Green Day - American Idiot

Though I've never really been a massive Green Day fan, I've always wanted to give a really elaborate review of this album, given the circumstances of how this album has been regarded since its release.

This year marks 10 years since then-9 year-old me was properly a fan of pop music, I'd watch the chart show every week (which led me to registering on this website later on, of course) and started collecting NOW CDs (which the Warners-signed Green Day was never included on, but still). Anyway back then this album was astronomically huge - the biggest thing in pop music, yet alone rock - and my memory of its success is one I often use when trying to imagine what the era of albums like Thriller and Nevermind would've felt like.

(Side note: of course other pop albums have reached and/or surpassed American Idiot's inescapability in the years since, but music critics try to deny it with 'something something fragmented culture' as if the general public is mostly in the form of /mu/tants these days, which is of course bollocks.)

It was SO big, infact, that unfortunately Green Day were ALSO the first band I felt peer-pressured into disliking for being 'too mainstream' (as told by my older brother and cousins who liked such obscure acts as MCR and Muse back then) which is a microcosm of a whole bunch of inane reasons that have rendered Green Day, and this album especially, terminally 'uncool' to like. Even though it sold millions and racked up some impressive critical accolades (even Pitchfork gave it a 7.2 upon initial release) its fate is a somewhat tragic phenomenon of an album's iconic status fading from instant-canonisation to being under-appreciated a decade from its reign in pop culture.

It's why I've maintained a low-key defensive attitude for Green Day, and American Idiot in particular, since while it's not a flawless album, the ways in which this album is dismissed by those considered tastemakers has always left me more than a little dumbfounded. Here will the eye-rolling (and eye-rollingly common) critiques of American Idiot will be named and shamed by yours truly:

"Green Day are sellouts who jumped on the emo/mall-punk bandwagon!" Why yes I'm certain that including TWO NINE MINUTE SONGS WITH SONG-SUITE STRUCTURES onto their album was an easy cash-grab that everyone else in the mainstream was doing, as was incorporating influences from rock opera and classic pop into a modern punk framework. I wouldn't have thought the guy complaining about eye-liner may actually be more brainwashed by marketing than those who actually bought it, but I can always reconsider.

"Green Day are talentless losers who only play 3 chords!" Again TWO NINE MINUTE SONGS WITH SONG-SUITE STRUCTURES (with too many changes in chord progression to count) but outside of that, plenty of great or at least varied musical moments to be heard here, like the explosive outro to 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams' or the slightly psychadelic 'Give Me Novacaine' or the glockenspiel-tinged 'Wake Me Up When September Ends'. Really, this album should be musically 'complex' enough to please anyone who isn't a deluded Dream Theater fanboy, and we can ignore those people. Given how dire so much commercial rock in the 00s was, the superiority of this album to pretty much anything else should've been obvious (but then again, association with *that* rock audience is usually an instant turn-off for a lot of more indie-leaning rock fans, myself included, and listening to this album of YouTube and Spotify and being recommended 3 Doors Down or Hoobastank is a needlessly cruel thing to experience when trying to enjoy this album.)

"The politics are shallow anti-Americanism!" This one I actually DO understand. I myself have consciously developed a pro-American attitude as a reaction to so much vogue America-bashing I've constantly been conditioned to agreeing with, whilst actually finding it toxic, hateful and hypocritical at best (unrelated note: British culture is not any more sophisticated than American culture, if you think that, you're dreaming.). But while the album's politics are hardly Chumbawamba, they are a bit deeper than "Wah Wah I hate America and George Bush". In fact, most of its lyrical content focuses on the personal emotions felt in the album's storyline where the protagonists learns to resist the impulse to aimlessly 'rebel' (which the St. Jimmy character is a caricature of) and transition into an adult life where social concerns are dealt with in a useful, progressive way.

I'm sorry about wannabe edgelords getting into America-bashing from buying this record, but that's just the nature of popular things eventually being liked by assholes. The content of this album in terms of politics or storyline is not really something I think much of when enjoying this album, even if it's flawed it's easy to ignore.

(side note: another good thing is that there's no Rage Against The Machine case where their politics are painfully derivative of a racially oppressed hip-hop group like Public Enemy, where they've taken twice the honors for half the actual commentary)

Anyway, American Idiot, despite all this odious bullshit surrounding it, is a very entertaining, fun and often powerful rock album which easily ranks as one of the best mainstream rock albums of its time. While its middle section does show a noticeable dip in song-for-song quality, the nature of the album's composition - given the context of *those* two aforementioned songs - means that the enjoyability of the record holds up more consistently, with filler songs feeling ostensibly as part of a greater medley which stretches across the entire album. The quality of the music is also able to withstand it's production, which incorporates many elements of a polished 00s rock sound - overly compressed drums in 'stadium' mode, big sounding guitar chords, et al, (although thankfully they still maintain a more distinctive, punchier feel to them which allows the power chords to sound lively and not lunkheaded). Here's hoping the realisation that it deserved all of it's fame in the first place comes through for its 20th anniversary a decade from now.

2018 Edit: Heck it this deserves a 6.
Laatst gewijzigd: 01/02/2019 10:59