GREEN DAY DROPS THE BALL
By Chris Mattern
This is the most overproduced, contrived,
waste of plastic since the last Green Day
album, which lucky for them, was full of great
songs. 21st Century Breakdown is
in fact, full of bad songs... a bunch of them.
I'm taking off my Green Day hat. I have defended
this band for 15 years and just can't do it
anymore. I will admit to enjoying a lot of
American Idiot, I thought it was
a great record, full of great songs, and the
idea of Green Day doing a concept album and
pulling it off was very exciting to me. So
naturally, I have been waiting to see what
Green Day would do next. Hands down, Green
Day is a great band that has written countless
top-notch songs. Dookie, despite being a major
label release, t is one of the greatest punk
records of all time, and I have always defended
Green Day to the “sell out!” screaming
morons, and the even more offensive “punk
bands have no talent” crowd. But I can't
defend this band anymore.
21st Century Breakdown is a load
of fucking dog shit. None of the songs jump
out at me, and from the production end the
album sounds like a Guns N Roses record. The
first real song (I say “real song”
because the album is peppered with Billy Joe
singing over a pretty piano with some annoying
effect on his voice that makes him sound like
Janis Joplin,) “21st Century Breakdown,”
is 5 minutes long. Five fucking minutes! Who
has time for that? Everything that people
have traditionally loved about Green Day is
missing from this record. While I did enjoy
the political edge of American Idiot at
the time of its release, it wasn't something
I thought could be pulled off twice. Green
Day songs are supposed to be about jerking
off and smoking dope. I don't need Billy Joe
Armstrong to explain to me that there is something
wrong with the world, I alreadyknow that...
so I go to punk shows, and listen to music
when I want to get away from the downfalls
of life and the world.. Maybe thats not the
best attitude, but it works for me. I don't
see punk as a vehicle to change society, I
see it as a dirty damp place to go and hide
from it, so bands that get too hung up on
social and political commentaries, irritate
the shit out of me.
Lyrical content aside, the songs just aren't
there. I think there is way too much Billy
Joe playing Billy Joel, or maybe even Axl
Rose, as he sings us piano-based ballads such
as “Restless Heart Syndrome” that
remind you of Wings-era Paul McCartney. All
and all, this album is completely and totally
unlistenable, especially if you have loved
Green Day for what they were traditionally
good at. In fact, you won't even recognizethe
band. Maybe all that eyeliner has gone to
their brains. All I know is that this isn't
the band I fell in love with in 1994, and
it isn't the band that rekindled my interest
me in 2006. This band calling themselves Green
Day is terrible, and this album is going into
the trash can as soon as I'm done typing this.
Right when I thought things couldn't get worse
in the world of mainstream music, Green Day
drops the damn ball.
Green
Day Hits One Over The Fence
By Tim Norek
Green Day gives us yet another rock opera
of love, rage, revolution, social discontent,
despair, and disillusionment. This one centers
around Gloria and Christian of the Class of
’13 (that’s right, all you eighth
graders, this album’s about you). The
revolution of the class of ’13 is much
more proactive and less apathetic then Jesus
of Suburbia’s. This makes the story
much more tragic yet hopeful, with the main
characters eventually bringing their revolution
to its inevitable failure and their destruction…
but at least they tried. It is a beautiful
balance of battle cries, anthems, lullabies,
and laments, exploring the ups and downs the
characters and their revolution.
The album seems to be an evolution from American
Idiot, while the band reaches backward
recapturing something of their older sound
while still re-exploring themselves, trying
to find something new. Green Day again falls
back on some of their older influential sounds,
like surf rock in “Peacemakers”,
and klezmer (Jewish folk music) in “¿Viva
La Gloria? (Little Girl)”. They even
bring in some crust-core stylings in “Christian’s
Inferno”. Meanwhile they expand their
influences from their traditional Clash-based
punk, pulling in a sound reminiscent of the
early Beatles and even Buddy Holly & The
Crickets in songs like “Last Night on
Earth” and “The Static Age.”
They continue the trend they set for themselves
on American Idiot by almost completely jettisoning
the traditional verse/ chorus/ verse format.
Nearly every song has two or three movements,
and transitions smoothly and logically into
the next song, giving the album a nice fluid
feel. They even tie the opera idea neatly
together by matching the prolog and the epilog
to the same music. However, the epilog then
transitions very smoothly into two more movements.
This time Green Day has really shown that
they have mastered this format, and the music
styles of 21st Century Breakdown are
much more mature then those in American Idiot.
All in all, the album is excellent, and I
hope to see a third installment, making Green
Day’s revolutionary rock operas a trilogy
for the ages. “Silence is the enemy,
so gimme gimme Revolution!”
GREEN DAY: The Real Surprise Is That This
Even Exists At All
By Jim Testa
By the time Bob Dylan turned 37, he had
revolutionized folk music, brought unprecedented
lyrical depth to rock, had already enjoyed
three major comebacks (one from his 1967 motorcycle
accident, another with his triumphant career-redefining
“Before The Flood” tour with The
Band, and a third with his image-bending Rolling
Thunder Revue,) and was about to reinvent
himself yet again as a Christian artist. When
Paul McCartney was the same age, he not only
boasted the Beatles on his resume’ but
also a string of worldwide mega-hits with
Wings, and was establishing himself as one
of the world’s most popular solo artists.
(And when Mozart turned 37, to borrow an old
Tom Leher joke, he had already been dead for
two years.)
I mention all this because Billie Joe Armstrong
is 37, and here he is still playing punk rock
in the band he formed as a teenager. Green
Day's longevity is as surprising as it is
unprecedented (remember the laugh we all had
when we heard Reprise had signed the band
to a seven-album deal in 1994, back
when punk bands rarely made it to their second
major-label release? Well, who's laughing
now - this is Reprise album Number 8.) Having
come this far - and accomplished so much with
American Idiot - making another Nimrod
or Warning would seem like a step
back, like Dylan returning to Woody Guthrie
covers after Blood On The Tracks.
So it’s not at all surprising that 21st
Century Breakdown tries to up the ante
on American Idiot's considerable
achievements. Ambition is a good thing; artistic
growth is even better. We don’t need
37 year olds writing three-chord ditties about
puppy love and masturbation; there are plenty
of 17 year olds to do that. (And if not them,
then Blink-182 and Sum-41.)
On the other hand, neither Dylan nor McCartney
needed rock operas or concept albums to expand
their musical palettes and find better, bolder
ways to both express themselves and expand
their audiences. If Green Day really wanted
to surprise us after the multi-platinum, critically
lauded success of American Idiot,
they could have released an album of brilliant
but simple pop-punk. (Instead, they snarkily
threw together some not-terribly-brilliant
pop-punk under the name Foxboro Hot Tubs.)
As Green Day, they're back with another rock
opera - bigger, grander, more intense than
the first, or so the script was supposed to
read. Billie Joe wants more than Grammy awards
or a platinum records this time around; he
wants to be the Mozart of Punk Rock.
Well, Mozart he ain't. I've grappled with
21CB's three "acts," its protagonists
Christian and Gloria, the slim shards of storytelling
that can be gleaned from the lyrics, and I
don't get it. Rock operas from their inception
(Tommy and Quadrophenia
being the prime examples) never really told
a story, not until they were fleshed out into
film scripts anyway; on the other hand, Pete
Townshend didn't rip off his contemporaries
or his influences (or, perhaps most significantly,
his own work) to write them. If 21st Century
Breakdown works at all, it's as a collection
of solid Green Day songs interspersed with
a few duds; recurring musical themes and the
two named characters probably give it as much
cred as an "opera" as Tommy,
but Armstrong's inability to compose without
either repeating himself or shamelessly copying
his betters - from Beatles/Oasis Britpop to
classic rock tropes from the Who, Kinks, and
Queen - mark it as a much lesser work.
What's ironic here is that Green Day proves
that the three of them still do Green Day
better than anyone (or anything) else; the
crunchy, concise punk-rock tunes that don't
stray into multi-part suites or flog the acoustic-intro-into-big-Rock-crescendo
cliche really do rock: "Know Your Enemy,"
the anti-religion rant "East Jesus Nowhere,"
the new wave swing of "Last Of The American
Girls," the declamatory hard-rockin'
"Horseshoes & Hand Grenades,"
even the frantic "Hava Nagila" rip
"Peacemaker" (straying dangerously
into Offspring territory but still a punchy
dance tune, if you're dancing at an ethnic
wedding) would make it onto a mix tape of
my top G'Day tunes. But given that Armstrong
starts the album by decrying Christian and
Gloria's parents as "the bastard children
of 1969," he sure expends a lot of energy
recycling familiar rock riffs you could have
heard at Woodstock. (The first one, not the
one where the kids threw mud at Green Day
or the one where Korn and Limp Bizkit got
everybody to burn down the stage.)
There wasn't another Woodstock after that
one because how do you top a cry for youthful
revolution that ends with real violence and
destruction, committed in the name of wanton
hedonism and irresponsibility instead of any
real ideals? And you have to ask where Green
Day goes after 21st Century Breakdown
- a 22nd Century sci-fi suite with synthesizers,
or a 19th Century orchestral symphony? That's
up to them, obviously, but I'll admit that
even with my disappointment over this album,
I'm glad they're almost certainly going to
be around in a few years to give it a try.
