Yes, it's one of those albums, you either love it or you hate it.

The love/hate is generally related to if that was your first real introduction to the band or if you were intimately familiar with their older material. I was still too young to really appreciate Dookie when it came out in '94 but I really got into the band after I heard "Brainstew" in like... '98 on the radio which was rare considering "Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)" was dominating the radio waves. I was already a fairly large Green Day fan in '04 when American Idiot came out and even skipped my last class the Tuesday it was released so I could go downtown and buy it. I'm not sure what happened, but the album just did not click with me. It had some great tracks, but the album in its entirety didn't engross me.

It's really hard to say what happened because at that time I was really starting to get into my Death Metal music and the idea of someone seeing a Green Day CD next to a Death CD was quite embarrassing to me at the time. I might have used that as an excuse to ditch the band entirely, but after I got over that little self-conscious period I went back and explored their discography and the only album I could really enjoy was Insomniac. Some bands do have an expiration date, it's really as simple as that. American Idiot is to a younger audience as what Dookie was to the teenage populace back in the mid '90's.