Green Day – American Idiot
At times I have said that I feel my 20s were somehow lost as a direct result of the Bush Administration. I think that’s unfair as a statement across the breadth of life: hell, I fell in love, got married, bought a house, took some great jobs and visited some wonderful, life-changing places. There is nothing in that I regret, and perhaps, somewhere, it was in part a direct reaction against Dubya. If so, thanks. But when I say ‘lost’, I mean a sense of direction, a sense of contribution, of community against individualism, of progress against protection, and of purposefulness and creation. Bad events took place in any 200* year, but our strength is to know the greater good and carry on. I don’t feel we had that until Bush left, and I think others agree: Green Day’s epic, operatic punk masterpiece is catchy, as complex as punk might ever get, political and discouraged, but more than anything else, inviting. People relate to its themes, of isolation, of fragmentation, of the conflict of praising the hero atop a pointless prize. They sing along with more gusto than you normally see at a concert – it is compelling to always go back, for despite being a pretty damning and destructive body of work, it reflected the world at the time, and to state that, loudly, and then rise above it, is an honest demonstration of virtue.
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