American Idiot

Eventually, most successful rock stars decide that writing great three-minute pop songs isn’t enough: They want to make music that’s important. American Idiot is Green Day’s first bid for relevance. It’s a sprawling rock opera that tackles politics, religion, and suburban alienation, but smartly undercuts its own pomposity with knowing sneers and juvenile humor. Whether blitzing through punk burners or swaying across classic-rock power ballads, there’s a grandeur to these tunes that Green Day’s never before attempted. But even on the pair of nine-minute, five-part punk operettas, the band’s reach doesn’t exceed its grasp: They deliver their payload in familiar, bite-size chunks of hooky, three-chord punk pop. Broken down as such, it becomes clear that the difference between writing symphonies about God, government, and the suburbs and banging out punk rock odes to jerking off is pretty negligible.