‘American Idiot’: The Green Day song inspired by Lynyrd Skynyrd
The inflammatory political nature of American Idiot took many Green Day fans by surprise. For the entirety of the prior decade, the Bay Area punks were known for songs about masturbation, drug abuse, mental breakdowns, and the like. The idea that Green Day were suddenly some of the most politically proactive artists in rock music might have seemed strange… had American Idiot not been such a successful album.
For Billie Joe Armstrong, the leap to politics was completely natural. After all, punk rock was an inherently political genre of music. “It’s about the confusion of where we’re at right now,” Armstrong told Spin in 2004. “My education was punk rock – what the Dead Kennedys said, what Operation Ivy said. It was attacking America, but it was American at the same time.”
Originally, Green Day had no plans to make their politics known. The sessions that eventually became American Idiot started out as Cigarettes and Valentines, an album of apolitical punk songs. When the demo tapes were stolen, the band collectively decided to try something else. All it took was Armstrong hearing a Lynyrd Skynyrd song on the radio to get a spark of inspiration.
“It was like, ‘I’m proud to be a redneck’ and I was like, ‘Oh my God, why would you be proud of something like that? This is exactly what I’m against,'” Armstrong told Q in 2009. “I looked at the guys like, ‘Do you mind that I’m saying this? And they were like, ‘No, we agree with you.’ And it started the ball rolling.”
After co-headlining the ‘Pop Disaster Tour’ with Blink-182 in 2002, Green Day had largely been on hiatus before the start of the Cigarettes and Valentines sessions. When they reconvened, longtime producer Rob Cavallo wasn’t completely convinced that the band were in the proper headspace to make the album that they wanted.
“The truth is, when they started making American Idiot, they were each living their own separate lives, and no one was really sure how the chemistry was going to be,” Cavallo told MTV shortly after the album’s release. “They all had to deal with a lot of personal stuff before they could be great again. And when they first came to me and said, ‘Let’s get the band back together and make the best rock record we can,’ I wasn’t totally sure they could do it.”
“They had all made a commitment, and I was lucky enough to be there at the beginning of that commitment,” he added. “I’d go up there on a Monday and leave on a Friday, and we’d be in the studio 12 hours a day writing and conceptualizing. They were so focused and so invigorated that honestly, my main role was to be their coach, telling them that I believed in them. They did the rest.”
Check out ‘American Idiot’ down below.
