Don’t’ Wanna Be an American Idiot!
How did Green Day become a symbol of protest culture through its song “American Idiot”?
“I do not want to be an American idiot!”
In reality, no one wants to be called an idiot, do they? Yet in their song, the band Green Day is really talking about someone. It is not just about some imaginary people, no, it is a clear reference to a part of the population that is designed as “American idiots”. But what is an American idiot? What is Green Day talking about in its song and self-titled album? Couldn’t we all be in some way “American idiots”?
To answer this question, we need to come back in time, almost 20 years ago….
September 21, 2004, in the context of the U.S. presidential election pitting Democratic candidate John Kerry against incumbent President George W Bush, who looks for his reelection, the band Green Day released the song “American idiot” and the album of the same name, in a beautiful punk-rock odyssey, telling the story of Johnny or “Jesus of suburbia”, a lower-middle class American antihero, desperately trying to escape the boredom of his life in the suburbs.
The band, and more specifically its singer, guitarist and leader, Billie Joe Armstrong, was strongly inspired by the defining events of the early 21st century: the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the ensuing Iraq War initiated by the administration of George W Bush. We are at a turning point in history, with popular opinion starting to switch, because people are getting fed up with the outgoing president’s administration. In this context, as well as that of the coming elections, Armstrong is dismayed and confused by the warrior culture of his homeland, noting a major divergence within the population over the war in the Middle East.
Thus, the album and the eponymous song are a means of expressing the group’s convictions, in particular to challenge the massively developed culture which could be summed up in the title of the song “American idiot”. By doing so, this album has been seen at the time as a manifesto against Bush.
However, despite the song being written and happening under Bush’s reign, do not think this song is limited to the 43rd President, but more as a representation of American society telling the newspaper The Spin: “I would never think of American Idiot as being about the Bush administration specifically. […] It’s about the confusion of where we’re at right now.”
Thus, the song’s main purpose is to criticize the American society of their time. Indeed, it speaks of a nation controlled by the biased new media, and of the fact that the singer is not part of a “Redneck Agenda”, referring to the presidency and its policies with which the author does not identify, dissatisfied with the way things are going. From a broader point of view, when Billie Joe Armstrong speaks of a “redneck” agenda, referring to a part of the population that comes from the white rural working class of the American South, he declares that he doesn’t recognize himself in a part of the population and consequently of the “Deep South” states, and in the worldview that is often attributed to this part of the population, namely an ambient racism, and behaviors that are too physical, and even violent. He denounces the culture of rudeness and of opposition to modern methods and progress due to the important place of conservatism itself due to the importance of the Christian religion, particularly through evangelical movements, that he finds too present in the society in which he lives.
The singer then establishes a link with what he considers to be the social dysfunctions of contemporary America, addressing the themes of fear and xenophobia within a society and accusing the media of using propaganda to stir up paranoia (“And sing along to the age of paranoia”) and hysteria (“Information age of hysteria”). “American Idiot” conveys a vision of society — not only American society — and the elite’s control of the masses, as well as the role of the mass media in shaping public opinion. So, this song is a reference to the author’s personal opinions that we are being told everything by the media and the politicians: what we should do, what is the right thing to do, what we need to believe in and of course in a capitalistic culture, what to buy. His punk influence and his deep desire for individual freedom has made him a revolutionary at heart, who doesn’t want to be told what to do, especially when it’s imposed through the media by the government. For him, we are constantly being subliminally “mind-fucked” by commercials, campaigns, and reality TV. They turn us into idiots with no individuality, totally dependent on the goodwill of the elites.
However, he doesn’t limit himself to making an observation: in his song, Armstrong says he doesn’t want his nation to be turned into a country full of idiots who have no critical view of the world around them or the policies that govern them. More specifically, his criticism focuses on various aspects. Firstly, he doesn’t want his country to be subject to a return to the past, as evidenced by his use of the term redneck to refer to the President, implying the amount of racism, and the influence of the conservators who don’t want the march of progress. He also wants people to be free to choose, not convinced that it’s right to hate someone because of their sexual preferences (“maybe I’m the faggot America”). By designing himself as a “faggot”, a pejorative term to design gay men at the time, he is choosing his side: he prefers being “a faggot” rather than choosing the path of intolerance. Finally he doesn’t want the nation to be isolated and hated because of stupid decisions made by the government (“Welcome to a new kind of tension, all across the alienation”), making a great pun between the term “alienation” relating to the country’s isolation to the rest of the world especially considering the subject of the war in Iraq leading to widespread popular disagreement around the world, as well as deep disagreement with many countries over the legality of the invasion, and “alien nation”, which is the way the United States is sometimes perceived in the rest of the world, and is an expression used to mock the world’s leading power and its alien-believing inhabitants and the infamous Area 51 .
The song should be therefore seen as a “call to individuality”, according to Mike Dirnt, the band’s bassist; it’s okay to be different than the others, and there is no shame in that.
In this way, art, here in its musical form, can be used to broadcast and share within mass culture, and more specifically popular culture, the political messages, and values that songwriters wish to convey. Here we return to the thesis of German author and philosopher Walter Benjamin, developed in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In this book, he argues about the political implications of the mechanical reproduction. For him, the mass production of art has the potential to emancipate the population politically by making art and the messages the authors want to convey accessible to a larger audience. By taking the example of the photography, he explains his belief that art can be a means of transmitting thought, particularly political thought, saying “With Atget photographs […] acquire a hidden political significance”, illustrating the political role art can play.
The punk-rock movement, from which the band Green Day emerged, fits perfectly into this idea developed by Benjamin. Extremely popular in the 1970s, punk culture is mainly characterized by beliefs promoting individual freedom, non-conformity, anti-authoritarianism, anti-corporatism, anti-consumerism, and anti-establishment views. At the beginning, a punk is, a troublemaker and then developed as a culture genre anti-mainstream and anti-system. To convey these values through art, punk generally uses a minimalist, iconoclastic and satirical aesthetic.
The influence of this culture can be seen in the song “American idiot”, particularly in its video clip. In fact, the video features several elements that explicitly refer to this mentality. Indeed, we are in the middle of an empty warehouse scene, with only a green American flag (a reference to the band’s name). At the end of the song, we can see the flag beginning to melt down to the floor as the band leaves the frame. There is huge symbolism in doing, remembering the punk culture and the iconoclastic aesthetic, and promoting an absolute liberty in melting the flag. When the group have been asked about the flag desecration they replied: “It means nothing to me. Let’s burn the fucking thing.” In a post 9/11 this meant a lot. We can see the political implication of the group in this declaration. Indeed, after the terrorist attacks, the main policy for dealing with this attack on American symbols was to call for national unity through patriotism. The Flag is therefore the Holy grail of the patriotism and desacralizing it shows a real challenge to the system as a whole and sends out a strong message of contestation of this policy and a call for an end to over patriotism. We can clearly see here, Green Day’s vision of themselves as rebels against the established system and propagandists of freedom and punk ideology.
It is also important to highlight the description and denunciation of the media done in this song. In his book, Benjamin already warned us against the potential for mass media to be used for propagandistic purposes. We can also find this idea in the song (“Now everybody, do the propaganda”) denounced by Armstrong that illustrates the fact that mass media can be used to create a narrative of fear among the population and influence the behavior of the same population based on some nostalgia and the manipulation of historical perspectives.
Green Day denounces the coverage of the events of 9/11 and of the war in Iraq and the division between what they called “television culture” versus the world’s view of America, which could be considered as careless warmongers. They want to show the world, but firstly Americans, that the mass media have been used to create a narrative of fear among the population to justify specific reactions, policies, and political agendas. We can see it in the song with “One nation controlled by the media Information age of hysteria”. This logic of the creation of narrative was developed by Michel-Rolph Trouillot in his book Silencing the Past, Power, and the Production of History. He introduced the concept of the “production of history,” emphasizing that historical narratives are not discovered but are actively produced through a selective process of inclusion and exclusion. The act of selecting which events to include or omit is a form of power. In our case, it is not directly about History but a selective process of news that may keep a certain level of fear among the population, that influences how we see people, creating preconceived opinions.
However, the temporality of events may also be a big factor in the influence of our perception. That is the idea developed by Frederic Jameson in his essay “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture”. For him, temporality plays a crucial role in understanding how mass culture operates and influences perceptions. One key notion to understand in Jameson’s work is the notion of “Nostalgia”, a tendency in mass culture to reify and commodify the past, turning historical or nostalgic events into marketable products. Thus, his theory discusses how mass culture handles the past, particularly through nostalgic representations, and how this manipulation of historical time influences people’s understanding of their own historical and social context. Media, in our situation, were used to make the population constantly remember the events of 9/11 and progressively confused people on their own history and society, making them what is now called by Green Day “American idiots”.
This situation, not without remembering of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, shows how people can be influenced to the point of losing their critical faculties about the world around them, and demonstrates the influence that the media can have on our perception of reality.
The song was a hit when it was released in 2004, both musically with 267,000 copies sold in its first week, reaching third place in the UK Singles Chart and scored №1 album on the U.S. pop charts, and culturally since it clearly influenced a generation to which I belong. Despite its enormous success in the past, we are entitled to ask: Is it still relevant today?
One might think that the song is too much embedded in a very particular historical context, and therefore would not resonate in a context that is different from the one in which it was released. However, a lot of elements can make us think otherwise.
Indeed, for the singer, even if the song is clearly from its time, there was always the hope that it would remain timeless. And it did because it became an ode to individual freedom, criticism of the elites and the media, and the propaganda to which they submit. It is also a song written out of the anger of the artists about not being represented by the world leaders. In a context where the trust in the politics and the media has fallen (only 32% of the Americans still have a good opinion on the media), it is not hard to understand why American idiot found an echo in our contemporary society. The song is now used as the protest song across the world. For example, in July 2018, before the visit of the American President Donald Trump in the United Kingdom, a campaign started to get “American Idiot” to the top of the UK song charts. On the Official UK Charts dated 13 July 2018, the song re-entered the UK Singles Chart at 25 and the UK Singles Downloads Chart at number 2.
It is also important to underline the political implication of the group, notably taking a stand against Donald Trump, especially Billie Joe Armstrong angry about the political situation in his country and particularly about Donald Trump being elected to the White House. As we can see, the song is still relevant today because it resonates with many people on the political and societal situation in the world, but also maybe in the future. As every survey gives Donald Trump as the Republican candidate for the next presidential election in 2024, we may see a comeback of this song in a near future.
In the end, maybe we are all a little bit our own version of the “American idiot” in the sense that we may have been in our life influenced by a lot of factors, family, media or even school. However, what we need to remember is that this song is an overview of the album’s most important ideas, as well as a sort of a warning calling out to the people across the country: don’t let them take away your personality, don’t let them turn you into Idiot America. Stay yourself, and stay critics about the world that surrounds you, inform yourself and make your own conclusion while taking every information into account. Be yourself. And if you have time, go listen to the song, even if the song may not find echo in you, the music is really worth it.
Charles Vermeere-Merlen
