When Green Day shed their skin without betraying themselves

In 2004 Billie Joe Armstrong he puts his talent to the test and conceives a rock opera, yes just like “Tommy” (read the review here) of the Whoto name one, and confirms himself as one of the best songwriters of his generation. On September 21, 2004, twenty years ago, the Green Day they publish “American Idiot” and it’s a great album. This is our review of the album.

Life is hard if you’re a musician and your music – punk rock – is made of three-minute songs based on three-chords-three. It’s hard if your band isn’t the Ramones, who were the masters of that genre. It’s hard even if your band is called Green Day, and was the engine of the commercial rebirth of punk rock in the 90s (which others, like the Offspring, mostly exploited).

But times have changed today and the radio doesn’t play songs like this anymore. We have to change, or die. Honor to Green Day, who with this “American Idiot” have managed to shed their skin without betraying themselves. They say (or rather, the album’s press kit says so) that they went from writing the “perfect three-minute song” to writing “the perfect nine-minute song.” A pompous project? Definitely. But listen to that little rock-opera from another time that is “Jesus of Suburbia,” four songs edited together, with changes in rhythm and melody assembled with skill: the definition is flawless.

The whole album is a kind of rock opera, a themed album on the contradictions of today’s America with a recurring protagonist: “I don’t want to be an American idiot/I don’t want a nation dominated by a new mania/Can you hear the sound of hysteria?”: these are the first lines of the album, the ones that open the title track.

“American Idiot” is, at least conceptually, the most ambitious album of the Californian trio. Don’t be scared: in the end, it’s always the same three chords. Only they are handled with a mastery that many colleagues can only dream of. In other words, “American Idiot” is saved because the basic idea – beautiful, but very dangerous in terms of potential boringness – is translated into a series of pleasant and well-played songs.

In short, “American Idiot” is an album that retains the best qualities of 90s punk rock (pleasantness, grit and melody) and brilliantly overcomes its limits (repetitiveness both in terms of musical structures and post-adolescent themes). It is not a masterpiece, that’s clear: it’s impossible to make masterpieces, in this genre, after the Ramones. But it is a pleasant and non-trivial album, which shows that Green Day are anything but stupid. The golden age of Californian punk rock may have passed, but Green Day have managed not to be swept away by success.