For at least a dozen years, I have resisted Green Day with the toughest of age-tinted stoicism. To me, they seemed like Sha-Na-Na at Woodstock or the Stray Cats in the 80s or The Knack in the 70s - pure throwback nostalgia and imitation. Who were these guys playing pure punk in the 90s, anyway? Phaw, man, I spent too many nights at CBGB, Max's, Mudd Club, the old Pep Lounge - you know, back in the day. Bought Johnny Thunders a beer at Zappa's in Brooklyn, man. Who do these young fellas think they are, some kind of Stiv Bators and Cheetah Chrome tribute band?
Bridge and tunnel wannabes. And worse. They were playing over-clipped machine gun downstrokes on low-slung Gibsons a generation after this bridge and tunnel wannabe closed up his short-lived punk rock lifestyle. Didn't these poseurs from Oakland know Max's was a nail salon? That the Sex Pistols were a dinosaur lounge act? That the surviving Dolls were co-headlining oldies festivals with Chubby Checker? That Johnny was dead, man?
I was even more dismissive of their planned "punk rock opera" project. Oh yeah right, like Billie Joe Armstrong was gonna play Pete Townshend?
But I love American Idiot.
I play the damned thing every day, unwinding the iPod and headphones from my backpack during my commute in a Brooks Brothers suit, feeling much as Townshend must've felt when he penned Rough Boys as an ode to the Pistols and Ramones back in '80 (ok, maybe not that evocative). This mofo rocks from start to finish, tells a compelling story, and sets out a lush musical basket-weaving that reaches - yes, reaches - well beyond anything in so-called popular music these days.
The structure of the record is simplicity; A-D-G chords strummed Steve Jones style, rumbling easily from everyone's garage circa 1979. And then the scene-setting words, which I admit, get my attention:
Don't wanna be an American idiot.
Don't want a nation under the new media.
And can you hear the sound of hysteria?
The subliminal mindfuck America.
Anti-media, anti-war, anti-Republican, anti-Bush, anti-digital vocal compression, but relentlessly pro-American in a way that harkens back to Hank Williams and Lost Highway. That is to say, there is no normal America, no typical America, and no actual heartland. This is a brilliant and deadly straight assessment. Armstrong tugs that five-decade string leading back to ol' Hank in Jesus of Suburbia:
City of the dead
At the end of another lost highway
Signs misleading to nowhere
City of the damned
Jimmy, the lead man in this power chord musicale, is a familiar urban character - a junkie, hooked on Novacaine, down on his luck, getting older, prone to violence and suicide, obsessed with his idea of a girl. Yeah, Quadrophenia, although the GD guys swear up and down that it's not an ode to Sir Pete.
But it's an older Jimmy, a 30-something who hasn't made it in life, not a teen mod battling rockers in Brighton. On this boulevard of broken dreams, twenty years slips by quickly and there's no irony and art in urban angst, just loneliness. In the end, American Idiot is not really a political work, although it's been played as a Bush-bashing ode by the MTV crowd. That misses the point: the record is an inner story of failure, of facing up to busted dreams. Our current landscape of politics and media is simply the backdrop - the light soundtrack.
Armstrong has said he spent a month in New York, away from his wife and kids and millionaire's McMansion, getting wasted on red wine and writing. That's the method of American Idiot. Staying up late in the Chelsea Hotel, writing Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands for you. "I felt like I was too old to be angry anymore," Armstrong told Rolling Stone. "I didn't want to come across as the angry older guy. It's sexy to be an angry young man, but to be a bitter old bastard is another thing altogether."
Tell me about it, Billie Joe. Yet, how to avoid the fate? Time barrels onward, we grow up, we move away. Over simple major chords played on the downstroke, American Idiot holds that story together, with scenery on the side of the road we all can recognize, Hank Williams road signs, scenery that does not shift from red state to blue and back again.
And in the darkest night
If my memory serves me right
I'll never turn back time
Forgetting you, but not the time.
