10 Perfect Albums That Defined The 2000s

As the '00s turned a corner, it looked like no one really had to care about Green Day. It had been years since the days of Dookie and there were some great bands like Sum 41 and Blink 182 that were doing the snotty punk thing a lot better than what Billie Joe Armstrong could muster up at the time. Once the band's master tapes for their next album were stolen though, Billie looked inward and came through with one of the greatest second winds in rock history.

Looking to rally against the Iraq War that was just about to get underway, American Idiot stood in defiance of George Bush's America, with songs that acted like weapons unto themselves. Although the rest of the pop punk scene had their angry songs, this was fashioned in the vein of the old school rock opera, with Jesus of Suburbia being a 9 minute marathon of different hooks that told the story of a kid trying to find himself in a post 9/11 America.

As much as some people wanted to call it unpatriotic at the time, this was the exact way a lot of us were feeling, with things getting more and more intense by the day and little hope for change on the horizon. Even if the world looked a little bit ugly at the time, you sometimes need records like this to remind you that things can still turn around.