Searching for a song that was culturally and personally relevant was a challenge initially. I could have chosen “The Wall” by Pink Floyd or “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday or any number of the songs I found on "100 Songs That Changed History” however, I didn’t want to write about a song or a period of time that I was not attached to. The one song that did jump out to me was “American Idiot” by Green Day.
Don't want to be an American idiot
Don't want a nation under the new media
And can you hear the sound of hysteria?
The subliminal mind fuck America

Welcome to a new kind of tension
All across the alien nation
Where everything isn't meant to be okay
Television dreams of tomorrow
We're not the ones meant to follow
For that's enough to …show more content…
Bush was in office. In a time with technology ever increasing with MySpace and the release of Facebook and Google’s Gmail. This was also post 9/11 and conspiracies and access to them were rampant. The song was initially aggressively protested by many Americans who assumed the Band was calling all Americans “idiots” and referring to President George W. Bush, with the use of the words “Redneck agenda.” Although the actual meaning behind the lyrics is political, it is said to be an attempt to inform American’s that they are being “subliminal[ly] mindfucked. In the lines “One nation controlled by the media/Information age of hysteria” Green Day is stating that Americans are being told what to think and what to be hysterical about by the media, we are not thinking for ourselves nor are we being given the chance to because the media only tells us what they want us to know. Also the narrator “doesn't want people to be convinced that it's right to hate someone because of their sexual preferences ("maybe I'm the faggot America"), doesn't want the nation to be isolated and detested because of stupid decisions that the government makes ("Welcome to a new kind of tension, all across the alienation").”