Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’ Turns 20: All the Songs Ranked
Written by Joe Lynch on September 21, 2024
It’s fair to say that a trio of potty-mouthed Californian punks with tracks named “Geek Stink Breath,” “Platypus (I Hate You)” and “Dominated Love Slave” in their back catalog wouldn’t have been the prime candidates to record an era-defining blockbuster famous for holding truth to power.
But Green Day did just that when they unleashed American Idiot onto the unsuspecting public in the lead-up to the 2004 presidential election. The trio’s seventh LP might not have unseated George W. Bush from the White House, but it did top the Billboard 200 in its first week of release, spawn four Billboard Hot 100 singles and go on to sell 23 million copies worldwide. And it provided some substance to the punk-pop revival which practically celebrated the art of getting stuck in arrested development.
In addition to raging against the machine, frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tré Cool also added their own distinctive spin to the rock opera with a relatively loose, and often incomprehensible, narrative about a suburban antihero “raised on a diet of soda and Ritalin.” Inspired by similarly ambitious epics from the likes of The Who and David Bowie, American Idiot was later adapted for the Broadway stage, adding several Tony nominations to the album’s already crowded list of accolades.
“It really made me feel like I can spread my wings,” Armstrong later told Billboard about its colossal success. “It proved to me that, if you have the guts to do it, then you can make it happen. When you have a hunch that it’s time to make a big statement, musically, and it gets acknowledged, it’s the best feeling ever.”
Twenty years after this big statement first made the 43rd POTUS’ ears burn (it came out Sept. 21, 2004), here’s a ranking of American Idiot’s 13 tracks ranked from worst to best.
