Green Day American Idiot Analysis
Contrary to popular belief, the band Green Day is not just a group of angsty millennials whose solitary intent is to force a migraine onto the whole of conservatist America. The band has a solid reputation when it comes to displaying legitimate forms of protest and education about the ‘blind leading the blind’, so to say, in media representation. In the popular single American Idiot, from the 2004 album American Idiot, Billie Joe Armstrong, along with accompanying members of his band, use fast-paced and violent sounding music to emphasize the thought-provoking lyrics which opinionates that the citizens of America are passively accepting a singular point of view projected by the media and refusing to take part in improving their homeland. Armstrong
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“Don’t wanna be an American Idiot, one nation controlled by the media, information age of hysteria, I’m calling out to idiots, America” shows that Armstrong is targeting the type of idiocy in which those who follow the media religiously will not doubt a word that is said. The media, in my opinion, has a way of twisting situations into something other than the truth. For example, the situation happening in Ferguson in the previous year. The police violence had a presence, and that was hard to ignore, but it was also difficult to project this event in an unbiased way. The general media had a negative view about the riots, they portrayed the protesters as violent anarchists that had mob-like tendencies, which in some situations was true, but there were also those who wished for peaceful protest and to follow in the ways of Martin Luther King Jr. The media generalized the protesting and caused them to look like unrelentless rebels. The #BlackLivesMatter movement also takes simple happenings and blows them out of proportion. The lyrics, “Welcome to the age of paranoia”, accurately describes this because the #BlackLivesMatter group is taking every instant of police arresting a black person as brutality and excessive force. Both forms of media are changing situations to fit their
“Don’t wanna be an American Idiot, one nation controlled by the media, information age of hysteria, I’m calling out to idiots, America” shows that Armstrong is targeting the type of idiocy in which those who follow the media religiously will not doubt a word that is said. The media, in my opinion, has a way of twisting situations into something other than the truth. For example, the situation happening in Ferguson in the previous year. The police violence had a presence, and that was hard to ignore, but it was also difficult to project this event in an unbiased way. The general media had a negative view about the riots, they portrayed the protesters as violent anarchists that had mob-like tendencies, which in some situations was true, but there were also those who wished for peaceful protest and to follow in the ways of Martin Luther King Jr. The media generalized the protesting and caused them to look like unrelentless rebels. The #BlackLivesMatter movement also takes simple happenings and blows them out of proportion. The lyrics, “Welcome to the age of paranoia”, accurately describes this because the #BlackLivesMatter group is taking every instant of police arresting a black person as brutality and excessive force. Both forms of media are changing situations to fit their