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.
"What's the difference between you and me?
I do what I want, and you do what you're told."
Warning, though, was streamlined, concise, when I was spiralling into some god-forsaken netherworld of cheap cider and rancid gut-juice.
The point of all this is to illustrate a couple things; A - That even in the foulest of moods, The Duke has never been one to treat Green Day with anything less than awe-struck reverence. And B - That in light of all this, all this growth and so on, it's nigh-on miraculous that Green Day still produce the stuff that gets The Duke spasaming and jittering like that freaky fucking woman what crawled out the telly in Ring.
American Idiot, the band's seventh album, is released on Monday. It gives me nothing less than thunderous orgasms of back-breaking intensity to report that it is sheer, unrelenting genius from start to finish.
I remember mentioning Green Day in a chat room one time and being greeted with the derisory sneer; "Yeah. I loved them when I was 14."
Well let The Duke be the first to announce that if fourteen year olds are the only ones listening to stuff as complex, as inventive, as fucking gorgeous as 9-minute prog-punk opus Jesus Of Suburbia, then all that yacking about The State Of The Youth should be met with disdain, cynicism, and most likely a baseball bat studded to fuck with twenty-inch-long razor-sharp nails. Beat those fears regarding the malcontents sniffing glue at the bus-shelter till its foaming blood-laced bile from every orifice, is what, if those 14 year olds are the only ones fit to grasp the wonder of such a track.
Article comments
1 - Tim Hall
Progressive punk? Who remembers The Damned's "Curtain Call"?
2 - Mark Edward Manning
Duke, thanks for the link, very decent of you. I'll have to return the favor with you someday.
Now then, you're right that there's nothing shocking about a punk band making a political statement - even the Ramones did that - but Green Day is engaging in the foulest, most dangerous area of politics, undermining and questioning the fight against terror, insinuating that whatever disgust and fighting spirit and patriotism that people felt in the aftershocks of Sept. 11 are no longer valid and that the President is a more of a terrorist than Osama. Billie Joe doesn't quite sing as much, but the point is made.
I expected better of these guys, and what a cheap way to revive one's career and get the respect of glue-sniffing 14-year-olds back.
3 - jonny
green where good but american idiot didnt do it for me