Green Day

American Idiot

Green Day: New or Old?

Review Score:

(8/10)
Okay, so finally, a mainstrem 'punk' band manages to get it right. Punk isn't, as some of you may be aware, really intended to be a form of music one listens to because it's technically skillful (translation: punks can't play their instruments to save their lives), but because it's honest, it's loud, it's energetic, and it kicked mainstream rock's festering, bloated corpse in the 70's and 80's. Punk is traditionally associated with a strong set of political beliefs (HELLO, Dead Kennedys).

That said, I have to find this CD a little bit ironic. Here is Green Day insisting that we shove the media where it belongs. Noble words to be sure, but what, with thousands of screaming fans, a major label contract, and promoters out the ass, is Green Day, if not mass media?

The music itself isn't bad, for such an obnoxiously mainstream band, but some songs (Boulevard of Broken Dreams, for instance) have me wondering what made GD think stuff like "I walk a lonely road / The only one that I have ever known / Don't know where it goes / But it's home to me and I walk alone" was a good idea. I know success is hard and you're busy, boys, but the longest word in those four lines has only two syllables. Lyric-writing like this is the reason I've had to explain what "indelible" means three times today.

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