American Idiot, Part One

Before I get into it, if there’s anyone who reads this damn thing, I’ve decided to serialize this “essay” I started a couple years ago about American Idiot, which is unironically my favorite record of all time. Be warned, though, this is way more of a self-absorbed wank-a-thon than it is about the album, but all things considered, I don’t really give a fuck. You aren’t required to read it, but if you do, I appreciate that.

Now, then. An introduction.

I went on a Tinder date back in December 2015, when I was on winter break. Over coffee in beautifully worn-in Portage Park, she asked me why I was so woke. Because I’m white and very uncool, I had to ask her what that meant. When she was kind enough to define it, I didn’t really have an answer ready for her, as much as I wanted to give her one. I was really flattered, though. I tried to explain myself, at first in hopes of making myself sound smart enough for her to want to give me a kiss when we parted ways, secondly in a half-assed attempt to figure out where my fascination with politics came from myself. The earliest of these inklings I can remember are reading a bunch of Life in Hell comics and listening to my mom complain endlessly about the current state of affairs (which, to this day, hasn’t changed at all and God love her for it). In sixth grade social studies class, my teacher asked me if said political views (over which I’d argue with another kid I won’t name, with whom I have been frenemies for going on thirteenish years) were mine, or my parents’. I lied and said they were my own, and somehow, that got me a spot at lunch with her and another student, where we would discuss politics and current affairs, though when they were discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I had no fucking idea what they were talking about. There was the orange carpet and the wall divider, and we sat together in those little desks as I ate my tepid mac and cheese and semi-proudly declared that I liked things that were more controversial.

“This is probably one of the most controversial things ever,” my teacher said.

I didn’t say anything back. I took a gamble and lost big. That was in, like, 2004, and long after that, I still loved the rush of righteous indignation. I’d argue that it’s why I didn’t do my degree in politics. I never cared about the nitty gritty details of public policy and lamented the nebulousness of ideology, and just cared about being right and being a good person in an unjust world. I also spent way too much time reading about various political ideologies on Wikipedia over and over. That doesn’t make me an expert, of course, but watching people shout at each other on lefty Twitter and weirdo-meme Facebook groups does. Shitty jokes aside, I do wonder what the most practical version of a utopia is, and in combination with my low-intensity regret in majoring in English has me hoping that that counts for something. The year before that snippet I quoted above, though, my older brother Kyle sat in the computer room. Kyle is three and a half years older than me, and to this day, he is still the coolest person I know, and the guy who used to cut my hair in Atlanta is a close second. I always looked up to him, and he would always let me hang out with him and his friends when I was a little kid—there was nothing like having the privilege of hanging out with the older kids, who, by natural law, were automatically superior beings in all forms. During the glory days of Windows XP and the dawn of iTunes and its best friend LimeWire, he repeated two songs in tandem: 1985 by Bowling for Soup (which I discovered about ten years later, to my dismay, was a cover that sounded little different from the original), and American Idiot. I mention all of the origins of my interest in politics because it’s an explicitly political record, and in the grand scheme of things, these loves blossomed around the same time.

“Con,” Kyle said, seated in the corduroy recliner in front of the desktop. “Have you heard this yet?”

“Heard what?” I asked. I was in the doorway, in case you were wondering. I’m ripping off Knausgaard.

He played Green Day’s American Idiot from the computer, and I don’t even know what it was that hooked me—how fast it was, how catchy the opening riffs were, I don’t know. One of those. I couldn’t make out what Billie Joe was saying, or what they meant when I used the power of Google to find the lyrics. This isn’t when the seeds of my love for music were planted in my brain, though. This was the flowering, I think. Long before this moment, as far back as I can remember, my mom was always playing her favorite singles in the car when we were with her, which, as a little kid, was almost all the time. She blasted everything—silly pop songs like Toni Basil’s Mickey, Blondie’s comeback single, Maria, to full Elvis Costello best-of compilations and the cleaner parts of Purple Rain. I never connected any of that, not even the Christmas music, to playing the instrument they forced everyone to pick in third grade. Every student was sent down to the small gym to try one out and figure out if they’d like it or not. I thought at the time that it was just a small, robotic ritual, akin to something The Simpsons would lampoon in its early days; it was something there for us to commiserate over, not a passion, not something we wanted or even needed to do, but something everyone just did, and that was all. In this musical purgatory, though, I grew more and more adept to using AIM to talk to my friends and girlfriends on a daily basis, reading about and playing every video game I could get my hands on. I don’t know what exactly compelled me to search for music on AOL MusicNet while I toiled for hours and hours on message boards and flash games and homemade technical guides for the Fairchild Channel F, but it had to have been around then that I realize that songs belong on albums, and albums to artists, and that American Idiot was just the titular song—there was so much more under the same umbrella.

I want to pretend to sound all profound and shit and tell you that I remember the exact first moment I listened to it all the way through, but I can’t, and I’m not going to make it up, because that isn’t going to do anything for anyone. Besides, I’ve said enough already. I call myself a hipster, and have for years, (not just in music, but in all of my many interests) and while Pitchfork’s influence and emphasis on the importance of independent music (whatever that means anymore) is here to stay, I proudly and semi-jokingly call American Idiot not only my favorite album, but one of the most important albums ever released. That’s a bold claim, I know, but to jam in an unrelated quote from a dead guy, Michel de Montaigne once said, “Every man within himself holds the entire human condition.” There’s no way that’s true, but if one writer can sit on his ass, write a novel, and be called a visionary or an important voice, or in Dostoevsky’s case, prophetic, then he may have been onto something. I’m not sure what. You tell me. American Idiot is such an album, and as an egotistical writer, I am here to gush and gloat about how important just listening to it makes me feel, like I can not just one day, but soon, maybe even now, become the revolutionary I’ve always secretly wanted to be, in whatever it is I decide to do, at the forefront of all my friends next to the girl I love, at my desk, on my runs, or in the car. And don’t think too much about that last line—these things run together in my head. The record is overproduced, it’s lyrically clunky, its “plot” doesn’t even make any sense, and there are a handful of songs that don’t even belong on the album if Billie Joe Armstrong, its lead singer, insists on calling it a rock opera. Even so, as Pitchfork put it, it’s “angrily on point,” and as I put it, it has never been more relevant. It paints a flowing picture with melodies and lines that really are great, with an accurate and booming sense of love, grief, and isolation, the memetic feelings any generically nihilistic asshole in my nationwide peer group finds just hilarious and normal, and this thing was recorded and performed for audiences long before this attitude became fashionable. I’ll listen to my heart on this one, even as I write, though I want to make something clear: this is not exactly something that will be told in order. American Idiot has so many glaring flaws, and Green Day is not the Velvet Underground, nor The Beatles, New Order, My Bloody Valentine, Nirvana, Kendrick or Saba, by any means. Even so, American Idiot is one of the greatest albums ever made. For you, the reader, I can’t say. For music critics whose ears are much more refined than mine, well, I’m sure they’ll laugh at me if they read this. To me, as someone who may or may not have the whole human condition behind him, there’s no contest.