Американский Идиот: Панк-опера Green Day

2004 studio album by Green Day

American Idiot is the seventh studio album by the American rock band Green Day, released on September 21, 2004, by Reprise Records. As with their previous four albums, it was produced by Rob Cavallo in collaboration with the group. Recording sessions for American Idiot took place at Studio 880 in Oakland and Ocean Way Recording in Hollywood, both in California, between 2003 and 2004. A concept album, dubbed a "punk rock opera" by the band members, American Idiot follows the story of Jesus of Suburbia, a lower middle class American adolescent anti hero. The album expresses the disillusionment and dissent of a generation that came of age in a period shaped by tumultuous events such as 9/11 and the Iraq War. In order to accomplish this, the band used unconventional techniques for themselves, including transitions between connected songs and some long, chaptered, creative compositions presenting the album themes. Following the disappointing sales of their previous album Warning (2000), the band took a break and then began what they had planned to be their next album, Cigarettes and Valentines. However, recording was cut short when the master tapes were stolen; following this, the band made the decision to start their next album from scratch. The result was a more societally critical, politically charged record which returned to the band's punk rock sound following the more folk and power pop inspired Warning, with additional influences that were not explored on their older albums. Additionally, the band underwent an "image change", wearing red and black uniforms onstage, to add more theatrical presence to the album during performances and press events. American Idiot became one of the most anticipated releases of 2004. It marked a career comeback for Green Day, charting in 27 countries, reaching for the first time the top spot on the Billboard 200 for the group and peaking at number one in 18 other countries. It has sold over 23 million copies worldwide, making it the second best selling album for the band (behind their 1994 major label debut, Dookie) and one of the best selling albums of the decade and all time. It was later certified 6× Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in 2013. The album spawned five successful singles: the titular track, "American Idiot", "Holiday", "Wake Me Up When September Ends", "Jesus of Suburbia" and the Grammy Award for Record of the Year winner "Boulevard of Broken Dreams". American Idiot was very well received critically and commercially upon release, and has since been hailed as one of the greatest albums of all time. It was nominated for Album of the Year and won the Award for Best Rock Album at the 2005 Grammy Awards. It was also nominated for Best Album at the Europe Music Awards and the Billboard Music Awards, winning the former. Its success inspired a Broadway musical, a documentary and a planned feature film adaptation. Rolling Stone placed it at 225 on their 2012 list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", and again in 2020, at 248.

Green Day was one of the most popular rock acts of the 1990s. However, their 2000 album Warning was a commercial disappointment In early 2002, they embarked on the Pop Disaster Tour, headlining with Blink 182. The tour created momentum for the band, who were earning a reputation as "elder statesmen" of the pop punk scene, which consisted of bands like Good Charlotte, Sum 41, and New Found Glory. The singer Billie Joe Armstrong called Dirnt and asked him, "Do you wanna do [the band] anymore?" He felt insecure, having become "fascinated and horrified" by his reckless lifestyle, and his marriage was in jeopardy. Green Day had spent much of 2002 recording new material at Studio 880 in Oakland, California for an album titled Cigarettes and Valentines, creating "polka songs, filthy versions of Christmas tunes, [and] salsa numbers" for the project, hoping to establish something new within their music. After the theft, the band consulted longtime producer Rob Cavallo. Cavallo told them to ask themselves if the missing tracks represented their best work. Armstrong said that they "couldn't honestly look at ourselves and say, 'That was the best thing we've ever done.' So we decided to move on and do something completely new." Soon afterward, Armstrong penned the title track, which explicitly addresses sociopolitical issues. The group then decided that they would steer the development of the album toward what they dubbed a "punk rock opera." Prior to recording, Green Day rented rehearsal space in Oakland, once again at Studio 880. Armstrong invited Cavallo to attend the sessions and help guide their writing processes. Cavallo encouraged the idea of a concept album, recalling a conversation the two had a decade prior, in which Armstrong expressed his desire for their career to have a "Beatles like arc to their creativity." During the sessions at Studio 880, Green Day spent their days writing material and would stay up late, drinking and discussing music. The band set up a pirate radio station from which it would broadcast jam sessions, along with occasional prank calls. The band demoed the album sufficiently so that it would be completely written and sequenced before they went to record. but the album "draws a casual connection between contemporary American social dysfunction [ ] and the Bush ascendancy." While the content is clearly of the times, Armstrong hoped it would remain timeless and become more an overarching statement on confusion. Armstrong expressed dismay at the then upcoming presidential election. He felt confused by the country's culture war, noting the particular division among the general public on the Iraq War. Summing up his feelings in an interview at the time, he said, "This war that's going on in Iraq [is] basically to build a pipeline and put up a fucking Wal Mart." Armstrong felt a duty to keep his sons away from violent images, including video games and news coverage of the war in Iraq and the 9/11 attacks. Armstrong noted divisions between America's "television culture" (which he said only cared about cable news) versus the world's view of America, which could be considered as careless warmongers.

Speaking on the album's musical content, Armstrong remarked, "For us, American Idiot is about taking those classic rock and roll elements, kicking out the rules, putting more ambition in, and making it current." Part of recording the album was attempting to expand their familiar punk rock sound by experimenting with different styles such as new wave, Latin, and polka music. The band listened to various rock operas, including the Who's Tommy (1969) and David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972). Cool also employs unorthodox instruments for punk music—timpani, glockenspiel, and hammer bells—which he received out of a promotional deal with Ludwig. These instruments are especially evident on "Homecoming" and on "Wake Me Up When September Ends", the latter of which includes an African bead gourd that was welded to a remote hi hat pedal for future live performances. "Extraordinary Girl", originally titled "Radio Baghdad", features tablas in the intro performed by Cool. For "Whatsername", Cool recorded drums in a room designed to record guitars to achieve a dry sound. With all these techniques and influences considered, critics have called the album pop punk and alternative rock, but primarily the aforementioned punk rock.

American Idiot is a concept album that describes the story of a central character named Jesus of Suburbia, an anti hero created by Billie Joe Armstrong. It is written from the perspective of a lower middle class suburban American teen, raised on a diet of "soda pop and Ritalin." Jesus of Suburbia hates his hometown and those close to him, so he leaves for the city. The second character introduced in the story is St. Jimmy, a "swaggering punk rock freedom fighter par excellence." Whatsername, "a 'Mother Revolution' figure," is introduced as a nemesis of St. Jimmy in the song "She's a Rebel". The album's story is largely indeterminate, because the group was unsure of where to lead the plot's third quarter. In this sense, Armstrong decided to leave the ending up to the listeners' imagination. The two secondary characters exemplify the record's main theme—"rage versus love"—in that while St. Jimmy is driven by "rebellion and self destruction," Whatsername is focused on "following your beliefs and ethics." Jesus of Suburbia eventually decides to follow the latter, resulting in the figurative suicide of St. Jimmy, which is revealed to be a facet of his personality. In the album's final song, Jesus of Suburbia loses his connection with Whatsername as well, to the point in which he can't even remember her name. Through the story, Armstrong hoped to detail coming of age in America at the time of the album's release. While he considered their previous record heartfelt, he felt a more instinctual feeling to speak for the time period in which the album was released. He had felt the desire to increase the amount of political content in his lyricism as he grew into adulthood, noting that the "climate" surrounding his aging produced feelings of responsibility in the songs he wrote. Armstrong said, "As soon as you abandon the verse chorus verse chorus bridge song structure it opens up your mind to this different way of writing, where there really are no rules." In addition to the album's political content, it also touches on interpersonal relationships and what Dirnt labeled "confusion and loss of individuality." "Give Me Novacaine" touches on American reality television of that time, which Armstrong likened to "gladiators in the coliseum." "She's a Rebel" was inspired by Bikini Kill's "Rebel Girl".

After finishing the music for the album, the band decided that the artwork needed to reflect the themes on the record, likening the change of image to a political campaign. Armstrong recalled, "We wanted to be firing on all cylinders. Everything from the aesthetic to the music to the look. Just everything." Green Day drew inspiration from Chinese communist propaganda art the band saw in art galleries on Melrose Avenue and recruited artist Chris Bilheimer, who had designed the art for the previous records Nimrod and International Superhits! to create the cover. The band aimed for the cover to be "at once uniform and powerful". The album's artwork—"a Posada stark print of a heart shaped hand grenade gripped in a blood soaked fist"—is representative of its political content. After listening to the new music on his computer, Bilheimer took note of the lyric "And she's holding on my heart like a hand grenade" from "She's a Rebel". Influenced by artist Saul Bass's poster for the 1955 drama film The Man with the Golden Arm, Bilheimer created an upstretched arm holding a red heart shaped grenade. Although he felt that red is the "most overused color in graphic design", he felt that the "immediate" qualities of the color deemed it appropriate for use on the cover. He explained, "I'm sure there's psychological theories of it being the same color of blood and therefore has the powers of life and death And as a designer I always feel it's kind of a cop out, so I never used it before. But there was no way you couldn't use it on this cover."