I thought Green Day was supposed to be punk, not emo!

[norinew]

@msmith537

I would like to be the first to welcome the OP to 2004. If you liked American Idiot, you might also like 21st Century Breakdown…when you hear it in 2015.

No, you may not welcome me to the new Millennium!
I am old. I like my music old, too.
Is that too much to ask?

[WordMan]

@jjimm

My takes is that this is deliberate. I seem to recall an interview with Billie Joe Armstrong where he stated this outright. The entire album is a progression through a character’s (‘Jesus of Suburbia’) emotional state, and this song is the character’s whining.

I am biased, but I too heartily recommend listening to the album in its entirety. There’s very little whining on it. To me it was a surprising, angry and brave cry against the prevalent attitudes in post-9/11 America, and really captures the silent minority anti-Bush Zeitgeist of the mid-naughties. Seriously, I think that album a work of brilliance.

I agree with this take - Green Day does tend to mine the nihilist aspect of punk in general, but American Idiot is bigger than that.

As for what punk is…meh. There is a “punkist” mindset about what is and is not punk that is pretty amazing and ironic in its desire to establish rules for something that was about trying to break rules. I look back to this threadfor where that thinking can lead…(thread where posters are stating that original punk bands aren’t punk because, well, they aren’t *their definition *of punk…oy.)