This video is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Head on over to (LINK ON SCREEN) for a free trial. In 2002,Green Day were in a funk. Coming off an album that was a commercial disappointment, And feeling that they'd lost their edge, they decided to go into the studio and try something new. Across the next four months, they would experiment with new sounds, break out of their comfort zone,and come up with 20 demos. Unfortunately,for the band,these demos were stolen shortly thereafter. Instead of trying to rewrite the lost album which was to be called 'Cigarettes And Valentines', Green Day decided to start from scratch, and it's probably good that they did, because the new album they came up with was one of the most seminal rock albums of its era. American Idiot. Let's take a closer look. (NOTE 1:DONT play a drinking game for each time they say Jesus Of Suburbia or Jesus.you'll be dead by minute 7.)(NOTE 2:this took me +2 hours to put the captions together, so I hope you enjoy it). Set against the backdrop of Bush era America, American Idiot is a concept album that tells the coming-of-age story of a suburban teenager, known as 'Jesus Of Suburbia'. Through his eyes, Green Day comment on the state of America as they saw it at the time. The opening track of the album sets the scene where the rest of the story will take place. One of the most overtly political songs on the record, its Green Day's take on modern America. They see a country dumbed down by media over saturation,and numb to the disenfranchised. In the chorus of the song, the band sing about how mass media presents us with ideal visions of our futures that are impossible to live up to,often leaving people to feel empty and like they failed. It's in this broken media obsessed America that we meet our main character. The Jesus of Suburbia is the living embodiment of two of the album's biggest themes. Rage and Love. In Green Day's eyes, american society is,in an internal struggle between rage and love. This is reflected in the album's iconography as well. Turning the symbol of a heart into a grenade, and putting a clenched fist around it. These two themes run rampant throughout the rest of Jesus of Suburbia, a sprawling song made up of five different sections. The opening section shows us our main characters biography and how he's been molded by a world full of apathy and contradiction. In the next section,'City Of The Damned', we're introduced to his hometown painted as a wasteland, where he begins his desperate search for meaning. Unable to find any meaning or beauty from these sources, the Jesus of Suburbia begins to preach apathy and gains followers who share his life experience. (I love this part) In these two sections, we experience the conflict once more with a rage-filled 'I Don't Care' followed by the love of 'Dearly Beloved'. In the final section of the song, Jesus of Suburbia Sets out to leave behind the suburbs that have left him in this drained state. The song finishes with him having left home. This moves us to Holiday,which can be seen as Jesus' first few days away from home, feeling like he's on a holiday at the dawning of his life with the rest of the world ahead of him. However, beneath these lyrics lies another criticism of Bush's America. And particularly, the war in Iraq. (ok never mind this whole album rocks) The upbeat music of Holiday is quickly juxtaposed with the gloomy Boulevard of broken dreams. In this song, the Jesus Of Suburbia finds himself struggling with depression as he feels utterly alone walking through the streets of the city he has run to. This loneliness brings us to a soliloquy in 'Are We The Waiting', which is then abruptly cut short by St.Jimmy. (ONE TWO THREE FOUR) In his loneliness and reflection, the Jesus of Suburbia Manifests his rage into a new identity, Saint Jimmy. This change is reflected in the music as well. With the shift from the atmosphere of 'Are We The Waiting',to a classic straightforward punk sound. Saint Jimmy is the typical anti-establishment punk,urging the Jesus Of Suburbia to rage against the world with violence. Saint Jimmy encourages Jesus to turn to drugs and self-destruction as an escape from the pain that he's feeling in the next track,'Give Me Novocaine'. After his experiences with drugs,Jesus runs into a girl called Whatsername. Detailed over the next two songs, Whatsername represents the love counterpoint to St.Jimmy's rage. She and the Jesus of Suburbia share a brief relationship before breaking up. 'Letterbomb' is the letter that she sends to Jesus of Suburbia to break up with him. This is where we get to the climax of the album in 'Homecoming'. Another nine minute EPIC made of five parts. This section marks the coming-of-age of the Jesus Of Suburbia. He realizes that the rage that created St.Jimmy, Lost him his love in Whatsername, so he kills off the St Jimmy part of himself. From here there's no triumphant finish. instead its, melancholic and sad. Jesus grows up and gets a job pushing paper (sounds really, really lame) daydreaming of better times. In 'Nobody Likes You',he's haunted by the letter that Whatsername wrote him all those years ago. In 'Rock-and-roll Girlfriend', he gets a letter from a friend still in the punk rock life and remembers what it was like to live that. (get off of my BASKET case) (ok that joke sucked) At the end of the letter,Jesus's friend asks him to stop complaining. He's happy with his Rock-And-Roll life and doesn't want to hear Jesus's laments about the life that he left. In the end this helps bring about the great revelation. That the Jesus of Suburbia needs to take control of his own life. He lets Saint Jimmy rage out and blame everyone else around him,without taking accountability for his own actions. With this revelation ,Jesus sets off from the city and heads home to the suburbs that birthed him. In the final song of the album,we get Jesus reflecting on Whatsername. The woman that meant so much to him when he was younger, and now he can't even remember her name. Green Day don't want to project the same unachievable images that they criticized in the album's title track. instead American Idiot ends on a lull that feels all too familiar to many in modern America. Being a grown-up and looking back with starry eyes at your past. American Idiot is a monumental album, but it's also an important historical document. It put the finger on the pulse of a large subset of America in the early 2000s. But it's not just stuck in that time frame. You can read it as tracing the path of punk rock as a movement,or America as a country, Or even just the ark of one man's life, And that is the power of American Idiot, And why I think that it's a truly timeless album. This video is brought to you by The Great Courses Plus. The Great Courses Plus is an on-demand video service featuring High-quality lectures from top professors and experts worldwide. A subscription will give you unlimited access to a huge library of over 8,000 videos on a wide variety of topics ranging from music and history to science or even lessons, that'll help you learn a new skil.l if you're looking for somewhere to start I've been working my way through music and the brain taught by Professor ani Patel at Tufts University It's given me a better understanding of just how music affects us And why it's so universal. so head on over to (SCREEN LINK) to start your free trial today show your support for me by following that URL or clicking on the link in the description Hey everyone, thanks so much for watching this video, I just wanted to give a really big shout out to Kevin Laue He designed the incredible artwork that I used throughout this video if you want to give him some support go to KLHR design on Instagram he's got a ton of really interesting Graphic design and a lot of it has to do with music. So please show him some love
he mixed Outlaws??
Is this polyphonic? His channels really informative