LPhoto credit: Wishbook

 

The year is 2004. I’m nine years old. I am yet to grow a beard (yes, a LONG time ago). I’m in Tesco’s with my mum, pushing the trolley and loving life. I make a beeline for the CD aisle, there’s an album I want to buy. Handing her the CD, she takes one look at the ‘PARENTAL ADVISORY EXPLICIT CONTENT’ and decides it’s a bad idea. But I’ve always been a persistent soul, so as we reached the check-out she relented. I ran as fast as I could, grabbed the CD and legged it back. I couldn’t wait to get home and listen. And do you know what dearest reader, to this day I don’t think I’ve been so excited about an album as much as this.

 

I heard American Idiot at a friends (you know that kid a year or two older who is immeasurably cool) and I loved it. Whilst moderately tame by punk standards, I was blown away by the thrashing riffs of the album, the simple yet mesmerising drumming of Tre Cool, and the almost casual and ‘rebellious’ (I cringe at the word) way in which Billie Joe Armstrong swears mid song. Now as sad this sounds writing this at the ripe old age of 20, 9-year-old me loved it; my eyes were opened to a totally new way to express music. Now this isn’t to say I became all spiky hair and safety-pins, but it did change how I looked at things.

 

Another thing that blew my mind was the sense of narrative throughout the entire album… The ‘Jesus of Suburbia’, a suburban middle-class teen, and his encounters with the rebellious renegade ‘St.Jimmy’. These characters are the absolute antithesis of one another. After loving and losing ‘Whatsername’ there’s the figurative suicide of Jimmy who, ‘blew his brains out into the bay’. Whilst rather dark for a song, this takes an M.Night Shayamalan-esque twist which reveals that ‘St.Jimmy’ was only one side of ‘Jesus of Suburbia’s’ personality. The rebellious little punk battles between rage and love, eventually destroying his rebellious side after losing ‘Whatsername’. The other thing that I am still amazed by is the strong message within the album that struck a particularly political chord with me; this was the idea of a manipulative-mass-media instilling an undercurrent of fear and idiocy within mainstream American society, hence the album’s title ‘American Idiot’!

 

Now I’m willing to bet most people missed that when they listen to the album, but hey, you learn something new every day. And maybe just maybe, you’ll give this album another listen, and give it the credit I think it deserves.

 

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