My Top 1000 Songs #941: American Idiot

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Look, I can't say I listen to Green Day very often (though probably more than you might assume). I was just a few years too old for them. They were more like the band I'd play for my son when he was growing up, wishing I could get him into the Pistols and Clash and Buzzcocks and Undertones and X, but knowing those would feel as outdated to him as the classic 70s movies I'd cue up on the DVD player and watch my kids grow incredibly bored by their slow pace.

Which isn't to say I didn't appreciate the band. Or at least that respectable run of singles from their first decade, which made their 2001 compilation International Superhits the next-generation equivalent of Singles Going Steady. Yet for all the guilty-pleasure fun in their initial run, 2004's American Idiot felt like a band reaching a completely different level, political and ambitious and sophisticated, but still tied to simple Kinks/Who-indebted punk-pop riff rockers. The album will always feel like "the one that my kid got really excited about," but the title track is phenomenal on its own merits. Its of-the-moment attack on the Bush era feels downright quaint in the moment we're currently living through, and maybe we need something a little stronger than "American Idiot" to help us through, but it's also never felt more dead-on accurate.

Live 2005:

Yeah, there's a Weird Al for that...