listener, and to be honest, the storyline on here is a bit memorable but is actually pretty shitty, and serves as some attempt to make these songs flow into each other, even if it momentarily breaks the story to have an incredibly personal song ("Wake Me Up When September Ends", dealing with the death of Billie Joe Armstrong's father) towards the end, the plotline ultimately doesn't matter and no one really gives a fuck about it. When you can give a summary of the complete plot of a rock opera in just two sentences at most, you realize that Billie Joe Armstrong and the crew didn't really focus as much on the plot or making you emotionally invested in the characters (Jesus of Suburbia, St. Jimmy, and Whatsername, which are actually memorable names for the characters in this story) to give a shit about what happens to any of them, especially when the plot isn't even properly fleshed out, leaving fans on forums online to debate about just what the hell happened and try to piece together a non-complicated story the best that they can. What I'm trying to get across is that the storyline in something that NEEDS a storyline doesn't matter at all, no matter how genuine the emotion behind it sounds, and that sucks, but hey, it actually doesn't take away anything from the music, I just had to bitch for a bit.

When you break the plotline of (the album) "American Idiot" down, it's pretty much a coming-of-age story about someone who's frustrated with the world, believes that being in a loving relationship with -that- person you actually barely have anything in common with is all you need, and is struggling to find the middle-ground between what your views are now and your parents' views on the world, given that they're from a different time. A lot of us related to everything I just listed when it first came out, a lot of it due to the world quickly changing after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and a lot of it due to just natural teenage angst, especially on my end since I'm sure I posted select lyrics to "Whatsername" as my MSN display message whenever I had gotten my heart broken the first time, with the lyric "I made a point to burn all of the photographs" being such a powerful lyric even to me present day, but even past the emotionally fragile nature of being a teenager, it got me and so many other equally ignorant teenagers thinking about politics for the first time in our lives, and that's fucking powerful. Now, when you break the music of (the album) "American Idiot" down, you don't get Rush's technicality, Meatloaf's penchant for theatrics, or Dream Theater's love for complex instrumentals, but what you do get is a trio of three angry young men who were perfectly content with making catchy little pop-punk songs about masturbating just ten years before with "Dookie" before being thrown into a post-9/11 world, writing pretty excellent songs (although it pisses me off how the title track steals the guitar riff from "Doublewhiskeycokenoice" by Dillinger Four) not only to show their displeasure with the direction that America is heading, but also to reinvent themselves as a band that made an album that feels completely satisfactory by the time it ends, and that you'll hopefully show your own children one day with "this is what I used to listen to as a teenager" and blow them away, but even in their excitement of actually enjoying something their parents loved when they were their child's age, it'll never, ever compare to the feeling of (as an insecure and impressionable teenager) trying to gain the approval of the girl at camp that you're hanging out with in the shade on a hot summer day, who prompted you with a question that you answer in the utmost confidence, hoping whole-heartedly to impress her, this girl (whose name you'd quickly forget) who wanted to marry Zac Efron: "Yeah, I love Green Day. I have, like, all of their albums. Do you?"

9/10
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Read about this album on Wikipedia! Great stuff to read while on the toilet! Yeah!