Over the years, I have asked myself many times which is the best choice as the 'album of my generation'.
It isn't the easiest question to answer, as I'm not sure there is a lasting cultural impact to be felt from anything of that time. The boy bands and pop princesses were the biggest thing going, but no record any of them put out come to define what life was like for us, or who we were going to become. Pop music isn't the best vehicle for that sort of thing anyway. Crossover records are the ones that have the most cultural sway, because they bring groups together in ways that create new mixtures of thought, that open our eyes to perspectives we might not have been quite aware of in our own cliques.
If I was a few years older, I could point to "Nevermind" as that record. The shadow it cast was so large and so long that denying its status seems rather foolish. But in many ways, it feels like the last album that was able to have that kind of influence on the culture at large. My time coming of age was as pop culture was fracturing, and I consider myself from the first post-monoculture generation. That means answering this question becomes more difficult.
The album I have long thought about as the choice is "American Idiot", which turns twenty years old this week. Aside from the feelings stirred up with knowing that the albums of that time have now been with me for half my life, I find it difficult to come up with anything else that bridged the gap between being music and being a statement.
Saying that, we need to wade into the depths of this album's complicated identity.
First of all, the politics of the record are bare-bones and not nearly as prominent as we thought at the time. Positioned as an 'anti-war' album, those sentiments are clear on the title track and "Holiday", but that's it. The rest of the story is about generic teenage angst, and leads me to the next point.
Second of all, "American Idiot" is not a concept album. It has always been called such, and it had a Broadway adaptation, but the album is not a single story told through the music. The two political songs have nothing to do with the teenage drama, which has nothing to do with the personal expressions of songs like "Wake Me Up When September Ends". You can't combine the personal with the fictional and call it a story. Green Day aren't nuanced enough to write in the post-modern style and have it make sense.
With that said, it is still the leading contender for the crown because those three different aspects play to what life for teenagers was like at the time. We were sickened by a government that took a moment of tragedy and exploited it to dump bombs as a show of strength. We were the first generation to grow up knowing the angst of thinking that a school shooter could be in our building on any given day. We were a generation who saw the world changing for the worse, and couldn't figure out why the people in power were willingly sinking the ship.
A record that could let us express how (quaintly, from the perspective of now) hopeless the future felt was exactly what we needed. I still struggle to understand how Green Day of all people were the ones who delivered the message, but it hit people hard. Life was the boulevard of broken dreams, as we walked on the shrapnel of the shattered suburban utopia.
Listening back to the record, there is irony to the fact these songs are trying to tell us things can be better, when Green Day would only go downhill when faced with the pressure of following up a landmark achievement. It isn't that being political cost Green Day their career, but rather that they lost their way when they went back to trying to have nothing to say. After giving us songs that mattered and meant something to us, they couldn't figure out what else they had to offer. We didn't want another suite of recycled classic rock tropes, and we didn't want three records of whatever scraps they could spit out. Green Day didn't understand what made "American Idiot" special, which brings us to the realization...
Maybe the true album of my generation is actually "The Black Parade". By approaching teenage angst from a more personal perspective, and without being tied to the politics of the time, it is the overblown conceptual album that can endure and evolve. My Chemical Romance would similarly never be able to figure out how to approach making new music after such an epic victory, but they can celebrate their past without it feeling like a remnant of a history textbook. They achieved such a rare feat in having an anthem that can be identified by a single note being played on a piano, an anthem that can just as easily translate to the next sickening chapter of our story, and the ones that will surely arise sometimes in our future.
"The Black Parade" not only served us in the moment, but can continue to speak to us as we get older. Green Day can only wish for that kind of lasting legacy.
Twenty years later, "American Idiot" is a record that has become too successful for its own good, too sanitized as it was pushed to every corner of our culture. As the dust of time fills in the carvings, we realize how flat the record actually was, how little it actually said. In that moment, we needed an outlet for our outrage, and Green Day gave that to us. It didn't matter if it made sense, just so long as we were able to stop thinking about the ways in which the world was falling apart.
We've done a lot of thinking in the years since, and a teenage love story was not the answer to the questions we had.
It also doesn't feel like the answer to the question I started this discussion with. The anniversary of "American Idiot", I think, it most accurately celebrated by putting it in the proper perspective. It was a cathartic batch of great pop-punk songs that got us through the moment, but much like Vietnam era art doesn't have as much to say once that era died down, "American Idiot" doesn't have much to offer us beyond the catchy hooks. Kurt Cobain was the voice of a generation, and Green Day was merely the voice of a moment.
Growing up, and outgrowing what once mattered so much, isn't a bad thing. If anything, it's a sign that "American Idiot" served its purpose. Maybe without it, we would have gotten stuck in that moment, and we wouldn't be able to hold out hope.
Sorry, I could barely type that last bit with a straight face. As if things are ever going to be better.
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