The Day That Green Day Died (To Me)

Some time in 1995, months after it was first released I bought a copy of Dookie, probably the first album I ever found by someone I didn’t hear about through my parents. Thereafter I bought every Green Day album the day they were released into stores and continued this tradition even as my interested in punk rock waned, if only as just a debt of gratitude to a band who was very important to me at one point in time. Amazingly, over about a decade of buying the band’s albums, and despite the fact I grew less interested in the genre of music they helped define and bring to a mass audience, I never lost respect for the Oakland trio.

Perhaps Green Day’s biggest contribution to music in a broader scope was bringing into clearer focus the idea of ‘selling out’ and what that term meant to punk rock purists. Nirvana, a couple years earlier, faced many of the same issues of maintaining respect and integrity in the face of the music industry, but the die-hards of grunge never shared quite the same level of fervor against mainstream success. Green Day, on the other hand, very much belonged to a close-knit scene on Gilman Street in Berkeley whose credo was entirely Do It Yourself.

When the band put out Dookie, their major label debut, in 1994 and, coincidentally, its sound was something which overtly lent itself to radio play -- at least far more so than anything they had created before -- longtime fans used to seeing the band at small clubs took this as abandonment. In their minds, Green Day were now writing disingenuous songs aimed at capturing larger audiences, leaving personal accessibility and that DIY ethic behind for a short-lived cash grab.

Looking back, that seems like a difficult position to take. Most songs from Dookie were written long before the album was ever put together, and moreover it’s just too hard to paint a picture of Billie Joe Armstrong locked away somewhere slaving meticulously over that next hook. They just never seemed to take themselves that seriously.

Unfortunately, after listening to Green Day’s new album, 21st Century Breakdown, that can no longer be said. In fact, for a band which -- years before Blink 182 came along -- found success by singing about masturbating, the surprising problem with this record is that it is so masturbatory. The reason Green Day was always so appealing was that they were one of the few mainstream artists who never seemed to treat their ‘art’ with any sort of reverence. Rather, irreverence was their art.

For instance, much of the impact of “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” was that it was a unique reflective moment hidden amongst an album, (my personal favorite) Nimrod, full of bombastic noise. More importantly, it was executed with Billie Joe’s characteristic snarkiness: those of us who knew laughed every time an effective ‘fuck you’ song was played at a high school graduation, or the series finale of Seinfeld. Shouldn’t the title have tipped more people off?

The first warning sign that 21st Century Breakdown would be bad, blinking yellow months before the album dropped, was when the band revealed that longtime collaborator and producer Rob Cavallo, for the first time since Dookie, would not have any hand in its production. The result -- much like former touring mates Jimmy Eat World, who put out three great albums with Mark Trombino before jumping producers and the shark simultaneously, but probably not coincidentally -- is that while the album still mostly sounds like Green Day, no part of it comes off as edited or pared down in the least. It’s bloated with too many half-baked ideas.

“¡Viva la Gloria!” creates an archetype for several Breakdown cuts, beginning with a wholly unnecessary piano-driven piece, barely connectable to the following song, before blasting into something which, while at least vaguely resembling a more familiar Green Day, is undoubtedly cheapened by that overwrought prelude. “Last Night on Earth” sounds like what it likely is, a cheap Beatles rip -- which, considering their b-side cover of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero”, ought to come as no surprise -- and “Restless Heart Syndrome” sounds far too much like a Guns N’ Roses-style ballad (with awful/cheesy title to boot) to be taken seriously.

However, my main beef with this record is not just with the music itself, but also the band’s second take at a concept album. While it may seem somewhat contradictory to criticize Green Day for their jaunt into high-mindedness on Breakdown while American Idiot really set the precedent for their attempts at political grandiosity, at least the story of the latter is somewhat intelligible, and -- despite the unnecessary jigsaw puzzle of a song like “Jesus of Suburbia” -- doesn’t distract the listener to the point where the album can’t just be enjoyed as a normal 13 track record.

Songs like “Wake Me Up When September Ends” and “Are We the Waiting” do veer disturbingly into arena rock, but others such as “American Idiot”, “Holiday” and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” are great singles, and work in the context of the Green Day who put out an album like Warning. And if you were really jonesing for some classic early 90s-sounding punk rock, then all you had to do was look up any one of the band’s side projects (Pinhead Gunpowder, Foxboro Hot Tubs, or The Network) who sound more like Green Day then, well, Green Day.

But going back, what exactly makes Breakdown a concept album? The fact that the first song and the last song feature the same piano riff? Is that what passes for ‘artsy’ nowadays? I’m not exactly sure, but on this attempt at storytelling it’s nearly impossible to tell who the characters are, much less discern any plot or message behind its lyrics. Granted, just about every song is steeped in a paranoia borne against some invisible enemy, but they just end up coming off like the rants of a stereotype über-liberal undergrad: lots of exuberance and a chip on the shoulder in regards to ‘the man’, but containing little real substance or insight.

Growing older and having families; dealing with going on the road and leaving those families behind; living up to the high levels of critical success people have come to expect from you; living up to the punk rock stereotype while approaching 40. These are the sorts of things I would like to hear Green Day sing about, these are the sorts of subjects that Billie Joe began to touch on in Warning. American Idiot may have been an acceptable foray into political writing -- they were pissed off at the government, we were all pissed off at the government -- but at a certain point you have to get over it and tell your own stories.

If the band had always made their mark using platitudes, then perhaps I would be willing to give them a break. But hell, isn’t “Nice Guys Finish Last” satirizing clichés like ‘nice guys finish last’? Quite frankly, I don’t want to listen to a Green Day with a mission statement. Or wearing eyeliner. Largely what makes American Idiot passable is the fact that, despite its purported concept, it isn’t always so organized, with large portions featuring the same kind of unrefined passion that always made the band great. However, 21st Century Breakdown's very essence is so contrived it’s too hard to get past its obvious delusions of grandeur.

So, in closing, I pose this question to Green Day: do you even know who your enemy is? Are you sure they even exist?

Nimrod-era Green Day... before the eyeliner