100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 American Idiot

02 Jesus of Suburbia

I. Jesus of Suburbia

II. City of the Damned

III. I Don’t Care

IV. Dearly Beloved

V. Tales of Another Broken Home

03 Holiday

04 Boulevard of Broken Dreams

05 Are We the Waiting

06 St. Jimmy

07 Give Me Novacaine

08 She’s a Rebel

09 Extraordinary Girl

10 Letterbomb

11 Wake Me Up When September Ends

12 Homecoming

I. The Death of St. Jimmy

II. East 12th St.

III. Nobody Likes You

IV. Rock and Roll Girlfriend

V. We’re Coming Home Again

13 Whatsername

It may well go down in history as the most crucial theft in popular music. In 2003 Berkeley, California punks Green Day cut what was to be their seventh album, but just after they finished tracking the 20 songs for a release to be titled Cigarettes and Valentines, the master tapes were stolen. Faced with the choice of re-recording their songs or starting from scratch, the trio admitted to producer Rob Cavallo that the songs weren’t the best work they were capable of. So they went back to it and the following year put out American Idiot, a landmark set that made rock & roll vital for a generation that had struggled to identify the real thing.

American Idiot is a great, sprawling crosssection of rebellion and social commentary, pathos and plunder, which calls on the Who at their concept album best and the Ramones at their bluntest. It was a beast of a record, with 13 songs – two of which had five distinct movements each – taking in almost an hour. And it was the qualities that once would have been anathema to the band, such as grandeur and thematic ambition, that knotted it together and made the songs move from fictional characters to catching the tenor of the times.

American Idiot was a long way from the truncated pop-punk diatribes that had elevated the band from all-ages punk clubs to the top of the charts in 1994 with their third album, Dookie, but American Idiot stayed true to the band’s lineage. Bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tre Cool remained a righteous rhythm section, turning a pummelling into a pleasure on the likes of the firebrand anthem ‘St. Jimmy’ and that major inducement to the hips that is ‘She’s a Rebel’.

The ‘Homecoming’ suite began with Dirnt recording a brief song by himself, and when Cool and guitarist/vocalist Billie Joe Armstrong cut their own efforts, competition gave way to cohesion and Green Day found that they could deploy everything they’d absorbed – whether it was ’80s underground hardcore or Kinks-like melancholy. When they slowed the pace, resonance grew up out of the silence and clear-headed imagery. ‘Summer has come and passed/The innocent can never last,’ Armstrong sang on ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’, and the tune’s heartbreak beat gave the album’s rock opera characters a weary believability.

The sparkplug frontman traded in broad sentiment on American Idiot – ‘this dirty town was burning down in my dreams,’ he declares on ‘Are We the Waiting’ – but the palpable intent and often ferocious flourishes bridged cliché and allowed personal meaning to seep into the images. ‘I walk alone’ was the repeated hook from ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’, but through the song, and the rest of the album, Green Day found a rallying cry that would result in cathartic scenes on the subsequent touring.

And Armstrong didn’t hesitate to call his shots. The album was released little more than a month before George W. Bush, – at the height of his ‘Mission Accomplished’ propaganda – crushed John Kerry in the 2004 US Presidential election. If there was a genuine opposition at the time it was Armstrong, who excoriated the Republican administration from the blitzkrieg opening title track onwards. With visceral songs that piled up on each other, so that the winning ‘Extraordinary Girl’ cut straight to the charging ‘Letterbomb’, Green Day made sense of a strange and troubled time. American Idiot was the friend who kept you on your feet until you were ready to pogo on your own.