Green Day defined protest music in the 2000s with their album American Idiot, but it's hiding a much more universal theme
Images from left: Billie Joe Armstrong , Green Day , Billie Joe Armstrong From almost any other band, the surprise would be that an inherently political album, with a brash and pointed lead single that paints early 2000s conservatism as being in a constant state of buffoonery, but in a dangerous way, so stupid that it might get us all killed, could rocket to the top of the Billboard charts. But this was Green Day, the band named after a day-long weed binge.
Three years later, three years of repressed confusion and fear and anger and contextless feelings that things were capital-B Bad, not just for me but for the world as a whole,blew my 13-year-old mind. I didn’t fully understand the political implications of it all, but the feelings hit meWhen Bush gets re-elected by an incredibly slim margin, despite a massive Democratic effort to discredit his handling of Iraq and Afghanistan and his response to September 11, there is a sense of impending doom.
After the bridges and the tunnels and the ferries closed to vehicular traffic as officials scrambled to lock down the city, he walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, then fought his way to the Long Island Rail Road hub in Jamaica, Queens, and hopped on a dangerously overcrowded train, people pushed together, face-to-face, no room to move, certainly no space to grab onto a handrail, enough bodies to effectively hold you up without fear of falling anyway, to get back to us. He was lucky to get out.
Jesus, “the son of rage and love,” as he describes himself, moves out of his broken home, leaves behind “this hurricane of fucking lies,” and heads for the city. Things really go off the rails after “St. Jimmy” with the heavy drug use detailed in “Give Me Novacaine.” The feeling of wanting to numb yourself to the world around you because if life is this bad, you might as well run it fully into the ground. “
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