Green Day didn’t even touch my radar for the first decade of their career, apart from having a bit of a laugh at California seemingly finding my native Stiff Little Fingers and The Undertones nearly twenty years late! Then American Idiot caught me by surprise in 2004 with its post 9/11 George W Bush critique of America at war. It was a revelation in content and sound. I’ve been looking forward to 21st Century Breakdown for weeks and I thought I was too old for punk. Punks are supposed to throw out confrontational albums but they are not supposed to be ambitious enough to reach for the great definitive albums. Punk is not meant to be so precise, so strategic, so crafted and so clever. You can understand why Green Day have had their naysayers and have been labelled Judases and hypocrites. Yes, they swear their way through Horseshoes and Handgrenades with a full on assault but elsewhere there are melodies and harmonies and an accessible sound that could storm radios and do coup d’états all over the world, an American invasion that the rest of the world might be able to welcome!
Since even before they changed their name to Green Day these guys have been treated with suspicion by the fundamentalist punks. They have too many influences on their pallet, too many strings to their musical bow, too much talent to be one dimensional. Here you get the complicated musical suite of the title track littered with Stuart Adamson’s Big Country guitar, after he had left the Skids whose song gave Green Day their biggest UK hit with U2 on The Saints Are Coming; the tenderness of Last Night On Earth that could have been a ballad on any Lennon album, sounding in fact very Julian Lennon indeed; The Last Of The American Girls could be the twenty first century Beach Boys; and though there are a few touches of Sex Pistols, there is more evidence of Keith Moon and Pete Townsend in drum, guitar and overall musical mission. Billie Joe Armstrong is a punk but he is also a great writer bringing a Beatles’ sensibility and U2 big stadium swagger to the underground sound of Berkeley circa 1992.
What are they on about? Well, that is not tricky to decipher at times and the storyline that is supposed to be here is sometimes not easy to follow. The socialist punk idealism of their formative years in Berkeley’s Gilman Street scene certainly makes appearances but these guys have a wider and sharper critique. Gilman Street was the punk commune venue that got too left wing legalist and judgemental. Green Day look back at its anger of American decadence but have long broken free of its narrowness. Angst there is a-plentiful mainly against materialism, war and religion, three very modern American malaises. Where as a Christian I might have found it unnerving to listen to East Jesus Nowhere Armstrong put it well in Q when he said that he thought any Christian would have doubts over religion. Green Day are not against religion any more than they are against America. They are prophetically challenging the way it is and they do that very well.
Answers are not so forthcoming and though hope is sprinkled across these eighteen songs you wonder where it comes from; some transcendent place that they don’t give many clues to. Unlike U2, however, I reckon that Green Day want to plough up the ground and leave the seeds of solution to someone else. There is nothing wrong with that, nor this album as a way to blow out the cobwebs of your frustration with the 21st Century Breakdown.
As Billie Joe himself says, “But for me, that's the release, putting it out there. To put it out there and create some kind of human connection and strive for something that's about
Great review Steve. Been really enjoying this album, I note your observation of the beatle-esque sound, and they know how to write a melody with some infectious hooks and riffs. It's a creative evolution from American Idiot. Brilliant stuff!
Posted by: Paul | 21/05/2009 at 08:44 PM