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Can someone who wasn't a teenager when American Idiot came out give me an evaluation of the album that isn't intimately tied to ... Everything about being a teenager at the turn of the century that made the album what it is (alternately revered and reviled) to us that came of age along side it?
What does it sound like to someone who experienced actual punk music before hearing this? What does it sound like divorced from the context of the Bush years?
@ajroach42 I was 21 when it came out, so a little older, but I still can't give you that sort of evaluation. It's still very much "of my time."
I mostly remember thinking, when it first came out, "Hey, Green Day is good again."
But, then, I also never considered Green Day punk (I guess they were pop punk, but I came of age during the "alternative music" phase, so we called it alternative back during the Dookie and Insomniac days).
American Idiot retrospective, big wall o' text
All that is to say that, yeah, I strongly suspect I wouldn't have enjoyed it as much as I did were it not for the time it was in and was about. But I also don't feel like it necessarily holds up outside of that moment.
By mimicking a rock opera it felt more adventurous and cohesive than any prior Green Day album or a lot of what else was out there at the time, and that variation (both internally and compared to other popular music) made it much more listenable, and catchy in a way that *didn't* make me want to push it out of my head once it got stuck there (it wasn't too vapid, and wasn't just an endless short loop since my mind's tapedeck could segue from one song or portion to the next). But its disillusionment felt naive to me, and its targets shortsighted, not unlike the current "everything would be fine if we got Trump out" hashtag-resistance worldview.
Just a few steps away from it and you had Bad Religion's "The Empire Strikes First", which came out earlier that year and while less allegorical was also less about the *specific* moment, not about the wars and the presidency and the media landscape as unique and novel things but as the continuation of a long history. There's a very inward-looking nature to "American Idiot", a lack of perspective, and to a large degree that's appropriate for the subject matter; a teenage boy coming of age at the time is liable to be myopic about the world and their own place in it. But precisely because of the combination of teen and political angst I was feeling at the time, Bad Religion's take on the topics hit much, much harder for me. As an example of that mix of personal turmoil and broader societal commentary:
"And I know I can't explain
The commotion in my brain
Like a terrifying reality
Deconstructed but inadequately
All gets pointed in the same direction
While the human masses and their vain conceptions
Obliterate each other with impunity
And release the weight of history"
I could probably go on forever about the comparisons and contrasts between the two albums as thinking about this reminds me of more and more (ex. "American Idiot" solely a surface-level use of American protestant tropes, while "The Empire Strikes First" opens with a song about the long history of evil from the Catholic Church). In a way that might make my experience of and relationship to "American Idiot" *very* specifically tied to its time, though; still listening incessantly to "The Empire Strikes First" (and the prior album "The Process of Belief") at the time, I was somewhat inoculated against "American Idiot", it was never going to fully win me over despite my enjoyment of it.