Green Day singer-guitarist, Billie Joe Armstrong, once proclaimed in song, "I'm a smart-ass, but I'm playing dumb," and for many years his performance was seamless. Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tre Cool met in their late teens and displayed natural gifts for propulsive, funny, disposable punk-pop songs about masturbation and alienation. In 1994 Dookie, their first major-label album, sold 10 million copies. Multimillionaires at 22, the members of Green Day settled into a routine of churning out blink-and-they're-over records followed closely by triumphant world tours. They were not quite criminally lucky, but they weren't exactly paragons of ambition either. Sometimes, when they got bored, they would write a song longer than 3 min. Other times they would just flash the audience their underpants.
All in all, it was a good life, and it might have gone on happily unexamined had Green Day not committed the ultimate act of laziness: releasing a greatest-hits album. In 2001 the group foisted International Superhits! upon the world, and like a cartoon boulder, it ended up flattening them. "Seeing a decade of your songs laid out like that is an invitation to midlife crisis," says Armstrong, 32. "Suddenly we were asking, 'Why are we in this band? Do we want to keep doing this? And, you know, what might happen if we challenged ourselves?'"
The answers to those questions arrived bundled together last September in the form of American Idiot. There is almost no precedent for a band's putting out six decent albums and then on its seventh delivering a masterpiece, but American Idiot debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, appeared on most critics' year-end Top 10 lists, netted seven Grammy Award nominations (including one for Album of the Year), returned for another run atop the charts this month and inspired talk that the rock opera--oh, yes, American Idiot is a rock opera with characters and a plot and sociopolitical themes, no less--might be due for a revival. The emergence of Green Day as artisteshas stunned the music industry; imagine Hollywood the day after the Farrelly brothers win Best Picture, and you'll have some idea.
How did this happen? Green Day's long maturation was due largely to its initial burst of success. Dookie attracted a broad audience of suburban teens for whom lines like "I'm not growing up, I'm just burning out" became mini-mantras. While the band occasionally showed a hint of depth (2000's Warning had more diverse instrumentation and was vaguely political), its popularity gave it no incentive to evolve. But over the past few years, younger outfits like Good Charlotte and Sum 41--who admit a musical debt to Green Day--began siphoning off the aimless-adolescent market. By the time Superhits! was released, Green Day's sales were declining, and Armstrong, Dirnt and Cool, all barely 30, felt very old.