Green Party

Green Day singer-guitarist, Billie Joe Armstrong, once proclaimed in song, “I’m a smart-ass, but I’m playing dumb,” and for many years his performance was seamless. Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tre Cool met in their late teens and displayed natural gifts for propulsive, funny, disposable punk-pop songs about masturbation and alienation. In 1994 Dookie, their first major-label album, sold 10 million copies. Multimillionaires at 22, the members of Green Day settled into a routine of churning out blink-and-they’re-over records followed closely by triumphant world tours. They were not quite criminally lucky, but they weren’t exactly paragons of ambition either. Sometimes, when they got bored, they would write a song longer than 3 min. Other times they would just flash the audience their underpants.

All in all, it was a good life, and it might have gone on happily unexamined had Green Day not committed the ultimate act of laziness: releasing a greatest-hits album. In 2001 the group foisted International Superhits! upon the world, and like a cartoon boulder, it ended up flattening them. “Seeing a decade of your songs laid out like that is an invitation to midlife crisis,” says Armstrong, 32. “Suddenly we were asking, ‘Why are we in this band? Do we want to keep doing this? And, you know, what might happen if we challenged ourselves?'”

The answers to those questions arrived bundled together last September in the form of American Idiot. There is almost no precedent for a band’s putting out six decent albums and then on its seventh delivering a masterpiece, but American Idiot debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, appeared on most critics’ year-end Top 10 lists, netted seven Grammy Award nominations (including one for Album of the Year), returned for another run atop the charts this month and inspired talk that the rock opera–oh, yes, American Idiot is a rock opera with characters and a plot and sociopolitical themes, no less–might be due for a revival. The emergence of Green Day as artisteshas stunned the music industry; imagine Hollywood the day after the Farrelly brothers win Best Picture, and you’ll have some idea.

How did this happen? Green Day’s long maturation was due largely to its initial burst of success. Dookie attracted a broad audience of suburban teens for whom lines like “I’m not growing up, I’m just burning out” became mini-mantras. While the band occasionally showed a hint of depth (2000’s Warning had more diverse instrumentation and was vaguely political), its popularity gave it no incentive to evolve. But over the past few years, younger outfits like Good Charlotte and Sum 41–who admit a musical debt to Green Day–began siphoning off the aimless-adolescent market. By the time Superhits! was released, Green Day’s sales were declining, and Armstrong, Dirnt and Cool, all barely 30, felt very old.

After finishing the aptly named Pop Disaster tour in 2002, Green Day had a series of state-of-the-band conversations in which its members resolved to stay together but change everything else. “We didn’t do the therapy thing,” says Armstrong, “but we talked about the fact that with people outside of the band, we interact like adults. Then we get back together, and it’s like, ‘Dude, you got a booger!'” Having agreed to retire every lame joke about one another, they moved on to the task of redefining their creative process. “We like each other a lot, which is a problem,” says Dirnt. “Because not being afraid to fail in front of those closest to you is the most difficult thing in the world. We needed to get to where we could look stupid in front of each other–artistically speaking.”

When they started work on a new album, the bandmates agreed that whatever musical direction they were headed in, they had to produce something complete. “We didn’t want to be a band bitching about downloading,” says Cool, “which happens when you put out one good song and a bunch of filler.” Otherwise they sat around and tried to clear their heads of everything they had ever done. “Musical hot potato was the idea,” says Armstrong. “If you can’t come up with something, do a dirty polka song. Just keep going and don’t try to impress anyone but yourself.” That led to weeks of actually writing dirty polka songs as well as a wildly profane, never-to-be-released Christmas album until eventually they sweated out 20 new tracks. Then the tracks disappeared. “Albums are kept on tiny discs these days,” says Armstrong. “Someone walked off with ours.”

A few tantrums and chairs were thrown before Green Day decided not to try to re-create the lost record. “They were really good songs,” says Dirnt, “but I don’t know if they had taken us to a new place. Plus, we had a taste for ambition at that point.” Soon after diving back into the writing process, Armstrong, inspired by what he calls “the absurdity” of watching embedded journalists broadcast live from the middle of a war, came up with American Idiot, the deceptively upbeat title track that proclaimed, “Don’t want to be an American Idiot/ Don’t want a nation under the new mania.” Then Dirnt composed a strange 30-sec. cabaret ditty, which Armstrong and Cool liked so much that they wrote their own 30-sec. additions. Soon they had the beginnings of the 9-min., five-part Jesus of Suburbia, which introduced both Jesus, a character struggling against the country’s “red-neck agenda,” and the possibility of a full punk-rock opera. “At first, we wondered if we should even call it something like that,” says Armstrong, “but, hell, why not make it as grand as possible?”

Armstrong in particular embraced the challenge. As a kid, he sang show tunes at convalescent homes and veterans’ hospitals, and he used the operatic concept as a chance to “figure out if I could take something like If My Friends Could See Me Now or Satin Doll and make it punk rock. I used everything I’ve ever learned or liked in music,” he says. It shows. A significant part of American Idiot’s charm is that for an album that bemoans the state of the union, it is irresistibly buoyant. Listen closely, and you will hear a story about Jesus of Suburbia, his dangerous friend St. Jimmy and a heroic girl called Whatshername, who are struggling to express their individuality in a mass-media culture. Listen less closely, and you will still nod your head a lot and remember most of the melodies, which veer from surf rock to Motown to Broadway to thrash, usually within the same mad dash of a song.

But the lyrics are the reason American Idiot is the most fully realized piece of Pop art to emerge from the 2004 political campaigns. Armstrong is a punk-rock millionaire from Northern California, and his party affiliation isn’t tough to guess. But while most would-be artistic commentators droned on about candidates and policies, Armstrong dramatized his protest. A verse like

I’m the son of rage and love

The Jesus of Suburbia …

No one ever died for my sins in hell

As far as I can tell

At least the ones I got away with

And there’s nothing wrong with me

This is how I’m supposed to be

In a land of make believe

That don’t believe in me

is epic, broad and slightly comic–Brechtian, in the best sense of the word. And Armstrong’s adenoidal whine, backed up by the rhythm section’s precise fury, keeps the concept from ever becoming pretentious–or Brechtian in the worst sense.

The band members still seem shocked that they have succeeded in shifting their context from lucky punks to relevant, opus-making adults. Just contemplating the upcoming Grammys stuns them into silence. Eventually Armstrong admits, “I never thought I’d say this, but I’d really like to win Album of the Year. It would be meaningful to me, and without tooting my own horn, I kind of think we might even deserve it.” He kind of might even be right. ???