By the time the new millennium kicked in, Billie Joe Armstrong was sick of pop-punk.
Not to say that up until that moment, Green Day had been defined by such a moniker. Their decade under the influence up until then had seen them go from Gilman Street to Madison Square Garden, bridging the gap between the chaotic underbelly of punk and the mainstream's desire for music with a bit of dirt under its fingernails. Since the outrageous success of 1994's Dookie, they had pushed and pulled at their scrappy, sincere take on sugary, snotty noise, with 1995's Insomniac incorporating more wall-of-sound nihilism and 1997's Nimrod bringing jovial ska, sun-stained surf rock, and rollicking hardcore to the table.
But more than anything, Billie Joe was tired. Being constantly on the road, pretty much since their inception, had taken as much of a toll on his creative joints as it had on the bags under his eyes.
"I just wanted to stop and not do anything," he told MTV's TRL. "We were over and over again playing shows one after another and recording. We’ve really had no time off the whole time we have been together. So I consciously made an effort not to write songs for a while, and for me, I think it’s been the best thing I have ever done for my songwriting."
Those two years off the road also allowed Armstrong to indulge in different styles of music than he had been subjected to up till now. Much of that had been inspired by the acoustic guitar. Used on the global smash Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life), which became uber-massive thanks to its inclusion in the Seinfeld episode The Chronicle, the starkness of its sound started to pique his interest.
"I had been getting into listening to more of The Kinks and The Who, who found a lot of power in an acoustic song, and used the guitar almost like a drum," he admitted to Rolling Stone in 2020, citing the latter's Pinball Wizard as an example of the percussive power of the instrument. Throw in some of the storytelling prowess of Tom Waits and the distinct rock of The Pretenders, and you are in waters far away from what was happening with the likes of Fat Wreck Chords and Hopeless Records.
Which is why Warning, released in the Autumn of 2000, feels the way that it does. More folky and more stark than what had previously transpired, it served as a changing of the tide for what to expect from Green Day. And that was clear from the moment that first single Minority was unleashed on August 22, two months ahead of the full record. Though beneath the rallying beats and plucked strings, there was also a deeper resonance. A political heart was beating at its core.
Written just before the election battle between George W. Bush and Al Gore kicked into gear, it is a song that speaks to the shift in societal allegiance Billie Joe was seeing beyond his four walls.
"I started feeling the political wheels starting to turn toward conservatism a little bit," he added during his conversation with Rolling Stone in 2020. "I think that song is sort of about declaring that you’re stepping out of the line, you’re not part of the sheep, and trying to find your own individualism."
Very much solidifying a main characteristic that makes punk so attractive to a lost teenager, it also stands as a point that writing what is real to you will always be right. That even if everything else is changing around you, that doesn't mean that it's changing in the right way.
"I was on a music journey where I was trying to find more and more music that was probably raw and real, and I think it just led me to start listening to punk, because it just seemed like it was music for outcasts," he mentioned to Variety earlier this year, looking back to his youth. “I felt like that’s where I fit in the most. It was just real. When I got into punk, everything before that felt fake to me or something.”
Lyrically, Minority is as playful as it is polarising. "It’s nice to twist things around and take them completely out of context but also find a different meaning out of it," he stated to CDNOW in 2000, and that's saying something. From chopping and changing the Pledge of Alligiance to naming and shaming the Moral Majority, a organisation led by Minister Jerry Falwell Snr that advocated for conservative religious values - banning of abortions, opposition of gay rights et al - in the 80s, it allowed Billie Joe to let his feelings on the way of the world be known in the most black and white of shades.
"A free for all // Fuck 'em all // You are at your own sight", indeed.
Despite promoting the album and performing Minority, on no less than The Stern Show, TRL, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Night with David Letterman and Farm Club in the United States alone, Warning still became the band's first full-length since Dookie to not go Platinum. Seen as a commercial disappointment at the time, in the years that have followed, Billie Joe has reaffirmed his personal feelings on what the band were attempting.
"It has an audience...I guess that’s the one thing about records and time," he admitted to Vulture. "When people revisit stuff, there’s fans of that era or that time where they have that record as their particular favorite. They want to be different, you know? I think Warning’s the one right now that I look at that maybe, at the time, was sort of misunderstood."
Yet without it, what would come would be completely different. Because four years later, American Idiot, an arena-ready rock opera for the ages, would take the band to a completely different level. Off the back of the conservative fears that had crept up Billie Joe's spine coming to fruition in ways that no one could ever have imagined - the world now completely changed off the back of 9/11 and the Bush administration making moves in the Middle East - the band were now making a political statement of resistance unlike anything they had committed to tape previously.
"When we did Warning, we were definitely trying to do something different from [our] sound than we’d ever done before," Billie Joe surmised for Billboard in 2024. "That was foreshadowing for what would end up becoming American Idiot. We had a studio that we were going into every day in Oakland called [Studio] 880, and we just started to experiment in there. We were like the inmates running the asylum for months. Then we came upon doing a concept record that was right in the middle of the George Bush administration and the war in Iraq."
That desire to experiment, that laser-focused want to call out injustice, that need to be on the right side of history, it wouldn't have been possible without that shift that Warning allowed. Only in long-width hindsight can we see just how life-changing that was for the band. Going from a big deal to a very big deal off the back of American Idiot, they have since pinned their politics even more proudly to their sleeves. From 2009's continued storytelling of 21st Century Breakdown to 2016's rallying Revolution Radio, through to the on-stage denouncing of MAGA ideology and reinforcing of support for Palestine, the last 20 years of their career have been very much defined by raising their fists firmly in the air.
"As far as standing up for what you believe in, on either side, you should be able to have a discussion, and for me personally, I think fear of failure is not an excuse for not trying," bassist Mike Dirnt told The Aquarian in 2005. "We’re going to go out there and say what we believe and believe what we say."
When asked what Minority means to him by Howard Stern, Billie Joe would state, "It's a song about being individual and being yourself and not subscribing to anybody’s gang or rules or whatever, and just being your own person." It's a sentiment that is not only bigger than the sum of its parts, but also something that continues to change with every year that passes since it was uttered. To have taken those steps a quarter of a century ago means that generation after generation can now find their footing to the sound of it.
And though the conversation surrounding the legacy and placement of Warning within the Green Day story will forever continue, the domino effect that Minority was the catalyst for will remain steadfast.
The 25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition of Warning is out now via Reprise Records.
