Green Day’s album American Idiot will be remembered as one of the great post-millennial testaments of resistance. It captures the rage, frustration and stupidity of the 2000s, an era that has transformed war into an excuse to label and judge those who do not slot into specific narratives of family and consumerism.
4 Oct 2006 12:00
Tara Brabazon
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Writing and Publishing
Green Day’s album American Idiot will be remembered as one of the great post-millennial testaments of resistance. It captures the rage, frustration and stupidity of the 2000s, an era that has transformed war into an excuse to label and judge those who do not slot into specific narratives of family and consumerism.
Thankfully, Green Day, like Woody Guthrie, summons an alternative America of difference and defiance. When added to the films of Michael Moore and Robert Greenwald, and the words and speeches of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, debates about the limits and transgressions of American power gain texture and subtlety in this horrifying decade.
Tara Brabazon is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Brighton in the United Kingdom. She is also the Director of the Popular Culture Collective. Tara has published six books, Tracking the Jack: A retracing of the Antipodes, Ladies who Lunge: Celebrating Difficult Women, Digital Hemlock: Internet Education and the Poisoning of Teaching, Liverpool of the South Seas: Perth and its popular music, From Revolution to Revelation; Generation X, Cultural Studies, Popular Memory and Playing on the Periphery. The University of Google: Education in a (ost) Information Age is released by Ashgate in 2007. Tara is a previous winner of a National Teaching Award for the Humanities and a former finalist for Australian of the Year.
