In March 2005 in a small village in Aberdare, South Wales, a nine-year-old boy, Corey George, lay in intensive care in a coma, having been hit by a car on his birthday two weeks earlier. Then his mother put on his favourite CD. Less than an hour later, Corey’s father told the BBC, the boy opened his eyes. The album was the seventh studio record by the American punk-rock band Green Day, American Idiot, which turns 20 this month. And Corey wasn’t the only person for whom it proved an awakening.
In the US, American Idiot was part of a musical mobilisation against George W Bush, the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq. Inspired by a similar movement protesting the Reagan presidency in the 1980s, Fat Mike, the lead singer of NOFX, started Rock Against Bush, a loose coalition of anti-war punk and alternative bands. Two compilation albums, Rock Against Bush, Vol 1 and Vol 2, with tracks from bands including Sum 41, the Offspring, the Foo Fighters and No Doubt, funded a tour in the months leading up to the 2004 election. (The song Green Day contributed to Vol 2, “Favourite Son”, appears on a special anniversary reissue of American Idiot released on 25 October.) Fat Mike also established Punk Voter, a website that asked “everyone to mobilise as a block of concerned voters. Punk bands, punk labels and punk fans must form a union against the chaotic policies George W Bush has put in place. He must be exposed.” After spending most of the Nineties producing songs about girls, weed and bodily functions (Green Day were named after one long binge; the title of their 1994 major-label debut album, Dookie, is slang for faeces), punk had rediscovered its political nous.
It was against this backdrop that Green Day released American Idiot – their first explicitly political album, with its songs of disillusionment, suburban boredom, subliminal advertising, “a steady diet of/Soda pop and Ritalin” – on 21 September 2004. It reached number one in 19 countries, won best rock album at the Grammys and went on to sell more than 23 million copies, making it one of the best selling albums of all time. During the month of its release, the band played the title track on CBS’s The Late Show with David Letterman; the other guest that night was the Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.
Despite the best efforts of Green Day and the Punk Voter movement, Bush was re-elected that November. But nearly 5 million more young people voted in 2004 than in 2000 – and the band’s career was revived. Green Day’s first number one was a song about watching TV and masturbating. American Idiot transformed them from the court jesters of US punk to its chief political agitators.
More than 5,000 miles from Green Day’s home town of Oakland, California, at an all-girls school in south-west London, American Idiot coursed through my class like an electric current. One friend wore an American Idiot pin-badge on her training bra; another box-dyed her hair “Billie Joe black” in tribute to the band’s frontman Billie Joe Armstrong. Several had numbers scrawled in Biro on the backs of their hands, a day-by-day countdown to the summer of 2005, when Green Day would play at the Milton Keynes National Bowl.
“Remember one thing,” Armstrong, a pocket rocket clad in black and red, eyes ringed in his trademark kohl, howled to the crowd that June, “regardless of who the powers that be are, the people that you elect, that I elect into office, remember you have the f****ing power! We’re the fucking leaders! Don’t let these bastards dictate your life or try to tell you what to do, alright?” The crowd screamed in response, though many were too young ever to have elected anyone. Still, American Idiot was for my peers and me part of the slow dawning that politics was not far-removed and adult, but could be personal and emotional – even for 12-year-olds.
When the release of Green Day’s second studio album, Kerplunk, began a bidding war among the major labels in 1991, Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tré Cool were just three kids from the grimy 924 Gilman Street Project in Berkeley, California. By the turn of the millennium and the release of Warning, an album the NME deemed “the sound of a band losing its way”, they had been together for a decade, were approaching 30, and were all married with kids. Having failed to reproduce the commercial success of Dookie, Green Day put out a greatest hits album in 2001, International Superhits! – considered by some a concession of defeat – and went on the road with the altogether sillier and more brash pop-punk trio Blink-182, a pairing that shocked older fans. In its review of Warning, Spin magazine asked: “Is this your older brother’s pop punk band? Have Blink-182 rendered them obsolete?” Fears that Green Day were ageing into irrelevance clearly plagued Armstrong: “I was a young boy that had big plans/Now I’m just another shitty old man” he sang on Nimrod’s “The Grouch”.
American Idiot was the record that was never meant to be. Returning to the studio in California in 2003, Green Day started recording a new album, Cigarettes and Valentines, which was nearly finished when the tapes went missing (the precise circumstances remain a topic of fevered discussion among fans on Reddit). By this point, the band were considering splitting up. Armstrong called Dirnt and asked: “Do you even wanna do this any more?”
The record that answered a resounding “yes” was born of further accident and misfortune. One day, Armstrong was registering for community service for a driving under the influence offence and Cool, in the process of divorcing his second wife, was meeting with his lawyers. Dirnt, alone in the studio, set himself the challenge of writing a “30-second vaudeville song”. When the other band members heard it, they began writing their own vignettes. Stitched together, these short bursts of song became a nine-minute suite, “Homecoming”. It was the start of American Idiot, a rich, ambitious concept album the band conceived of as a punk-rock opera. As well as the titular figure of the American Idiot – being both Bush and the Americans who blindly followed him – the album has other characters: a disenfranchised suburban kid, Jesus of Suburbia, falls in with St Jimmy, a rebellious “scumbag” (Dirnt’s word), and falls for a girl, Whatsername, who challenges their beliefs. For an album often remembered as pure protest, it also contains two rock ballads that are firmly embedded in pop culture, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and “Wake Me Up When September Ends” – songs about growing up and getting out, and the strange nostalgia for a home town you couldn’t wait to escape.
American Idiot’s joyless depiction of dead-end suburban America – “City of the dead/At the end of another lost highway/Signs misleading to nowhere”– was steeped in the bandmates’ own blue-collar upbringings. Billie Joe Armstrong (his real name), Mike Dirnt (real name: Michael Ryan Pritchard) and Tré Cool (unbelievably, real name: Frank Edwin Wright III) were all born in 1972, Armstrong and Dirnt in California. Armstrong had a happy childhood until his father, a truck driver, died of cancer when the singer was ten (a tragedy he reflects on in the song “Wake Me Up When September Ends”). His mother worked round-the-clock shifts as a waitress to keep the family afloat. Dirnt was born to a teenage mother with a heroin addiction and given up for adoption at six weeks old; his adoptive parents divorced when he was seven and his mother worked three jobs to support the family. Cool, born in Frankfurt, Germany, had the most fringe upbringing of the three: his father, a Vietnam veteran, moved the family to a remote house 150 miles north of San Francisco, which they built themselves and which had no electricity or plumbing.
This was, as far as they were concerned, the American way of life – one that Bush was supposedly willing to go to war to defend – and they saw little of moral value in it. The three believed the elite the president represented to be fundamentally divorced from their lived experience. “I come from a world [Bush] couldn’t ever understand,” Dirnt told Rolling Stone in 2005. “Drugs and fighting and divorce. If he’s right about what’s correct in this world, with his oil buddies and his Ivy League schools, then I’m just f****ed anyway.”
There were hints of the band’s politics on their previous album, Warning, but American Idiot had a new-found urgency from the start. Although the title track does not name Bush, it is a full-throated condemnation of self-interested politicians, war in the Middle East, reality TV, fake news (long before the phrase entered common parlance), and the apathy of their fellow Americans:
“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 mind-fuck America
Well maybe I’m the f*ggot, America
I’m not a part of the redneck agenda
Now everybody do the propaganda
And sing along to the age of paranoia.”
The album’s anti-war message is felt most keenly in “Holiday”, which decries the “shame” of soldiers dying “without a name”, the hypocrisy of protesters who flip-flop after finding “the money’s on the other side”, and a foreign policy that begets further violence. Its bridge is the most incendiary 30 seconds of the whole album:
“Sieg Heil to the president gasman
Bombs away is your punishment
Pulverise the Eiffel Towers
Who criticise your government
Bang bang goes the broken glass and
Kill all the f*gs that don’t agree
Try to fight fire, setting fire
Is not a way that’s meant for me”
It was risky stuff in a time when Bush had divided the world into “good” and “evil” with his Mussolini-eqsue sound bite: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” (The previous year the country group the Dixie Chicks had been blacklisted from radio stations and received death threats after an on-stage remark that they were ashamed Bush was from their native Texas.) Green Day spoke for those who were not “with the terrorists” but also not in favour of a futile war that killed more than 4.5 million people and displaced many more.
Today, Green Day have a new contender for the album’s title role. The day before the 2016 election, in a performance at the MTV Europe Music Awards, the band changed a lyric in “American Idiot” to (the nonsensical) “subliminal mind-Trump America”. They marked the former president’s August 2023 indictment by releasing a limited-edition band T-shirt featuring his mugshot, and celebrated the start of 2024 on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, changing another lyric, “I’m not part of the redneck agenda”, to “I’m not part of the Maga agenda”. But to what end?
Green Day have released seven albums of varying merit since American Idiot, none of which has come close to equalling its commercial success or cultural impact. Punk could not change the outcome of the 2004 election, and Green Day, concerned even then about being washed-up has-beens, are now in their fifties. Twenty years after the release of American Idiot, and 15 after Bush left the Oval Office, the album’s targets feel of their time, and the idea that music could change the course of history seems more naive than ever. But its sense of disenfranchisement and alienation remains.
[See also: Chappell Roan’s war on fandom]
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This article appears in the 02 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The fury of history