10 Perfect Protest Songs In Rock History
6. American Idiot - Green Day
The thought of any pop punk act having a protest song under their belt felt unthinkable in the early '00s. This was an inherently juvenile genre, and the only thing that these artists would really be protesting is their parents not allowing them to sleep in in the morning. As the nation headed off to war though, something needed to be said, and it took the godfathers of the genre to help open up the floodgates.
Though Green Day were certainly not the first band to hurl a song at George Bush, they landed a pretty heavy blow with American Idiot, as Billie Joe Armstrong talks about Bush's tactics of using the media to keep us desensitized to the carnage that's going on around us. Since this was the age when Bush was promoting a sense of blind patriotism, Billie was not afraid to criticize the country he lived in, not willing to go along with the redneck agenda that everyone believed you should follow if you wanted to support your country.
The song isn't all just Bush bashing though. If you look closely at the lyrics, Billie says that he doesn't want to be an American Idiot, trying his best to not be swayed by everyone else's biases and finding your own place in the world. Life might not be easy to navigate, but you're not going to happy just going along with the program all the time, and Billie is adamant about not giving in to what the higher ups have to say.