Have An Unacceptably Long Post Analyzing Green Day’s New Singles That I Wrote Instead Of Doing Work

As I slowly “retvrn” to writing more seriously about the music I like in addition to writing about games and politics and so on, it occurs to me that so far I’ve really just scratched the surface of my tastes or even really examined why it is that I like what I do. I grew up in a household that listened to 90s alternative and punk music; my dad especially shaped my tastes by inundating me with music from his adolescence, which eventually got me into 80s hardcore and turned me into the freak I am now. But a good chunk of my taste also comes from my mom, who enjoyed much poppier, more melodic fare, like Green Day, the Goo-Goo Dolls, and Social Distortion. When I tell people this they usually reply that I had cool parents, and… the story there is more complicated and not something I’m at all comfortable with getting into in a post like this. But one thing that I have genuinely never considered is: what does “teenage rebellion” look like when your parents have inculcated you with music that speaks directly to that drive? Am I simply deeper into the hole my parents started digging for me now as a 32-year-old whose favorite genres according to Apple Music include “Post-Rock” and “Neocrust?” Do I show that I’m divergent from my parents now by listening to jazz or electronic dance music? Does it even matter? (Honestly I’m in the “no” camp here.)

Green Day is probably, out of all the bands I listened to as a child, the one act that was most initially influential on me. I learned about the seminal punk zine Maximum Rocknroll through reading a biography on the band, Nobody Likes You, by the late music journalist Marc Spitz. From there I began to develop an interest in deeper cuts and more obscure bands. If it hadn’t been for Green Day and their tenuous connection to the San Francisco Bay Area punk scene, I wouldn’t have learned about Dillinger Four or Cobra Skulls. I wouldn’t be regularly scouring the MRR reviews columns for new music. Hell, this is embarrassing to say, but if it hadn’t been for American Idiot, I maybe wouldn’t have been clued into the fact that American politics are fucked so early. Maybe I’m not giving myself enough credit in this regard, but I don’t know what my outlook on the world would look like if I hadn’t been belting the lyrics to “Holiday” as a 13-year-old.

Everybody starts somewhere.

Green Day was made famous because of a particular sound they carried out of the early 90s, a simultaneously hard-edged and melodic sound that threw back to older pop standards of the 50s and 60s while also emulating the snottiness of their contemporaries. But Dookie, their first major-label album, came out in 1994, 30 years ago. American Idiot, the album that redefined the band’s career: 20 years. There is an entire decade’s worth of their music that I’ve never really listened to for various reasons, ranging from not really enjoying their heavy leaning-into straight-up pop to finding the lyrics (especially on their most recent album, Father of All Motherfuckers) to be painfully cringe and self-unaware.

I don’t need to listen to every new piece of work by a band I like to still consider myself, at the bare minimum, an enjoyer of said artist. I love Refused, for example. It’s a pity they retired in 1999, never to play music with each other under the band’s moniker again (and certainly not under the moniker of a fake band from Night City in Cyberpunk 2077). No I will not google this to confirm it. Anyway, I’ve long resigned myself to enjoying Green Day’s early body of work only, and it’s not like the band has to try to prove anything to me, an unknown culture writer in Oklahoma, besides.

This all is what I thought this morning before I opened Apple Music on my computer to see what new junk has dropped in the past week, where two ominous words hung at the bottom of the New Music Playlist description: GREEN, and DAY.

New Green Day albums have been coming out at a rate of once every election cycle refresh since 2012, when we got the triple-album ¡Uno, Dos, Tré! and basically no memorable songs or sections from the project. 2016’s Revolution Radio was fairly weak as well, though it was labeled as a “throwback” to the band’s 90s heyday. The song’s title track sounds like a B-side for 21st Century Breakdown and American Idiot, and the rest of the album doesn’t really bring that same energy. Still, it was mostly inoffensive compared to 2020’s The Father of All Motherfuckers, which was a deeply misguided attempt to consciously lean into the 60s garage pop influences the band has always emulated on some level. It was like listening to Foxboro Hot Tub, a related Billie Joe Armstrong project from the 2000s, on ketamine—just an utterly unenjoyable experience.

And so now, we’re entering 2024 in less than two weeks. Two weeks after that, Green Day will release its 14th or 15th studio album: Saviors, on January 19th. Three songs from the album, “The American Dream is Killing Me,” “Look Ma, No Brains!” and “Dilemma,” have already dropped. The tracks sit at 3:06 minutes, 2:04 minutes, and 3:18 minutes, respectively. The album cover looks vaguely like a Code Orange or Ceremony cover from the 2010s while also calling back to 1999’s Warning. Without reading the lyrics or listening to the songs, several assumptions could be made about the content, especially with regard to which era of the band’s discography they’re deliberately calling back to. And with those assumptions, what are we trying to do here? Is this a play on nostalgia, the umpteenth promise of “Green Day like you remembered them when you were a misanthropic 20-something Gen-Xer yourself?” Is it an attempt at re-redefining themselves? I’m not sure. Listening to an interview with the band at a Toronto radio station, it seems clear to me that Billie Joe Armstrong has been infected with the same apoliticism that artists like Taylor Swift seem to carry: no willingness to make a defined statement, a reticence to even engage with the world around him at all.

“We got away from the politics for awhile to where we didn’t just want to be like, you know, another pundit on CNN,” Armstrong said to 102.1 “The Edge” host Alan Cross. “But it’s like, you know, songs, and political songs, it takes a lot of heart to do that, and I think it’s like, if you keep doing it for the sake of doing it just because you’re angry, then you take the heart out of it, and then it just becomes part of what everyone is complaining about.” To be clear: American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown are probably the only two “political” albums in the band’s catalogue. It feels disingenuous to me for Armstrong to say this when other bands in his rough milieu – the Bad Religions and the Offsprings of the world – have been consistently political for 20 or 30 years now. But that’s beside the point. We’re not getting an American Idiot Part 2, that much is clear. So what’s going on with these songs?

The American Dream Is Killing Me

I didn’t expect to hear a guitar riff that could have maybe fit on a lesser Flogging Molly or Pogues album, but that’s what we’re starting with on “The American Dream Is Killing Me.” Four bars of that run right into a pretty bog-standard Green Day-ass chord progression – two power chords, likely F#5 and B5, repeated for the entire intro chorus and first verse, with that B chord only barely switched up to a C#5 as we get into the pre-chorus. I’m not really going to bag on the band for this because doing so would be like shitting on a fish for breathing water. But it doesn’t exactly inspire me to get excited for another 14 tracks in this vein.

Lyrically, we get vague hints at discontent. Oblique references to conspiracy thinking and gentrification, poverty, unemployment, homelessness; and also shit like “TikTok and taxes.” (That’s it that’s the whole line in the verse.) If you’re looking to sink your teeth into anything substantive, any hint that Armstrong actually cares about any of these issues and isn’t just tired of them, you won’t find one. It’s been 30 years since Armstrong wrote “Burnout,” “Longview” and “Welcome to Paradise,” all songs which deal more viscerally with both ennui and shit like intense poverty, and it seems that maybe the well has run dry on his apathetic teenage burnout bit.

I don’t hate this song if I’m not paying attention to it, but man, I like to pay attention to the music I’m listening to.

The video doesn’t really do anything all that special for me either. It’s got zombies and survivalists and the band itself looking like they just wiped off some Black Parade makeup and there’s a whole bunch of tortured visual metaphors to go along with the played out textual ones.

Look Ma, No Brains!

Unironically I think this song fucks, which is admittedly a complete 180 from my feelings on the first single. Is “Look Ma, No Brains!” trying really fucking hard, both with the song itself and the video, to call back to Dookie? Yes. Am I laughing at Armstrong, 51, for bleaching his hair? Maybe. Is this song still a certified pop punk jam? Also yes.

Lyrics like “Slamdanced on my face again/Nonsense is my heroin/Rude boy going comatose/Dropout and I’m adiós” do not make a lick of goddamn sense, but shit like “I said “Look Ma, I ain’t got no brains”/I’m a goner and I don’t feel no pain” hit the part of my brain that loves the goof-assed lyrics of Teenage Bottlerocket, The Lillingtons and Masked Intruder just right. The music is high-energy, Armstrong’s singing sounds… somewhat like he did in the 90s and early 2000s, and I just find it impossible to not have a good time while listening to this track.

Dilemma

By comparison, nobody’s really having fun with “Dilemma,” and it’s not really the point: “Welcome to my problems/It’s not an invitation/This is my dilemma/And it’s my obsession,” Armstrong sings. In the video, he’s lying on the floor looking at the camera after a night of drunkenness and drug use. “I don’t wanna be a dead man walking.”

Armstrong has been open about his history with drugs and alcohol in the past. In 2012 he entered rehab following a public meltdown at the iHeartRadio Festival when the band’s set was apparently cut short, and maintained the ensuing sobriety until 2020. Is “Dilemma” a cry for help? Maybe. Could it also possibly just be another storytelling device wrangled from a tumultuous personal life? Sure, I guess anything’s possible.

Still, I think there’s something interesting happening here with the video especially. The shots of Armstrong surrounded by friends and bandmates, being lightly cajoled into doing some fat lines of coke or downing another beer at a holiday party end up being juxtaposed with images of angry bar patrons, Armstrong snorting shit off the bathroom floor, throwing up in an Uber, and stumbling into some random person’s house by accident, terrorizing their family and knocking their Christmas tree over. It’s hard to find the “pure fictional storytelling” angle all that convincing as a result. Hopefully he gets the help he needs, if the song is autobiographical, semi- or otherwise.

I don’t know what I expected to find by listening to these tracks. I’m not sure what we gain when the big old bands of our youths and young adulthoods “come back” or “resurface.” There’s a part of me that’s morbidly fascinated at all by the simple fact of these bands’ existences. It’s a part of me who is interested in this weirdly pervasive idea that any of us can hold onto the fact of our youths purely by consuming the cultural detritus of those periods in our lives. Green Day’s music is boring and derivative, but I think that’s because the mere fact of Green Day’s existence is boring at this point. There are so many thousands of bands out there with material that is as good as or even better than the work of Armstrong and company that folks will simply pass by because of its lack of inherent familiarity. Listening to these first three tracks off Saviors I am struck by how smooth they are, even in their rowdiest moments, as if they’re trying to fend off any thoughts or feelings about them that might get attached.

I’m not offended by these songs by any means; nor am I particularly enthused by them. To me they’re like water, taking on the shape and quality of whatever container is holding them at the moment. And like water in cupped hands, the songs are trickling out of my brain as we speak.