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By Alan Sculley / Special to The Detroit News

Reprise Records

After trading pop for politics with its latest album, "American Idiot," Green Day have pushed on as the elder statesman of punk rock and a source of brash social observations while preserving the band's image and sound from 1990s purgatory.

It's been a reelection campaign of sorts, and a victory rally will be held Sunday night at The Palace of Auburn Hills.

"American Idiot" is an audacious statement for Green Day, which celebrated the 10th anniversary of the release of "Dookie" last year. That album, with hits such as "Longview," "Welcome To Paradise" and "When I Come Around," turned "Dookie" into a multiplatinum hit and brought pop-punk into the rock mainstream.

That postadolescent measure is a far cry from the satirical nature of "American Idiot," which is billed as a punk opera. But that doesn't mean the band followed exactly in the trail blazed 35 years ago when the Who released rock's first and still definitive rock opera, "Tommy."

"It's not so literal like that," says drummer Tre Cool, noting that "American Idiot" doesn't employ the linear story-telling device of most rock operas. "We have to leave it up to the imagination of the listener. Otherwise, you listen to it once, and there's no underlying fabric that you can pull over, and there's nothing shrouded. There are lots of like hidden things and lots of new meanings that come up after like the fifth, sixth listen."

"American Idiot" appears to have set an even higher standard by being the most ambitious Green Day album. It retains the band's patented brand of hard-charging, hook-filled rock, but it ups the ante with the CD's centerpiece, "Jesus Of Suburbia," which essentially strings together five mini-songs into a longer single piece.

And while most of "American Idiot" flows seamlessly from one song to the next, unlike most rock operas, most of the songs can stand alone as singles and don't suffer when removed from the context of the entire album.

Cool, while acknowledging that he's proud of the influence Green Day has had over the past decade, says competition is not what fuels the band. "I don't know about staying ahead or whatever. It's just we don't want to do the same things over and over," he says. "Like these (other pop-punk) bands, they're all going to grow, too. They started out basically in the pop-punk genre, and then they moved to whatever they're going to do. Everybody has their path.

"You can't judge the Beastie Boys on 'Fight For Your Right (To Party).' It's a great honor when a band that's hugely successful will sit there and say 'We owe it all to Green Day.' That's awesome."[/size]