248. Green Day, "American Idiot"

 

When we last saw Green Day, they had just SOLD OUT by moving from tiny local Lookout! records to Reprise, causing great consternation all over the East Bay.  Well, this album, their seventh, completed the process by moving 16 million units and making them into one of the country's - maybe the world's - biggest rock bands.  Now, as a former sneering indie kid, it would give me immense pleasure to report that this is the ultimate sell-out, an overproduced studio confection, lacking in imagination and packaged to appeal to the lowest and biggest-selling common denominator. 

Unfortunately, this album fucking rips, and I can't stop listening to it.  It's fucking great.

Green Day's secret power (or maybe it's not such a secret) has been to marry the hardest-driving, crunchies punk guitars to the catchiest, poppiest melodies, vocal tracks so great that Max Martin would cut off his Autotune knob just to write one of them.  I mean, I guess it's not a secret; that's why they call it POP-PUNK, but Billie Joe Armstrong does it better than anyone else.  You cannot come at the king, lower pop-punk bands, because you can't get into his room.

Let's take "Holiday," one of the best songs on the album, an overtly poltical song (as many of the songs on this record are), but forget that, the lyrics could be about ice cream flavors or BART stations or whatever.  I want to focus on two things: the guitar chord progression and the vocal melody.

The chords are some of the most fundamental in rock; the basic progression is E minor-C-G-D, then E minor-C-G-B.  Couldn't get more basic.  The guitars sound great, of course - in fact, the whole album, produced by Rob Cavallo, sounds fantastic - but the real genius of the song is the vocal melody.  Armstrong swerves all over the chords, always going in a slightly different direction than you'd expect.  He's been doing that since the first Green Day album, but he's just so good at it.  And this vocal style makes the chorus sound truly anthemic.  There are also incredible harmonies on the chorus that must have taken forever to get right.  It's just a fantastic song.

There are a ton of hits on the album - the title track, of course, and "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," and "Wake Me When September Ends," but even the lesser-known songs are great.  I had never heard "Too Much Too Soon," but it sounds like classic old Green Day, like it could have fit nicely on Dookie.  "Shoplifter" has a great early-80's X vibe.  

This album was, of course, turned into a Broadway show, as if to seal the deal that Green Day was no longer cool.  It is physically impossible to be cool when you have a show on Broadway based on one of your albums.  Even Dookie-era Billie Joe would have laughed derisively.  But fuck it, this album goes hard.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Fuck yes.