I have to express--HAVE to--my sheer delight in the newest Green Day album, American Idiot. It is the best rock album that I've heard--well, I don't want to say ever, because I would have to think really hard about that--so let's say, the best rock album I've heard in all the experience that I can immediately recall. There are other songs by other bands that are individually better than the songs on this disc; but this album as a whole is a monster of fantastic proportions.

And I was credulous when Alex first gave me a copy, there's no doubt about it. He was speaking to me of it in superlative terms, just as I am doing now, and I was like, "But... Green Day? They're still putting out music? errrr." He wanted so badly to convince me that it was this good that he made me a copy and refrained from taking it back so he could listen to it in his car on the way home. And now I understand.

I was talking about it with Alex the other day, and we absolutely agreed that this was a Rock Opera at it's finest. Leave it to the critics and teenagers to decide whether this is a Punk-Rock Opera or a Pop-Rock Opera. My mental impression was that they had grown to be something between Queen and Bad Religion, and deserving of the comparison. That's saying a lot, guys. Queen and Bad Religion are really good bands.

Essentially, they're knocking around the same ideas now that they were on Dookie. Emotional confusion, political alienation, poignant looks at the past and hope for the future. It's just that now, the complexity of expression, their sensitivity to modulation is just astounding, leaps and bounds. There exists an underlying structure of chorus and verse, and yet each of those things is made multi-layered and complex; the music takes your thoughts, ideas, and feelings, and molds them into a rapid succession of different yet related forms, like a balloon animal artist working quickly and gently on your mind. Except that your mind is not a balloon, it is made of ROCK N' ROLL.

I say for anyone who enjoys rock--good rock--the essence of rock, minus any sense of scenes--you have got to listen to this album. And I don't mean, listen to a few songs and then decide if you want to hear the album. I mean listen to it straight through, without skipping. I have to say, the first song was relatively unexceptional. It's still GOOD, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't sound like anything new. Just coast, just coast on through, and you will hit the most AWESOME WAVES OF SOUND THAT HAVE EVER COME IN SUCCESSION OF EACH OTHER. I'm just saying, I have nothing but delight in the way that one piece of music follows another, with the exact change you needed but didn't expect, and at exactly the right time. I even recall a moment when I heard a chord/tempo shift that I thought was something 'one would expect', but then I thought, no--this album is too good, they have not been in any way brutish with their music. And I was right. It was that moment when they absolutely trounced my last vestige of wary cynicism, that I realized: they are Great. They have become a Great Band, fully deserving of having people listen to their music five generations from now.

On top of that, Billie Joe's voice has absolutely come into its own. He can really belt it out, On Pitch and On Rhythm and with flawless character. And, aside from the first song, the lyrics are never blunt, never dumb. Everything is said just-so, in a way that you didn't think of, but you realize is right.

I keep wanting to use the word delicate. It's not delicate in the sense that this is gentle music - it is rockin music. I mean that they implement minor changes, subtle progressions, smooth transitions in a way that is delicate, precise, accurate: perfect.

I'm serious. I literally haven't taken it out of my car CD player for, I think, a week. That's an eternity in the land of driving music. Do you have any idea how many times the CD has played over? And yet I don't know when I will tire of it. I've even thought to myself, shouldn't I be tiring of this? I pull out my case of other CDs, and rifle through them to see what else I feel like, but then I stop in the middle of looking through my CDs to listen to this one awesome part of the song, and I realize it's futile. I am not tired of it, and there's nothing else I want to listen to while that album is playing.

Even if Green Day produces nothing more that is good, or nothing more at all, they are entirely justified. They deserve, in no uncertain terms, to live rich, free, happy lives off their music until they die.

12:33 p.m. 2004-11-29�