American Idiot - An Unfairly Maligned Album

Ok. I know its still uncool to say this, but I love the Green Day album American Idiot. It’s been 14 years since the album came out and I still love it. It’s one of the few pop-punk albums of the late 1990s/2000s that really stands the test of time (others are the first Third Eye Blind album and My Chemical Romance’s Black Parade, but that’s a discussion for another time).

I will admit, I was never a Green Day purist. I never listened to their early stuff and my first real introduction where I connected the radio song to the band was Good Riddance back in the late ‘90s. So I can’t speak to the changes in “hardcore-ness” that the band went through. But I don’t buy that they sold out at all.

One of my favorite earlier Green Day songs is Basketcase. And honestly, it sounds a heck of a lot like everything on American Idiot, for all that it came out a decade before hand. Listen to Basketcase and then St Jimmy. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Done listening? Great. They are clearly the same sound and the same band. Major chords, high-energy, fun punk. The lyrical themes, of alienation and mental issues are the same too. The idea that one is a “sell-out” version of the other is musically and lyrically false.

Also, yeah, punk is allowed to be fun. Watching Dropkick Murphys sing “Kiss Me I’m Shitfaced” at the end of the concert and the people from the audience invited onto the stage to sing along was super fun. “I Wanna Be Sedated” by the Ramones – a punk song with unimpeachable credentials – is in a major key and fun to rock out to. So is “I Fought the Law and the Law Won” by The Clash.

But back to American Idiot. I love a good concept album. It’s hard to pull off well. especially when you need to sell both singles and the album itself. Listen to Her Satanic Majesty’s Request if you don’t believe me. American Idiot is best appreciated as a cohesive whole, as any concept album should be. It’s coherent, both musically and thematically. And it had four major singles off the album – American Idiot, Holiday, Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and Wake Me Up When September Ends.

Heck, even some of the unknown songs off the album are great. Whatsername is actually one of if not my actual favorite song from the album. I certainly listen to it more often than any of the other songs from the album.

If anything, the number of more ballad-y songs is my guess as to what turns a lot of people to deem the album as not “punk enough.” Which I think is a shame, personally, but to each their own. Even if you hate those, there are plenty of up-tempo songs on the album. And I will ask those people – did you hate all of Nimrod because of Good Riddance? A rock ballad or even three doesn’t destroy an album, even if it’s not your taste.

Selling out and being popular are different. Green Day didn’t sell out on American Idiot, the sound and themes are extremely consistent compared to the previous decade of work, or at the very least recognizably similar.

At the end of the day, something stands up over time if you can listen/watch something and it continues to resonate, despite the changes in time or even era. 14 years after it came out, American Idiot still hits that note for me. If you disagree, please just listen to it without your hipster headphones and reconsider. Something good shouldn’t be punished because the band became too popular.