Music |
American Idiot
Green Day
By
Published: Jan 01, 2005
Category:
Rock
American Idiot
Green Day
Work out? Have an iPod? Like that inspired “Rocky” feeling when the right music kicks in and you pick up the pace on the running track or push harder on the elliptical trainer? Then read no further — the CD that will be your new training inspiration is Green Day’s “American Idiot.”
Wait a minute! Head Butler suggesting that you buy the #1 CD in America? Wasn’t the Big Idea of Butler that you’d find esoteric stuff here — books and music and films that were just too good for the masses? So what’s the deal?
Even Butler’s 19-year-old stepson had doubts about this one. “Green Day?” he said. “I remember ‘Dookie’ — first CD I ever bought.”
Yes, it was. The lad was nine that year. Kid punk was new, and “Dookie” was the best of it, and Green Day sold 10 million copies of it and these musicians found themselves, at 22, insanely rich. Since then, Green Day has made a bunch of CDs, none of them known to me.
But “American Idiot” — I heard the title song on the radio and was hooked. Have you heard it? Machine-gun drums, guitars chords hitting you at the speed of the Ramones, and angry, angry lyrics:
Don’t want to be an American idiot.
Don’t want a nation under the new mania.
And can you hear the sound of hysteria?
The subliminal mindfuck America.
Welcome to a new kind of tension.
All across the idiot nation.
Everything isn’t meant to be okay.
Television dreams of tomorrow.
We’re not the ones who’re meant to follow.
Well maybe I’m the faggot America.
I’m not a part of a redneck agenda.
Now everybody do the propaganda.
And sing along in the age of paranoia.
Couldn’t be clearer, could it? No way did these guys vote for Bush. Or even their native country. The second song on the CD, “Jesus of Suburbia,” rails against “a steady diet of soda pop and Ritalin.” Later, we learn that “the center of the earth” is a parking lot. And in this “city of the damned,” the kids are “lost children with dirty faces” — and “no one really seems to care.”
But “American Idiot” is no hymn to nihilism — Green Day cares, and their message is bracing and inspiring. There are ballads. There are love songs. And, most of all, there is a large, open, operatic feeling to this CD; Green Day has swallowed big chunks of rock history and repackaged it in what is nothing less than a song cycle. You’ll hear The Who. You’ll hear Queen. And you’re hear a lot of pop stuff that seems, in Green Day’s hands, new and fresh and fun.
Yes, this is music for kids who are misunderstood and proud of it, trapped in suburbia and unable to figure a way out that’s more radical than putting on headphones. But it’s also smart and literate, angry with a purpose and totally suitable for adults:
I read the graffiti,
In the bathroom stall,
Like the holy scriptures in a shopping mall.
In short, wake up. Get in a new conversation. Be smart, precise, clever — find the equivalent of a musical “hook.” Which is to say: follow the example of Green Day.
Butler burns 300 calories a day to this music. For those of you who no longer enjoy the metabolism of youth….is there a better endorsement than that?
To buy “American Idiot” from Amazon.com, click.
