Speaking of "the class-warrior socialist elite of this nation [continuing] to press their agenda to the point of national suicide," as we just were, it is notable that the alt-punk rock band Green Day is about to release another politically charged CD criticizing economic liberty, Christians, and a variety of other evils.
It’s a concept album with a story and is the Bay Area band’s follow-up to its 2004 anti-Bush diatribe, American Idiot, which proved the wickedness of market capitalism by selling twelve million copies.
The new album, 21st Century Breakdown (to be released this Friday and now available on Rhapsody and ready for preorder on amazon.com), is more musically diverse than the band’s previous efforts (not a particularly difficult standard to exceed, to be sure) but just as simple in its lyrics and ideas ("Dream, America, dream, . . . Scream, America, scream"), unless you consider it very sophisticated to criticize the public as too complacent in accepting circumstances Green Day does not like. There are a couple of nice turns of phrase sprinkled in, but mostly the lyrics are not good enough to earn an eighth-grade public school student better than a B.
Musically the album is quite enjoyable overall (except the boring "Horseshoes and Handgrenades"[sic]), so it will be interesting to see if a record condemning its potential audience will be as popular as the one that piled on top of an inarticulate president whose popularity was rapidly declining.
At least 21st Century Breakdown is not dreary and lugubrious like the deadly ooze emanating from Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, and other such politically engaged rockers in the past few years. As a result, it’s currently the top-selling album at amazon.com.
Given that the great majority of rock lyrics are unsophisticated inanities, audiences will probably be well able to ignore the lyrics of 21st Century Breakdown and just enjoy the tunes.
—S. T. Karnick
I couldn’t agree more, Fortunato. In fact, in most areas of music today there is so much homogenization that although there are a variety of different genres or styles, within those types everything is pretty interchangeable. And for the most popular forms of contemporary music, such as alternative rock and pop-country, the proliferation of performers barely distinguishable from one another is truly stunning.
The problem with alternative rock, at least as practiced in America today, is that it’s not really an alternative: bands sound pretty much like each other (agressive guitars, plaintive voices and vice versa) and seem unaware of anything that happened in the field since Kurt Cobain’s passing…
S.T., the only time that I saw a Green Day video, it reminded me of the Clash (a better band; however I wish that their 3 album indulgence was named Solidarity after the 80’s political movement that actually changed the world instead of that Marxist non-starter). I have also heard that they have previously used Kinks songs for their own tunes.
R.J., I always play early Beach Boys along w/the Ramones (those 4 guys from Queens). They go great together. Do you have the live video DVD that came out a few years ago? I enjoy it very much.
Finally, speaking of DVDs by punk bands, I do also want to recommend a documentary about the Undertones called Teenage Kicks. They were often referred to as the “Ramones of Belfast”, & they weren’t that political, which was surprising because of the time (late ’70s) & the place (Northern Ireland) that they came from.
I think they were killed by the politicization of everything.
It’s hard to believe that punk used to aspire to emulate “Summertime Blues” and the Beach Boys. When did we go from “so what if you can’t play your instruments, neither can we” to “we’re much more clever than you”? Did they close Rockaway Beach? Where have those four guys from Queens in their Chuck Taylors and cut-up jeans gone?