3:AM Magazine

By Graham Rae.

21st Century Breakdown - Green Day.

“My generation is zero/I never made it as a working class hero” - Billie Joe Armstrong.

Let’s face it, Green Day are an unfortunate phenomenon at best. They came to world prominence in 1994, shortly after Kurt Cobain had blown his head off. The kids of America (and, by extension, the rest of the American-electronically-colonized world) needed a bit of comic relief after this grim (or hilarious, depending on your view of Cobain) musical moment. Then along came this bunch of young spiky Clash-wannabe pop-punks trailing tales of masturbation and getting stoned and sexual confusion and anger-lite in their wake, as well as cries of ‘sell-out!’ from tedious jealous gutter-mutter punks…and the youth fell in love. The Day lit teenage fuses and enthusiastically infused the mourning musical world with capital-f Fun and everybody enthused about them when ‘Basket Case’ came out. I myself remember the moment like it was only, oh, 15 years ago.

So yeah. Time rolled on, and Green Day kept putting out albums. Their major lyrical concerns seemed to reflect singer Billie Joe Armstrong’s own seeming alienation and isolation (you know, the usual late 20th century clichéd leitmotif life-motive crap) and damage incurred by his father’s untimely death when the frontman was a mere ten years old. I bought a couple of their albums, but as the years rolled on the quality of the releases got less and less, with each album only really having a couple of standout singalong-songs treading water in an airless sea of emotionally-retarded-sonics filler. They were seemingly slowing down and losing speed and scream-steam as they grew older and more financially secure and away from their obscure Berkley, California roots. And it’s like any band that you like a bit when you’re younger. You hear of them occasionally, and are almost surprised to hear that they are still going as you grow older and move on in your own life, shaking your head in the distance at their seeming time-standing-still stance.

Then all of a sudden a half-decade ago came the sonic juggernaut ‘American Idiot,’ and Green Day were back on top again.

Now. In the history of music, there has rarely been an album as over-hyped or credited with being much more political than it really is than ‘American Idiot.’ Basically what it encompasses is some disaffected cokehead (the ‘Jesus of Suburbia’ – if you ever want to see hilarious po-face humorless clichéd-rebel emo garbage, I suggest watching the nonsensical video to this song) who leaves home, kicks around in the world a bit, then goes home again after his headspinfluential tormentor-mentor punk hero ‘St. Jimmy’ kills himself. All set to music. Quite stunning. It really only got as much approbation as it did because it came out during the Bush years and the title song (with a riff ripped off wholesale from ‘Doublewhiskeycokenoice’ by Dillinger Four, who should have sued) was a rallying cry for liberal types in America to declare that, yes, they too didn’t want to be an American idiot, and they liked prepackaged pseudo-anarchy too. Oh yeah, and Armstrong (know around my house as Billy Bob, after his skewering in the novel ‘Weasels in a Box’ by John ‘Jughead’ Pierson of Screeching Weasel, whose guitar sounds like a lot of the string-strumming on this album) sang “Sieg heil to the President Gasman” and hilariously declared the band “outlaws” for doing so. So any concerned lefty liberal citizen could chant along and feel self-righteous and angry and anarchic…as the war in Iraq went on and Chimp Bush raped the world for his own fun and profit and it was big business as usual.

Green Day made absolutely no impact whatsoever on real-world politrix far from the morose hormone-decimated teenage bedrooms of the angsty snotty kids who sullenly chanted along to the meaningless songs on the album. I mean, how could they truly impact on anything with ‘lyrics’ (in the loosest sense of the word) like “a gag/a plastic bag on a monument” or “The town bishop’s an extortionist/and he don’t even know that you exist” or “City of the dead at the end of another lost highway/signs misleading to nowhere”? The album was just vapid shallow muddlebrain shite and sold over six million copies for the band, being exploited for a full five fucking years before the new platter by the band came out a few weeks ago in May. Which may seem like an eternity in the modern flashfastforward world, but, well, they just stuck a new single out from it, and will no doubt be looking to squeeze it until the pips squeak for quite some time to come, so why shouldn’t I take a literal stab at reviewing it?

I got ‘21st Century Breakdown’ (good start – a clichéd meaningless amorphous read-anything-into-it title) from the local library. I never bought ‘American Idiot’ either; haven’t bought an album by them in over a decade; don’t want to make these American idol idiots any richer than they already are. So I listened to it, expecting very little after hearing the horrendously bad opening salvo track ‘Know Your Enemy’…and I was not disappointed. Let me say this: ‘21st Century Breakdown’ is a piece of complete and utter garbage from a band long grown stale and outdated and irrelevant, and should never have been released. I have rarely heard such a slick, bored, ball-less, uninspired, emotion-and-inspiration-free piece of junk from a major artist. Well, actually I suppose that’s a lie, but I almost didn’t expect something this bad from this band, and I have actually liked many of their previous songs in a throwaway way. Actually, scratch that, that’s a lie – I (un)fortunately did expect something this bad.

Why did I, do you ask? Well, it’s like this. When ‘American Idiot’ broke big, somebody unfortunately told Billie Joe Armstrong that he was Intelligent and Important, the Voice of a (de)Generation, and had Things To Say – when, patently, none of those things were true. For spewing out the Rorschach pile of meaningless verbal dribble that constituted ‘American Idiot,’ Billy Bob got to hang out with the Egomaniac Wank Messiah Bono and record a song about New Orleans and Katrina (the pompous ‘The Saints Are Coming’), record a John Lennon song (‘Working Class Hero’) and put out ‘21st Century Breakdown.’ Any reviews I have seen of this album make me all the more contemptuous of the incestuous relationship the media has to the artists they review. They often shy away from giving a piece of bad product (and I did not choose the word ‘art’ on purpose) a bad review in case they don’t get all the freebies and access to the band that are part of the perks of being a working journo. Giving this album great reviews is just a complete mystery to me. It blows my mind that anybody but the mid-teenage self-mutilating self-absorbed black-clad emo teens would actually l ike this work, let alone rate it highly.

I suppose there’s meant to be some sort of story behind this put-the-con-in-concept album, or at least there is according to the sycophantic Rolling Stone review for it, but I can’t be bothered trying to join any supposed tale-dots. What I hear is a band bored out of their brains following a cookie-cutter formula form formed with ‘American Idiot,’ and boring the vaguely perceptive or older (i.e. me) elements of the audience silly as they do so. There are a lot of songs that start out slow and low and melancholy, building some sort of preprocessed ‘rebellious’ melancholicoholic atmosphere…then ITGETSREALLYLOUDANDFASTANDSHOUTYANDPSEUDOPUNKY…then slowing down and getting wistful and wishful again…then rinse and repeat to the defeat of the astute listener’s patience with the whole sonic smorgasbored.  Musically, this album rattles the chains of the ghosts of The Who (of course, seeing as how ‘Tommy’ was the main inspiration for the first laughable ‘pop-punk opera’ ‘American Idiot’ in the first place), Queen(!), AC/DC(!!), Marilyn Manson(!!!)(but the song here that sounds like MM, ‘East Jesus Nowhere,’ was just MM ripping off 70s British glam rock anyway so it’s a rip-off of a rip-off), Elton John(!!!!), Rowlf the Dog from the Muppets(!!!!!)(maybe not entirely serious about that one)(maybe being the operative word) as well as The Clash (more expected) and The Ramones. It’s good to know that they even keep up the plagiarism angle, by wholesale ripping off ‘Main Offender’ by The Hives with ‘Horseshoes And Handgrenades.’ They certainly never miss a slick trick anyway. John Lennon is a major influence on this album as well, and there are a few Lennon-alike piano-crooned cringeworthy tunes during the running (well, limping) time.  Seems like Billy Bob has gotten to thinking he is some sort of ‘meaningful’ working class hero a la Lennon, and it’s gone to his head.

Actually, it’s funny (actually, amend that; there is no humor on this album whatsoever, which is another thing to hate about it, the fact that they’re taking this no-laughs laughable pish so seriously). Lyrically, all the singer here is doing is recycling the same sort of angsty, self-absorbed, narcissistic, solipsistic, pseudo-nihilistic burned-out horseshit he has been soft-peddling for two decades. There has been no real evolution in his thinking or worldview; he got handsomely rewarded for it on their last album and, well, why fix it if it ain’t broke – and if you aren’t capable of doing so anyway? The older this band get the more pathetic this whole thing becomes. The words on this album are some of the most pointless, meaningless and poorly-written verbal sludge it has ever been my misfortune to encounter in decades of popular music listening, made all the worse because the writer obviously thinks they’re deep and meaningful (you would assume, unless he’s having a laugh at the expense of the fans)(you never know). Representative sample lyric or two? “Raise your hands now to testify/your confession will be crucified/you’re a sacrificial suicide/like a dog that’s been sodomized” (with the latter being one of the weirdest, most deranged, most hilarious lines I have ever heard) or “I text a postcard sent to you/did it go through?/sending all my love to you/you are the moonlight of my life every night/giving all my love to you/my beating heart belongs to you/I walked for miles ‘til I found you/if I lose everything in the fire/I’m sending all my love to you.”

The latter is the sort of pish that a depressed mournful teen girl would write to some guy she has a crush on in high school and doesn’t have the guts to approach, and it’s actually incredible to think a man of 37 wrote this shit (and don’t try to tell me he’s writing as a ‘character’ cos I won’t buy it – his vocab and quality level has never risen much above this in any of his songs). But that’s the rub though, isn’t it? The band now know their audience and market, and how to tailor their lyrics and music towards them, in played-out Play-Doh cookie-cutter fashion victim-of-themselves form. Their audience is depressed trouble-free-life middle class teenagers, basically, so the man has to write down to a level they can understand and relate to. Which is basically where his mind is at in his late 30s, so it’s no great stretch. Here’s one last microcosmic syllabic-and-syntactic-tactic example of what I mean. “Runaway/from the river to the street/and find yourself/with your face in the gutter/you’re a stray for the Salvation Army/there is no place like home/when you got no place to go.” A lot of the lyrics on the album are just like this: no rhythm, no rhyme, no scanning pattern, no bounce, no flair, no nothing, just the dead empty hum of uninspired can’t-be-bothered worksmanship. This is a man and band putting out an album they are absolutely uninterested in except from a financial point of view, which is fine except then don’t try to pretend it’s anything but what it is, a product from the long-established huge-selling Green Day franchise.

You can almost sense Armstrong (who sings in a ludicrous fake English accent I’m sure the wee American idiot lassies just love to bits) sitting bored as hell at the laptop on this album with a lyrical to-do list: “Anger, check. Angst, check. Anarchy, check. Self-mutilation and self-hatred, check. Sodomizing dogs, check. Depression, check. Few expletives here and there to keep things slightly edgy and piss off the parents, check. Some vaguely contentious unfocused diluted statements about the evils of organized religion and government, check. Covert reference to GG Allin that practically nobody will get, check. Smiths album title reference – they’ll think I’m sensitive – check. Stuff about blowing shit up with gasoline, check. Societal collapse, check. Broken hearts, check. Doomed teen love, check.” And if you think I’m being cynical about this, well, I’m sure as Hell not being as cynical as the man who actually wrote this sub-teen sniveling drivel, trust me. And why would I even care about this stuff? After all, I’m 39, hardly the target audience for this corporate triumph of the swill. Well, I grew up on American punk music, and have always been a lover of good lyrics. Armstrong clearly and ludicrously thinks he’s some sort of wordsmith: “I am a sonofabitch and Edgar Allan Poe,” as he put it on ‘American Idiot,’ so he gets graded more harshly. Plus one of my all-time fave bands for many years were Dead Kennedys, who had political lyrics that actually meant something, addressing subjects outside of depressed melancholic navel-gazing in lyrically and musically scorching fashion. Judging Green Day against that sort of standard, I have to find the pop-punk skunk-stinkers laughably inept and boring and stupid and pathetic. The sheepherd-mentality unthinking approval ratings Billy Bob gets for this shite nauseates me, because this album and its predecessor just represent everything wrong with contemporary tempo music to me: no emotion, no interest in topics sort-of presented, bombastic amped-up production to detract from the unoriginality of the musical and lyrical material on display…and on and on and on. It’s all just too familiar (OK, there may be no such thing as new music anymore, but at least fucking try, you know?) and uninteresting and pedestrian – basically everything punk originally reacted against in the late 70s. Listen to the album if you can be bothered and tell me if I’m wrong.

It’s an all-too-truism to say that punk bands work best during oppressive political times in the West (where they won’t get tortured and torched for speaking out against the ‘terrible’ oppressive countries they live in), when they have hateful energy to feed off of, angry symbiosis as a smart career move, and the same goes for soft wee boy pop-punk blands too. Now that Boogeyman Bush is gone, the faux-political apolitical focus of ‘American Idol’ (sorry, ‘Idiot’) is gone and Green Day seems like a black flag waving without a cause celebre. Not, however, that they ever truly did have any cause whatsoever anyway. What Billy Bob and his bands of merry pranksters-cum-emo-clowns have taken eight albums to tell us is that they are burned out and have absolutely nothing to say. How many times do they have to say it before the audience takes the hint and moves on? How many times must Armstrong raid the outdated farcical arsenal of outdated 20th century extremist punk give-em-enough-rope tropes before the audience just tells them to fuck off and not come back? From my vantage point, these advantaged millionaires have come to the end of their sonic road and nothing they ever say or do again could be of any interest to me whatsoever. Armstrong, just give it up. You don’t have the brains or lyrical or musical talent to be some sort of anarcho-punk leader, you’re a Joe Strummer wannabe and your lyrics suck shit. Please take a hint and retire someplace. The world’s had enough. You’ve had enough too and it shows. On some level you know it too. “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass,” as you yourself once sang.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Graham Rae lives in the Chicago suburbs with his beautiful wife and daughter and always-vomiting cat. He awaits the collapse of Western civilization with interest. He has been waiting for quite some time. Those teenage punk lyrics lied to him and, at 39, he should be old enough to know better. He just had a story published in Paint A Vulgar Picture, a book of Smiths-based short stories. And he continues to plot and write and wait.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Tuesday, June 30th, 2009.