Opera goes Punk: Green Day Reinvents the Genre with American Idiot

Oct. 13, 2004

Give a listen to Green Day’s new CD, “American Idiot,” and chances are you’ll agree this ain’t your mom & dad’s rock opera.
The Verdi’s of punk from Berkeley, California surprised the music world in September with a number one CD (their first since ‘94’s “Dookie”) about the ongoing collapse of the American Dream as seen through the eyes of a character named Jesus of Suburbia.
It’s not too hard to figure out who the American Idiot might be; suffice to say that the threesome of guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tre Cool are really quite irritated about the political climate and “subliminal mind-fuck America” generated by the Bush administration. “Welcome to a new kind of tension/All across the alien nation,” Armstrong sings on the title track.
In fact the whole album leans heavily on the politicized rage of such late-’70s/early ‘80s epics as “London Calling” and “Sandinista” by The Clash, spelling out the same divide between rich & poor, power & poverty, hope & arrogance. There’s the same kind of thrash & snarl that put The Clash over the top as troubadours of the troubled.
On the other hand, The Clash merely had a theme, but as is the case with true opera, Green Day have a protagonist and various characters telling a story with tragic overtones. The 57-minute CD is populated with rebellious punks such as Whatsername and St. Jimmy, spouting off on social injustice on the “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” True, it’s a messy, fragmented story, and some may find it half-witted at best, but that tends to describe most opera in general.
Give Green Day credit, at least, for doing their homework in terms of imbuing their work with an operatic dimension. Both the title track and “Homecoming” are nine-minutes songs -- unheard of for a band that specializes in three-chord, two-minute punk pop. The song, “American Idiot,” is presented as a five-part suite, divided by Roman-numerals, with vignettes such as “City of the Damned,” “Dearly Beloved” and “Tales of Another Broken Home.”
Chew on that, Mozart!
But is “American Idiot” really opera? The critics have been chewing on that one ever since the CD hit the stands.
“’American Idiot’ is the kind of old-school rock opera that went out of style when Keith Moon still had a valid driver’s license, in the tradition of the Who’s ‘Tommy’, Yes’ ‘Relayer’ or Styx’s ‘Kilroy Was Here,’” writes Rob Sheffield in Rolling Stone magazine. “Since Green Day are punk rockers, they obviously have a specific model in mind: Husker Du’s 1984 ‘Zen Arcade’, which showed how a street-level hardcore band could play around with storytelling without diluting the primal anger of the music.”
Sheffield adds that, “Since rock operas are self-conscious and pompous beasts by definition, Green Day obligingly cram all their bad ideas into one monstrously awful track, the nine-minute ‘Homecoming,’ which sounds like the Who’s ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’ without any of the funny parts.”
In fact, that mini-opera by The Who was an experimental forerunner to their 1968 masterpiece, “Tommy.” With Green Day throwing down the gauntlet to considerable financial success with “American Idiot” at a time when many considered the 30ish band to be washups, one has to wonder if other bands and genres will dabble in operatic waters in the coming months. Toby Keith dissing Michael Moore in a country opera, perhaps? With the world in its present state, there seems to be no lack of subject matter.