00:00:00
This video is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Head on over to (LINK ON SCREEN)
00:00:06
for a free trial.
00:00:08
In 2002,Green Day were in a funk. Coming off an album that was a commercial disappointment,
00:00:13
And feeling that they'd lost their edge, they decided to go into the studio and try something new.
00:00:19
Across the next four months, they would experiment with new sounds,
00:00:22
break out of their comfort zone,and come up with 20 demos.
00:00:26
Unfortunately,for the band,these demos were stolen shortly thereafter.
00:00:30
Instead of trying to rewrite the lost album which was to be called 'Cigarettes And Valentines',
00:00:35
Green Day decided to start from scratch,
00:00:38
and it's probably good that they did, because the new album they came up with was
00:00:42
one of the most seminal rock albums of its era.
00:00:45
American Idiot.
00:00:46
Let's take a closer look.
00:00:49
(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).
00:00:56
Set against the backdrop of Bush era America,
00:00:59
American Idiot is a concept album that tells the coming-of-age story of a suburban teenager,
00:01:05
known as 'Jesus Of Suburbia'.
00:01:07
Through his eyes, Green Day comment on the state of America as they saw it at the time.
00:01:12
The opening track of the album sets the scene where the rest of the story will take place.
00:01:17
One of the most overtly political songs on the record, its Green Day's take on modern America.
00:01:23
They see a country dumbed down by media over saturation,and numb to the disenfranchised.
00:01:39
In the chorus of the song, the band sing about how mass media presents us with ideal visions of our futures that are
00:01:45
impossible to live up to,often leaving people to feel empty and like they failed.
00:02:06
It's in this broken media obsessed America that we meet our main character.
00:02:19
The Jesus of Suburbia is the living embodiment of two of the album's biggest themes.
00:02:24
Rage
00:02:25
and Love.
00:02:26
In Green Day's eyes,
00:02:27
american society is,in an internal struggle between rage and love.
00:02:32
This is reflected in the album's iconography as well.
00:02:35
Turning the symbol of a heart into a grenade, and putting a clenched fist around it.
00:02:40
These two themes run rampant throughout the rest of Jesus of Suburbia, a sprawling song made up of five different sections.
00:02:48
The opening section shows us our main characters biography
00:02:51
and how he's been molded by a world full of apathy and contradiction.
00:02:56
In the next section,'City Of The Damned', we're introduced to his hometown painted as a wasteland,
00:03:00
where he begins his desperate search for meaning.
00:03:23
Unable to find any meaning or beauty from these sources, the Jesus of Suburbia
00:03:27
begins to preach apathy and gains followers who share his life experience.
00:03:33
(I love this part)
00:03:54
In these two sections, we experience the conflict once more with
00:03:57
a rage-filled 'I Don't Care' followed by the love of 'Dearly Beloved'.
00:04:12
In the final section of the song, Jesus of Suburbia
00:04:15
Sets out to leave behind the suburbs that have left him in this drained state.
00:04:20
The song finishes with him having left home.
00:04:42
This moves us to Holiday,which can be seen as Jesus' first few days away from home,
00:04:48
feeling like he's on a holiday at the dawning of his life with the rest of the world ahead of him.
00:04:53
However, beneath these lyrics lies another criticism of Bush's America.
00:04:58
And particularly, the war in Iraq.
00:05:03
(ok never mind this whole album rocks)
00:05:13
The upbeat music of Holiday is quickly juxtaposed with the gloomy Boulevard of broken dreams.
00:05:20
In this song, the Jesus Of Suburbia finds himself struggling with depression
00:05:23
as he feels utterly alone walking through the streets of the city he has run to.
00:05:28
This loneliness brings us to a soliloquy in 'Are We The Waiting',
00:05:32
which is then abruptly cut short by St.Jimmy.
00:05:49
(ONE TWO THREE FOUR)
00:05:50
In his loneliness and reflection, the Jesus of Suburbia
00:05:53
Manifests his rage into a new identity, Saint Jimmy.
00:05:57
This change is reflected in the music as well.
00:06:00
With the shift from the atmosphere of 'Are We The Waiting',to a classic straightforward punk sound.
00:06:06
Saint Jimmy is the typical anti-establishment punk,urging the Jesus Of Suburbia to rage against the world with violence.
00:06:29
Saint Jimmy encourages Jesus to turn to drugs and self-destruction
00:06:33
as an escape from the pain that he's feeling in the next track,'Give Me Novocaine'.
00:06:38
After his experiences with drugs,Jesus runs into a girl called Whatsername.
00:06:43
Detailed over the next two songs, Whatsername represents the love counterpoint to St.Jimmy's rage.
00:06:49
She and the Jesus of Suburbia share a brief relationship before breaking up.
00:06:54
'Letterbomb' is the letter that she sends to Jesus of Suburbia to break up with him.
00:07:10
This is where we get to the climax of the album in 'Homecoming'.
00:07:14
Another nine minute EPIC made of five parts.
00:07:17
This section marks the coming-of-age of the Jesus Of Suburbia.
00:07:21
He realizes that the rage that created St.Jimmy,
00:07:24
Lost him his love in Whatsername, so he kills off the St Jimmy part of himself.
00:07:45
From here there's no triumphant finish. instead its,
00:07:49
melancholic and sad.
00:07:51
Jesus grows up and gets a job pushing paper (sounds really, really lame)
00:07:55
daydreaming of better times.
00:08:11
In 'Nobody Likes You',he's haunted by the letter that Whatsername wrote him all those years ago.
00:08:17
In 'Rock-and-roll Girlfriend', he gets a letter from a friend still in the punk rock life and
00:08:22
remembers what it was like to live that.
00:08:35
(get off of my BASKET case) (ok that joke sucked)
00:08:40
At the end of the letter,Jesus's friend asks him to stop complaining.
00:08:44
He's happy with his Rock-And-Roll life and doesn't want to hear Jesus's laments about the life that he left.
00:08:50
In the end this helps bring about the great revelation.
00:08:53
That the Jesus of Suburbia needs to take control of his own life.
00:08:57
He lets Saint Jimmy rage out and blame everyone else around him,without taking accountability for his own actions.
00:09:04
With this revelation ,Jesus sets off from the city and heads home to the suburbs that birthed him.
00:09:31
In the final song of the album,we get Jesus reflecting on Whatsername.
00:09:36
The woman that meant so much to him when he was younger, and now he can't even remember her name.
00:09:55
Green Day don't want to project the same
00:09:58
unachievable images that they criticized in the album's title track.
00:10:03
instead American Idiot ends on a lull that feels
00:10:06
all too familiar to many in modern America.
00:10:08
Being a grown-up and looking back with starry eyes at your past.
00:10:13
American Idiot is a monumental album, but it's also an important historical document.
00:10:19
It put the finger on the pulse of a large subset of America in the early 2000s.
00:10:24
But it's not just stuck in that time frame.
00:10:27
You can read it as tracing the path of punk rock as a movement,or
00:10:30
America as a country,
00:10:32
Or even just the ark of one man's life,
00:10:34
And that is the power of American Idiot,
00:10:36
And why I think that it's a truly timeless album.
00:10:40
This video is brought to you by The Great Courses Plus. The Great Courses Plus is an on-demand video service featuring
00:10:47
High-quality lectures from top professors and experts worldwide. A subscription will give you unlimited access to a huge library of over
00:10:54
8,000 videos on a wide variety of topics ranging from music and history to science or even
00:11:01
lessons, that'll help you learn a new skil.l if you're looking for somewhere to start
00:11:04
I've been working my way through music and the brain taught by Professor ani Patel at Tufts University
00:11:10
It's given me a better understanding of just how music affects us
00:11:14
And why it's so universal. so head on over to (SCREEN LINK)
00:11:19
to start your free trial today show your support for me by following that URL or clicking on the link in the description
00:11:28
Hey everyone, thanks so much for watching this video, I just wanted to give a really big shout out to Kevin Laue
00:11:34
He designed the incredible artwork that I used throughout this video if you want to give him some support go to KLHR design on
00:11:41
Instagram he's got a ton of really interesting
00:11:43
Graphic design and a lot of it has to do with music. So please show him some love
