- The Observer, Sunday 19 April 2009
Green Day's dazzlingly ambitious 2004 rock opera American Idiot, with its striking caricature of "the President gas man", didn't just chime with the anti-Bush post-Iraq invasion zeitgeist; it increasingly came to define it. And not just in the United States: American Idiot sold 12 million copies worldwide. That this had been achieved by a band still widely perceived at the time as a Saturday-morning cartoon version of the Clash was all the more remarkable.
- Green Day
- 21st Century Breakdown
- Warners,
- CD
- 2009
Five years on, 21st Century Breakdown picks up broadly where its predecessor left off, its 17 songs attempting to make sense of what it means to be angry and alive amid the figurative and literal wreckage left behind by Dubya's presidency. The bad guy may have been run out of town, but this is less a victory parade than a trenchant to-do list, an album that's as complex as the era that shaped it.
Like its predecessor, this album introduces allegorical, semi-autobiographical protagonists to construct a loose narrative - most notably Gloria, a former freedom fighter struggling to recapture her youthful idealism, and Christian, a narcissistic nihilist - but this isn't merely More American Idiots. It's a state of the union address, an apocalyptic protest album.
It also sounds phenomenal. New producer Butch Vig has both focused Green Day's stadium-sized punk rock and embellished it with flamboyance and muscle cribbed from either side of the 60s pop and rock divide. Last of the American Girls rejoices in Beach Boys harmonies, while Restless Heart Syndrome, a withering assessment of the prevalence of prescription medication, waxes and wanes like vintage Led Zeppelin.
Green Day's greatest accomplishment, though, is the manner in which they've constructed a supremely cohesive whole out of such seemingly disparate parts. The characters, themes and motifs that recur throughout 21st Century Breakdown are marshalled into an engrossing narrative that recalls both Bruce Springsteen and novelist Chuck Palahniuk.
If there is a central theme, it is this: in a society centred on conflict, how can we discern if there's anything actually worth fighting for? And if frontman Billie Joe Armstrong knows, he's certainly not letting on. Having emphatically denounced "the modern age" in the pivotal American Eulogy, he leaves the question hanging tantalisingly during the closing See the Light as echoing guitar chords float off into the future.
Green Day have become so accustomed to viewing the American Dream as a nightmare that they've lost sight of another significant interpretation. That three punks who named their band after slacker slang for sitting around getting stoned can become the most prescient polemicists of their age is as good a justification of the American ideal as you could hope to find.