The Duke Adores "American Idiot" By Green Day

Green Day were, far as I remember, the first band to give The Duke the shivers. You know how it is, right? There's a hook, a melody, something so inspiring, so infectious, that you can feel it burrow into your asshole and ascend your spine, beating every organ, bone and muscle fuckless in the process. It only lasts a couple seconds, but in those couple seconds, man, there's enough endorphins and shit released in the body to keep you soaked in delirium for the next fortnight.

I've never felt ashamed, as I see some folks do, by the fact that Green Day were my first love, and that I've followed their every flatulent piff since that evening spent entranced by Top Of The Pops. For a twelve year old kid whose only knowledge of the world came from A Nightmare On Elm Street 3, (the motherfucking pinnacle of all Freddies, by the way), living in a council estate in the arse-end of nowhere in The Northern Ireland, you didn't worry too much about credibility. I can pretend that the first record I bought was Stations Of The Crass or some equally kudos-drenched record, but it wasn't. Until I heard Green Day that night, via satellite link-up, no less, I didn't know that there were rock bands in the world who you just fucking knew existed only to catalogue and soundtrack your every waking thought.

I mean sure, I loved Iron Maiden, but it's kinda hard for a pubescent cinephile to identify with songs about WW2 bombers and plots to assassinate unborn children.

The T-Shirts fucking rocked, though.

This is gonna be hard for a motherfucker from, say, California or some shit to believe, but when Dookie was straddling the album charts like some acne-riddled colossus, I was one of about five folks in my high school who had even heard of these sons a bitches, much less gave a rancid shit.

Of course, this had its benefits, like when I wanted to go out with a lass and so gave her a piece of paper with the lyrics to Why Do You Want Him scribbled on it, claiming it as my own.

Any damn way, what happened is that through time, Green Day never let me down, never released a solitary under-par record. It's the old cliché about growing up alongside the band that changed your life and all that horse-paste. That first trio, from Smoothed Out to Dookie, talked about teenage lust and longing and all that jazz just as I started wanting to sit with the lasses instead of the blokes, and the lasses started wanting to sit with the motherfuckers flinging footballs around the place. Insomniac, one of the most underrated albums of all ever, was dark and oppressive just when The Duke was starting to write self-pitying poetry and getting all obsessed with Joy Division. Nimrod encapsulated emotions and anxieties and political musings that I was trying with varying degrees of success to articulate.

Article Author: Duke De Mondo

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