At the start of the 2000s, Green Day was at a musical low point for the first time in their career. Though the last few records had seen them ascending to the greatest heights that any punk band had reached, their willingness to experiment on albums like Warning didn't suit the style the rest of the world was going for. While the pop-punk scene gravitated towards acts like Blink-182 and Sum 41, Billie Joe Armstrong wanted to compete with the musical greats.
Inspired by the massively flimsy stance of George Bush's invasion of Iraq, Armstrong wrote the song 'American Idiot' to let out his aggression. Almost a pop-flavoured answer to The Clash's 'London Calling', Armstrong knew that he had set the bar pretty high for himself, thinking everything had to measure up to this one piece of brilliance.
As the rest of the band contributed material, Armstrong was taken with a short snippet of a song Mike Dirnt brought to the table called 'Nobody Likes You'. Looking to make his own bite-sized song, Armstrong came up with a version of a tune called 'East 12th Street', which combined with Tre Cool's 'Rock and Roll Girlfriend' to become the multi-part epic 'Homecoming'.
The makings of a storyline began forming in the lyrics, and Armstrong channelled the rest of his creative energy into painting a picture of young kids trying to make it through 21st-century America. If 'Homecoming' marked the bitter end to the characters' story, 'Jesus of Suburbia' was the sweeping epic to kick everything off. Although Armstrong always had his punk credentials intact, he also pulled from classic rock.
When talking about the tune's genesis, Armstrong was taken with the sweeping epics that Queen would make during their prime, telling Rolling Stonethat he wanted to write "the 'Bohemian Rhapsody' of the future". While there are very few songs that could compete with Queen's masterpiece, 'Suburbia' does earn every piece of that inspiration.
Spread across nine minutes, Armstrong paints a short story of a kid working through a broken home, living on a diet of soda pop and Ritalin before realising he's worth so much more than his dead-end town. After lashing out in anger in the 'I Don't Care' section, Jesus gets off his ass and leaves for the big city with a tear in his eye on the final movement, 'Tales From Another Broken Home'.
Aside from Queen, the song also bares striking similarities to the epics that came out of the glory days of rock and roll storytelling. The piece's structure may contain echoes of 'Rhapsody', but the drastic tonal switches also evoke the sweeping, dramatic songs that Pete Townshend would write for The Who before his rock opera Tommy, such as 'A Quick One While He's Away' and 'Rael'.
Regardless of the British rock influence, Armstrong's lyrics were at the beating heart of every teenage American around the same time, trying to empathise with them the same way Bruce Springsteen related to the down-and-out figures in his material. The hangover of the story was to come in 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams', but for these nine minutes, the world was Jesus's oyster.
