Imagine a scenario where you’re just two months out from a presidential election where it feels like the fate of the country, and even the free world as a concept, is on the line. The previous years have been full of tragedy, protest, fear, media distrust and paranoia. Unprecedented societal shifts introduce “new normals” and generations of kids are marked by the conditions they’re born into. The stakes have never been, nor could they be, any higher.
Wake me up when September ends, am I right?
If 1994’s Dookie was the album that made Green Day the biggest punk band in the world, American Idiot is the album that transcended punk entirely, rocketing Green Day to new heights of visibility at a time when their career had seemed to be flagging. Even most hit pop albums don’t enjoy the kind of cultural saturation and statistical dominance Green Day achieved here.
Upon its release 20 years ago this Saturday, American Idiot became Green Day’s first #1 album in the US, posting career-best first-week sales of 267,000 and spending three weeks atop the Billboard 200. Its songs were everywhere, including Top 40 radio. After “American Idiot” became Green Day’s first Hot 100 entry, the next three singles cracked the top 20. In terms of objective metrics, “Boulevard Of Broken Dreams” (#2), “Holiday” (#19), and “Wake Me Up When September Ends” (#6) are the band’s biggest hits by far. Two decades later, with American Idiot six times platinum in America alone, the sight of Green Day in their newly applied eyeliner and black-and-red uniforms is arguably the defining image of the band.
There are multiple ways to think about American Idiot, depending on how you received it. There’s the album that (re)launched a band into the stratosphere after it looked like they were on their way out. Just a few years earlier they had veered away from its core sound to mixed results with Warning, then put out a greatest hits album and rarities release — two things that bands on the upswing don’t tend to do. American Idiot, though, turned a whole generation of kids onto not only distorted guitars and punk rock sensibilities, but also made them question authority and the status quo and maybe start thinking about why saying the Pledge of Allegiance every day before school is actually sort of weird.
And then there’s the other way to look at American Idiot: an album that took a great band and turned them into a corny theater kid act, alienating the fans who loved them for their snotty punk rock roots and mud-slinging childish antics that defined much of the post-Nirvana ‘90s. In a word: They were sellouts. Posers, perhaps.
Until American Idiot, Dookie was the BC/AD dividing line of Green Day. It was where fans drew the “I like their old stuff better before they sold out” line. The fans who only heard “Basket Case” or “When I Come Around” but never “Going To Pasalacqua” or “1,000 Hours” were just trendy, and Green Day were turning their back on the scene that birthed them by signing to the major label and securing the bag. If you were too young for Nevermind, Dookie might’ve been the first time you heard anything like this; it got countless kids on the path to punk rock and every associated subgenre.
If you were too young for Dookie, though, American Idiot was probably the album for you. It hit kids of a certain age who were growing up alongside all of the things Billie Joe Armstrong was singing about, but without any of the context to understand it — a perfect audience for mostly vague, mostly one-size-fits-all references and surface-level political action. These kids remembered the towers falling and the war in the Middle East. They remembered the fear in their teachers’ and parents’ eyes. They remembered drills preparing for an attack in their town, to say nothing of the armed intruder drills that by 2004 had unfortunately become a norm and have only become more tragically necessary since.
For kids who hadn’t yet figured out that the adults in the room might not actually have all of the answers, that some things might go deeper than the answers they were getting in school or at home, or that terrorists might not just envy America’s freedom and that it might not actually be the best country in the world, a song that starts with “Don’t want to be an American Idiot” hit like a sledgehammer.
The message isn’t deep because it couldn’t be. At this point in time, Green Day needed a hit. They needed a louder return to form after the quirky, acoustic-heavy, and often underappreciated Warning. They needed something that could sell. After all, they were still on a major label and were considered marketable. As Armstrong said in Kerrang! in 2005, the suits at Warner thought the band had “lost their fucking minds” when they said they had a rock opera full of nine-minute anthems, but they still footed the bill, confident it would sell.
Overall, American Idiot isn’t actually a political record. There are really only two songs with specific references to anything political — the title track and “Holiday,” with its spoken-word breakdown:
Sieg Heil to the President Gasman
Bombs away is your punishment
Pulverize the Eiffel Towers
Who criticize your government
Bang-bang goes the broken glass, and
Kill all the fags that don’t agree
Trials by fire, settin’ fire
Is not a way that’s meant for me
Billie Joe Armstrong did not invent political commentary and — take it from a guy who would blurt out “Green Day” when asked his favorite band of all time — he’s not especially good at it. The point of American Idiot was not to teach geopolitics and the specific, itemized failings of the Bush administration, but it did at least point to the fact that there were some cracks in the foundation and allow kids to notice that something was up. There were, in fact, “hollow lies” that you could, in fact, “beg to dream and differ” from. And hidden in the sprawling multi-part Who worship and pageantry, kids of this certain age could blissfully fancy themselves the revolutionaries of their time, or at least their junior high school, ready to dismantle the establishment one catchy chorus at a time, much to the chagrin of the older brothers and cousins who still swore the only correct Green Day album to canonize was Dookie.
As soon as the overture of “American Idiot” ended, you were starting the plot in earnest, following the “Jesus Of Suburbia” through his unsatisfactory homelife with Moms and Brads, chemical distractions, the belief that life could be better if only he was able to get out of this rut and this town, and a Fight Club-esque journey of split personality.
One of the key things Green Day did well with American Idiot that set itself apart from capital-p Political music of the time was that they expanded on the idea of Bush-era life beyond yelling about the actual policies or simply directing anger at the leaders. That stuff is almost incidental. There was empathy and relatability to the civilians not engaged in any war at home or abroad, but simply fighting against youthful apathy, self-doubt, and ennui, just as they had when they were writing about biting their lips and closing their eyes.
American Idiot isn’t a protest album, after all. It’s a love story. And say what you want about Billie Joe Armstrong’s bona fides when it comes to writing political anthems, there’s no denying the guy knows his way around a song about yearning.
If there is one lyric that serves as the overarching motif and theme of the album, the one it would theatrically revisit to make sure you understood what the show is really about, it’s “Nobody likes you/ Everyone left you/ They’re all out without you/ Having fun.”
Kathleen Hanna taunts you with it at the beginning of the album’s unsung showstopper “Letterbomb” — a gut punch to many an insecure school-aged listener about feeling abandoned by your friends, watching everything that looked so promising crumble away. “Letterbomb” serves as the album’s long-and-short plot summary and remains in Green Day’s upper echelon. The melody is used later on in the album’s crescendo grand finale, “Homecoming,” first borrowing the melody for a Mike Dirnt-sung reference to falling asleep watching Spike TV (which itself serves as possibly the most jarring time capsule when listening with 2024 ears) and ending with a rumbling, bell-ringing final chorus to remind you that even after all of the rebellion, all of the hijinks, all of the hope, you’re still just the disappointment to yourself that you were back home with your parents.
Once again, Billie Joe Armstrong sings in “Letterbomb”:
You’re not the Jesus of Suburbia
The St. Jimmy is a figment of
Your father’s rage and your mother’s love
Made me the idiot America
Our hero leaves his home in search of adventure, finds it, enters a honeymoon phase. Then he learns it’s not all it’s cracked up to be and that wherever he goes, there he is. After all of the dust has settled, he’s meditating on everything that has happened, faces from his past that at one point meant everything and life-changing moments that now “feels like forever ago.”
“I’ll never turn back time/ Forgetting you but not the time.”
At the time of its release, 2004-era Pitchfork wrote a shockingly positive review of American Idiot, giving it a 7.2 back when the grading rubric was brutal, praising the band’s ability to go beyond hurling insults at the president like shoes, finding common ground with the people going through what at the time was an unprecedented existence. It’s funny to look at that review now, though. Just like how so much of what was happening in daily life in the early 2000s now almost seems quaint in comparison, it’s almost silly to see the writer boil down the album to “Life changing? Not a bit.”
After the lightning in a bottle of American Idiot, Green Day returned to the well with an album that felt like a sequel that people weren’t really asking for – 21st Century Breakdown, once again bringing two lovers together amidst Billie Joe Armstrong’s idea of a political revolution backdrop, even going as far as specifically name-dropping the “towers’ fall” to rhyme with “Homeland Security could kill us all.” We heard it before, and it was catchier the first time.
Nothing topped the eight-minute mark, but nothing also got to the point as quickly, decisively, or with as much fun as the album before it. It was objectively successful enough for a big band: Songs ended up in commercials and video games, and the concert venues sure didn’t shrink, but it didn’t change anyone’s lives like American Idiot had. Each album after seemed to find the band throwing ideas at the wall to see if anything stuck, including an over-ambitious trilogy of albums with probably about one album’s worth of serviceable material between them, wardrobe changes, and even an album that re-hashed the American Idiot album art as a sign of maybe finally, truly, running out of ideas.
And we haven’t even gotten to the Broadway musical yet.
Suddenly even the die-hards, the St. Jimmy faithful, were starting to feel fatigued. By 2010, we had already lived through Hope that gave way to More Of The Same in many regards. The crusty Oakland punk squats that influenced the story were now fully gentrified, the war the characters were being shipped off to was somehow still happening, and the depiction of stereotypical punks with stereotypically punk nicknames on bare punk mattresses on stage in an increasingly expensive Manhattan felt decidedly un-punk.
There’s a universe where American Idiot never came out. In that universe, Green Day put out an album in 2003 called Cigarettes And Valentines. It’s probably fine, more or less. It’s a return to form after toying with different styles on Nimrod and even more on Warning. It’s a proof-of-concept LP demonstrating that the band is still viable, like the ones Weezer keeps trying before sliding back into pop-chart territory.
As the story goes, the Cigarettes And Valentines master tapes were stolen and the band, despite having backup copies, just decided to scrap the whole thing and start from scratch. We never heard Cigarettes And Valentines, though. Actually, that’s not true — we’ve heard the title track much later, when they performed it live as part of the Awesome As Fuck live release.
But rather than just start over, the band holed up first in an Oakland rehearsal space, and then headed down to LA, and what came from about five months of recording was Green Day’s most divisive, star-making album since the first divisive and star-making album they put out 10 years prior.
Plan A of releasing Cigarettes And Valentines might’ve just expedited the downward trajectory of the band after people started losing interest with Warning (again, unfairly). The venues would’ve shrunk, people would’ve liked some songs and appreciated they were going electric again, but it probably wouldn’t have been life-changing to anyone, including Green Day. Within this timeline, we probably don’t get other big-swing and era-defining albums. After American Idiot, it suddenly became possible for scrappy pop punk bands to become Really Big Bands and introduce entire narratives and universes. Rob Cavallo, the long-time Green Day producer who steered the American Idiot ship, also guided My Chemical Romance through the recording of The Black Parade — the coincidence of course being that Gerard Way was inspired to start MCR after the Sept. 11 attacks.
If you choose to believe the story about Cigarettes And Valentines being stolen, then it’s safe to argue that that singular moment changed the trajectory of Green Day and the genre. If you don’t, you think that the band just knew it had one last shot, and that Cigarettes and Valentines — with a title track that we now know sounds like a perfectly fine AI-generated late-stage Green Day track — did not have the juice, so the band went back to the drawing board.
Either way, American Idiot was a life-changing album. It changed Green Day’s lives. It changed things for a lot of other bands, too. It changed the lives of a whole generation of kids whether they decided to start googling the background of the war in Iraq or just liked to jam out to “Holiday.”
Right now, after everything, including the inevitable career slowdown that the band was probably destined for had they gone with Cigarettes And Valentines, Green Day seem to have found where they’re supposed to be. I think it’s fair to say that for a while the band had a hard time admitting that they were growing up. And now they’re an institution. The elder statesmen at the helm of a giant nostalgia tour coming soon to a ballpark near you, bringing both American Idiot and Dookie to a ballpark near you – a large enough venue to fit the various factions of fanbases. It seems like they’re on their third act, but there could yet be a third wind in there somewhere. I wouldn’t doubt them — not after the comeback they pulled off with American Idiot.
The album ushered in an entirely new era for a band whose career was already the envy of all the bands that copied them. If you read between the lines, its lyrics also seemed to predict that comeback. While the band would tell you that “Wake Me Up When September Ends” is the only purely biographical moment in the album, where they break down the fourth wall to pay tribute to Armstrong’s late father, there are plenty of lines on the album that you could just as easily project onto Green Day. It’s fair to say that the lyrics about extraordinary girls or the exploits of the Jesus of Suburbia weren’t purely fictional. They rhyme too nicely with songs like “2,000 Light Years Away” or “Welcome To Paradise.”
Maybe there was a moment in this album’s creative infancy, when the tapes for Cigarettes And Valentines were stolen or just dropped in the studio trash can, where it sure felt like nobody liked them and everyone left them. If “Letterbomb” is really the album’s centerpiece, you can see in the chorus that the band was betting on themselves when maybe they felt like no one else was: “It’s not over til you’re underground/ It’s not over before it’s too late.”
