by Jeffrey Webb, edited by Erik van Rheenen

The thing about the Jesus of Suburbia is that he doesn’t start out as a nihilist– he starts out bored. Victimized by his broken home and his own peculiar slice of suburban hellscape, sedated and titillated by the alternating lows and highs of television and Ritalin, the “son of Rage and Love” flees the “land of make believe [that] don’t believe” to the Big City in a Sartrean search for meaning. All set to alternating windmilled guitars and soft-keyed interludes, multi-layered harmonies and fury-fueled shrieks. By the end of the nine-minute, Pete-Townshend-on-speed anthem that is the opera’s introduction, Billie Joe Armstrong has shown that anarchy begins at home, and apathy is its gateway drug.

The story that follows—the story of Green Day’s 2004 magnumopus, American Idiot—is a bildungsroman that’s equal parts Joseph Campbell and J.D. Salinger, and all the tension that pairing entails: hero (whiny jerk?) leaves home, faces adversity (but not real adversity?), and returns home redeemed (a total failure?). Any attempt to appraise its merits thus acts as a Rorschach test of one’s aesthetic gestalt. The JoS’s quest is either inspiring or entitled, epic or annoying. Given the ubiquity of the maturation theme, and the delusions of grandeur that usually accompany so-called rock operas, it’s a story that should be overly affected, passé. Instead, ten years later, somehow, miraculously, it still pulses, snarls, demands attention. Why?

The reason is not because the album is one of the great protest rock records of all time, though it certainly is that. It’s difficult for teenagers now to imagine the swelling of indignant rage Americans felt after September 11th, rage that metastasized into a kind of dyspeptic autoimmune disorder that we voted upon ourselves: the Patriot Act, whack-a-mole adventures in the Middle East, surrealist color-coded threat levels that shifted like a terrorism mood ring. So it’s difficult for those teenagers —hell, it’s difficult for the rest of us — to remember how subversive it was in 2004 for a band to sneer at our self-righteousness, to stand athwart the military-media complex, yelling, “stop.”

It’s not that Green Day’s protest wasn’t potent or prolific — it was. The album’s title track — “Well maybe I’m the faggot America/I’m not a part of a redneck agenda”— hardly beats around the (ahem) bush, and “Holiday” oozes disaffected irony as Billie Joe’s voice crackles over Mike Dirnt’s ominous bass line: “Sieg Heil to the President’s gas-man/Bombs away is your punishment.” It’s just that it was a protest of a particular geo-political context, and if that’s all the album was — stump speeches over four chord hooks — Idiot would remain a rock relic, a piece of anti-war liberal nostalgia, the musical equivalent of party going, tie-dyed sorority girls, fake flowers in their hair.

Instead, like all great stories, American Idiot is anchored in and reflective of a specific time and place, yet it manages to bridge the chasm between the particular and the universal. Green Day achieve that timelessness by wedding noise and narrative, sound and syntax. The result is an affirmation, as old as Sophocles’ Antigone, that the political and the personal are indelibly linked, and that to understand one, we have to immerse ourselves in the other.

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Following the grandiose “Jesus of Suburbia” is a the double-dose come-down cocktail of “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and “Are We The Waiting.” Both songs suggests that the JoS’s Kierkegaardian search in The City might be more fool’s errand than leap of faith. “Boulevard” contains some of Billie Joe’s few lyrical missteps on the record, as the hackneyed clichés — lonesome roads, shadows-as-companions, etc. — add up to earnest inanities that beat you over the head with the protagonist’s inconsolable desolation.

“Waiting” is a return to form, with its languid, looping drumrolls and choral cry for help: “This dirty town/Is burning down in my dreams…” The repetition and inversion of “Waiting’s” layered chorus — “Are we/We are/Are we–we are the waiting”— lulls the listener into a kind of resigned calm, the lethal peace felt by those slowly freezing to death.

Then, with no song break at all, the opening chords of “St Jimmy” light the whole thing on fire. What follows are three manic minutes of a decidedly Ramones-ey guitar blitzkrieg and Tre Cool’s insistent, concussive percussion. All the while, St. Jimmy, the newcomer, plays punk priest, sermonizing rebellion and revelry, but not necessarily in that order. “Cigarettes and ramen and a little bag of dope/I am the son-of-a-bitch and Edgar Allen Poe,” he cheers, all fireballs and pom-poms.

St. Jimmy, the chief of a cult of non-conformist ne’er-do-wells, is the self-proclaimed “resident leader of the lost and found… the king of the forty thieves… the needle in the vein of the establishment.” But one gets the feeling, listening to his chest-thumping screed, that he doth proclaim too much, that perhaps behind the gutter-scum bravado is a post-hoc rationalization for a very shallow kind of selfishness. Indeed, as the album progresses, it becomes clear that it’s all an act, a cleverly crafted cult of personality that lacks the discipline and self-control necessary to have any kind of real socio-political ambitions beyond the next high. Jesus, alienated, desperate, seeking refuge in the anesthetizing Novacaine Jimmy’s selling, buys the pitch and follows him down the rabbit hole, trading hollow boredom for empty rage, corn syrup for heroin.

Enter Whatsername, the object of the JoS’s affections and St. Jimmy’s Manichean counterweight, his equal but opposite revolution. The chord progression of “She’s A Rebel,” frantic and frenetic G-C-Ds, closely mirrors “St. Jimmy,” inviting a comparison between the two and their versions of The Resistance. St. Jimmy hides behind his own victimization and its roots — “Products of war and fear,” “We’re fucked up and we’re not the same/And Mom and Dad are the ones you can blame” — and uses those transgressions to justify abject hedonism. In “She’s a Rebel,” Whatsername avoids casting blame and is decidedly other-oriented: “She sings the revolution/The dawning of our lives/ She brings this liberation/That I just can’t define.” She’s Lady Liberty with a hand grenade for a torch. The JoS may be the album’s protagonist, but Whatsername is the hero, and the villain is St. Jimmy’s brand of lazy solipsism.

Nowhere is the album’s positive project more evident than on “Letterbomb,” the kick-to the-sugar-rotted-teeth, rollicking punk steamroller that serves as the climax (and anticlimax) of the Jesus-Whatsername fling. Armstrong, who has never lacked for a good, snotty sneer, practically spits at our collective apathy, our contentedness to choose the false-consciousness and bad faith of amusement over activism. “Where have all the riots gone/As your city’s model gets pulverized" he asks and accuses. Indeed, Armstrong never has Whatsername and Jimmy interact. Instead, “Letterbomb” uses the second person plural: “YOUR city,” expanding the scope of the criticism beyond the characters. All at once, the album’s target is no longer just George Bush or St. Jimmy. It’s us Armstrong’s pointing the finger at, himself included. We are all idiots.

But it’s not all handwringing. There’s still time to abandon our “private wombs” of vapid entertainment, to question, to agitate, to engage. Indeed, it’s never too late “till you’re underground.” There’s a famous Greek aphorism to “call no man happy until he is dead.” Armstrong insists that we’re not defeated until then, either, and it’s in that battered and bruised optimism that the album’s redemption lies.

Armstrong’s portrait of the navel-gazing, would-be rebel recalls the modernist neuroses of T.S. Eliot’s “etherized" Prufrock, warning us against the dulling effects of distraction. These themes are echoed more plainly on Idiot’s follow up, 21st Century Breakdown, in songs like “Know Your Enemy” and “The Static Age,” as well as in 2001’s underrated Warning in “Minority” and “Waiting,” but the paean is more urgent, more authentic on Idiot. And, not coincidentally, more personal too. It is in fact because the album succeeds on a personal level; we get the characters and their motivations. The social message moves beyond hollow rhetoric.

The album’s thesis (its call to arms) has been lost on some critics, especially as Michael Mayer translated the characters from lyrical to theatrical constructions in 2010’s musical. “[American Idiot] sprays its boilerplate discontent at no one in particular, with a lotta standard-issue bitching about The Media and The Man.” Another: “It’s one thing to be a rebel. It’s another to be just a spoiled whiner… My biggest issue is the relentlessly, uncompromising nihilistic tone.”

Those punches might land when leveled at Dookie, with its precocious brand of bubblegum nihilism, equal parts fun and fuck-you. Not so with Idiot. Sure, the power chords still churn and the world still burns, but this time Armstrong’s got a plan for picking up the pieces, and the opiate-fuelled crack-ups are siren songs rather than safe havens from the firestorm. Dookie is great because it captured perfectly a portrait of the archetypal Gen X slacker ethos; Idiot is better because it transcends it.

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On first listen, I thought Armstrong’s only major misstep was the album’s closing track, “Whatsername.” Surely the bluster and bombast of the penultimate, nine minute “Homecoming” and the Freddie Mercury military march of that song’s final vignette would have perfectly mirrored “Jesus of Suburbia.” The JoS has been dumped by his femme fatale, who’s finally wised up to the self-gratifying impulses behind Jimmy’s merry band of thieves: “She said I can’t take this town/ I’m leaving you tonight.” Whatsername’s abandonment shatters the JoS, but the force of the shock acts as a catalyst, a clarion call. He leaves The City and returns home, but not before St. Jimmy, who turns out to be Jesus’s alter ego, commits suicide, blow[ing] “his brains out into the bay.”

And so ends the plot: hero leaves home to go on quest, hero returns home with villain vanquished. St. Jimmy is dead. Cue the trumpets. “Homecoming” thus provides poetic bookends to Jesus’s descent into the cave. And yet.

What most Campbellian epics conveniently omit is what happens after the dragon is slain, after the hero returns home and the pomp and circumstance fade, which is that life goes on still, and still, Armstrong insists over and over and over, “nobody cares.” It’s just that Jesus is a little bit better equipped to deal with the vacuum, to stare — with clear eyes and clenched jaws —into the abyss and spit into the void in defiance. “She went away and then I took a different path/Now I wonder how Whatsername has been,” Armstrong shrugs, deadpanning over monotonous, muted chords on “Whatsername.”

What’s left, for him and for us, are fractured and half-forgotten memories of what might have been, and the collection of trite, seemingly trivial choices we make every day that add up to who we become — and who we fail to be.

Armstrong thus robs the plot of a satisfying conclusion, but by insisting on ambiguity, he secures the album’s greatness. When you turn down the dialed-to-11 Marshalls and boil down the piles of 7-11 Styrofoam and anti-depressants, Idiot is at bottom about a choice: a choice we all make one way or another when confronted with the banalities of loss and meaninglessness. What’s it gonna be? Jimmy or Whatsername? Rage or love?

It’s a question worth returning to now and ten years from now and ten years after that, as long as it’s to the sound of power chords.