Our story begins with the title track, a deceptively straightforward tune that belies the gravity of the material to follow. Granted, the song "American Idiot" does have a "single" feel about it, but the piece is easily superior to most of Green Day's radio-airwave contributions in the past. Their sound has continued to become fuller and more well-rounded as time goes on, but thanfully their punk essence has remained impervious to each successive album's increasingly immaculate production values. It's a fitting and wholly appropriate prologue to Green Day's finest hour. Then comes "Jesus of Suburbia." And the doors are blown wide open.
"Jesus of Suburbia" is a nine-minute epic suite composed of five separate and unique pieces -- "Jesus of Suburbia," "City of the Damned," "I Don't Care," "Dearly Beloved," and "Tales of Another Broken Home" -- which are expertly blended together with some exquisite guitar work. It is here that we are first introduced to our protagonist, Jesus of Suburbia, the disillusioned teenage "son of rage and love." Lost in a world of confusion, apathy, rage, loneliness, and drugs, Jesus doesn't come off as the kind of fellow who's going to take our story home into a warm and rising sun. And yet, for better or for worse, he's completely relatable, these nine minutes locking you into an empathetic mindset that persists throughout the length of this man's odyssey.
"Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me / 'Til then I walk alone..." -- "Boulevard of Broken Dreams"
After giving us a sobering glimpse of Jesus' constricted and poisonous world, Green Day sets it against the intimidating backdrop of the international theater in "Holiday," their inevitable polemic against Gulf War II. The song is as powerful and poignant as it is inflammatory; our President is reduced to the status of "gasman" and the picture painted of battle is as hellish as one might imagine. The true power of the song, though, is derived from how our crazy modern world factors into the lives of Jesus and the other characters we meet. Green Day forces us to consider not only the casualties of war abroad, but also those in our own neighborhoods.
The aforementioned image is further reinforced by "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" and "Are We the Waiting," songs which come across as the anguished screams of a destitute soul. Not content to relegate their instrumental oeuvre to the standard guitar/bass/drums that characterize much of their back catalogue, Green Day brings in a series of new ingredients to these and the other tracks on the album, actualizing the pianos, bells, and orchestral inflections they experimented with on Warning:. These unorthodox expansions serve the music far better this time around as they have a greater context with which to justify them. It all feels eerily and brilliantly natural.
"King of the 40 thieves and / I'm here to represent / The needle in the vein of the establishment..." -- "St. Jimmy"
Jesus of Suburbia needs a savior of his own, and it appears in the form of St. Jimmy, a streetwise kamikaze of a punk who comes off as just as destructive to himself as the "establishment" he so loathes. Red lights sound off like a million klaxons as the listener realizes that St. Jimmy may be the final push that sends the already-vulnerable Jesus of Suburbia over the edge, an idea which seems all the more valid during "Give Me Novocaine," a crucial moment when our protagonist seems to latch on to the false freedom St. Jimmy offers: "Tell me, Jimmy, I won't feel a thing / Give me novocaine." This track, even independent of the remainder of American Idiot, may be the most beautiful song Green Day has ever written.
Our third and final character, Whatsername, is introduced in the duality of "She's a Rebel" and "Extraordinary Girl." The transition from the lamentable chords of "Novocaine" to the uplifting riffs of "Rebel" illustrates that things may be looking up for Jesus after all, as he finds himself quite taken with Whatsername -- "She's holding on my heart / Like a hand grenade." The conflict outlined in "Extraordinary Girl," however, is our first clue that even this particular brand of salvation is too much to ask for.
"You're not the Jesus of Suburbia / The St. Jimmy is a figment of / Your father's rage and your mother's love..." -- "Letterbomb"
The demons of the past are conjured in "Letterbomb," and with them, we realize that everything is crashing down as Green Day hurtles towards the third act. As with many of the tracks on the latter half of the record, elements of all that has come before, especially the characters and the feelings they emote, resurface to give the entirety a consummate cohesion. Needless to say, not even Whatsername can save Jesus of Suburbia from his numbing Hell: "She said, 'I can't take this town / I'm leaving you tonight.'"
"Wake Me Up When September Ends" is our protagonist's requisite dirge for what could have been. Soaked in acoustic guitars and bells, "September" is easy to regard as the spiritual successor to Green Day's venerable ballad "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)." The band wisely omitted the names of their characters from this powerful song, choosing instead to serve us equal doses of American Idiot storyline and universal emotion without having to break down the fourth wall.
"Jimmy died today / He blew his brains out into the bay..." -- "The Death of St. Jimmy
Finally, the threads of the story begin to be tied up, although not under the most ideal of circumstances. "Homecoming" is the nine-minute, third-act parallel to Act One's "Jesus of Suburbia," providing another set of five mini-songs tied together into a grand suite. St. Jimmy is dead and we find Jesus of Suburbia, over two decades later, "filling out paperwork now /At the facility on East 12th Street," completely wrecked by the events of the story. Sure, he's alive, but as one might theorize, not by choice. And what of Whatsername? "Thought I ran into you down the street," Jesus of Suburbia says, "Then it turned out to only be a dream." The song is an excruciatingly beautiful closer to American Idiot, and with all the hope that's been sapped from us over the course of the preceding 55 minutes, we can't help but feel that just enough of it remains. "She went away and then I took a different path..." Perhaps she saved him after all.
"I'll never turn back time / Forgetting you / But not the time..." -- "Whatsername"
