100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s #36 Green Day – American Idiot

Released: 2004

Boy, times were good back then compared to now. I mean they weren’t, but even with 9/11 site yet to be fully cleared and a second, much more unjustified war in the Gulf underway, when benchmarked against the divisiveness of the supposedly enlightened twenties, the early noughties little tremors feel like a lost paradise.

Green Day didn’t have to make American Idiot. By 2002 they were the biggest punk rock band in the world, their 1994 album Dookie becoming more popular than Nevermind, their Gen-X mining diffidence striking a chord with a pre-internet generation who spent their hours in more salubrious pastimes like watching videos and smoking weed.

But make it they did, and lead with American Idiot they did, in a move which provoked cable news anchors in a largely pre Fox News world. Not a sophisticated tune, it turned the tables on populists who hijacked blue collar expression, raging at villains who then were still mostly hiding in plain sight. A ten dollar song in an eight dollar suit, it was also the perfect soundtrack to a shit-sandwich alright, but in retrospect, we never knew we were having it so good.