Word: armstrong
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...