Despite the limited airplay of punk overseas, Dookie sold 50,000 copies in Europe in 1994 and built a following for Green Day internationally.

Armstrong and Dirnt turned to music as an escape and to bring a little excitement into their admittedly staid, suburban lives. Though many of their punk brethren have accused them of selling out, complaining that real punk rock cannot be found on a major corporate label, Green Day's success has not cast a shadow over their drive for fun. Dirnt commented to Rolling Stone, "I told Bill, 'Let's just take it as far as we can. Eventually we'll lose all the money and everything else, anyway. Let's just make sure we have one great big story at the end.'"

Green Day began in San Francisco, California, as an escape for two troubled teens— Michael Dirnt and Billie Joe Armstrong. Dirnt (born Michael Pritchard) was the son of a heroin-addicted mother. A Native American woman and her white husband adopted Dirnt, but they divorced when he was an adolescent. At that time, Dirnt returned to his birth mother, then left home at age fifteen, renting a room from the family of a school friend—Billie Joe Armstrong. (The friendship had solidified around the time of the death of Armstrong's father, when Billie Joe was about ten years old.) Dirnt and Armstrong eventually moved out on their own, inhabiting various basements throughout Berkeley, California, and frequenting a club called the Gilman Street Project.Armstrong and Dirnt hired Jeff Kiftmeyer as the new drummer and began touring. Upon their return to California in 1990, Gilman Street Project regular Tré Cool replaced Kiftmeyer as the drummer. This combination turned into the formula for Green Day's success as the band tried to bring punk rock into the mainstream.This trio of tattooed, pierced, and dyed-hair 22-year-olds emerged in 1994 as one of the hottest commodities in the entertainment business and ushered in punk as the heir apparent to grunge in rock and roll's quirky evolution. For all their efforts, the band has helped make punk mainstream and opened the gates for other punk bands including former Lookout! labelmates, the Offspring and Rancid.

Green Day's first number one album since 1994's multi-platinum Dookie--which is likely due to the fact that while the lyrics may have a deeper meaning, the hooks are still there, and they are played with the same intensity that made the group famous more than a decade ago. Spin said the title track was "Green Day's most epic song yet.

Like their punk predecessors, Green Day showed commitment and passion in their songs while reveling in disorder with their outlandish stage theatrics. Whether drawn to the on-stage antics or the music, listeners have always responded well to Green Day. Audiences have purchased an unprecedented number of the band's albums and continue to attend their concerts in large numbers. Both critics and music industry organizations have handed the band honors and praise for its music and lyrics.

Their lyrics dwell on "hormone-related" issues such as alienation, resentment, disillusionment, hopelessness, and self-destruction. Typically punk, they preach redemption through realism. It is not surprising then that Green Day's material was once classified as "music for people with raging hormones and short attention spans.

Moreover, critics lauded Dookie for its melodies and lyrics as well as for its controlled frenzy. In June 1994, Time reviewer Christopher John Farley even went so far as to declare the work the best rock CD of the year. In 1995, Dookie won the prestigious Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Performance. Rolling Stone Music Awards also recognized Dookie as the best album of the year and named Green Day the best band of 1995. "Longview" from Dookie also received two honors at Billboard's Music Video Awards. It was MTV's constant playing of "Longview" that made the punk-pop song more than an alternative hit and Green Day a major crossover success with mainstream audiences. Similarly, Green Day's singles earned impressive credits. In 1995, for example, "When I Come Around" spent more than twenty weeks on Billboard's Hot 100 Chart, eighteen weeks on the Modern Rock Tracks Chart, eleven weeks on the Hot 100 Recurrent Air Play List, and nine weeks on the Top 40 Air Play Chart. The next year "Geek Stink Breath" endured for eight weeks on Billboard's Hot 100 Air Play Chart.

If ever an alternative rock group epitomized modern punk, it would be Green Day. Influenced by groups like British punk rockers The Sex Pistols and The Clash, as well as by the 1960s British Invasion pop group The Kinks, Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tré Cool built on the British punk sound of the 1970s to carve their own place in pop music history.

The work challenges listeners to dig deeper than the high-octane guitars and thundering drums that drive the record's jubilant pop sheen. This is a multi-layered, literate narrative that effectively wields anger, wit, and bombast to expose the ugliness that seeps below the surface of this country's patriotism, commercialism, and nationalism.

"A lot of rock music lacks ambition. Rock has become stagnant. There are a lot of bands that aren't doing anything differently than what's currently going on in pop music--like issuing a single, putting out a record, making a video, and hopefully getting on a tour with a bigger band. I think the reason hip-hop has become so much bigger than rock lately is because those artists are much more ambitious, and they are making records that have a concept and characters. They sound like a script." ~Billy Joe Armstrong

"All my songwriting is about creating a statement and taking action. On American Idiot, it's reflecting on what's going on in the world right now." ~Billy Joe Armstrong

Green Day drew inspiration from Chinese communist propaganda art the band saw in art galleries on Melrose Avenue. The band aimed for the cover to be "at once uniform and powerful". The album's artwork—"a Posada-stark print of a heart-shaped hand grenade gripped in a blood-soaked fist"—is representative of its political content.