May
15
2009
‘Cause I’m a 21st Century Digital Boy
Author: adminThe new Green Day album came out today.
It is awesome.
I think that Green Day has been the band that I’ve been listening to the longest. When I started to get into pop music in summer of 1996, it was mostly all about the Spice Girls. Then in fall of 96, I really got into the ska punk band Smash Mouth and in spring of ‘97, I bought the Green Day album Nimrod. I was in the 7th grade.
Spice Girls pretty much faded away after that. Smash Mouth’s follow up album sucked. But Green Day continued to stick around. I got into their back catalog in the 8th grade with Dookie and Insomniac. In the year 2000, when I was a sophomore in high school, their new album Warning rocked me out so much that I actually dyed my hair green for a few months. I even went to a Green Day concert that following summer. And their 2004 rock opera American Idiot was one of the only CDs I seriously dug when I was in college.
21st Century Breakdown is another rock opera, but it seems to be less like American Idiot and more along the styles of Warning, a good mixture of different genres and influences. It’s not the Green Day of the 90’s, that’s for sure. That Green Day’s died with Nimrod and will never come back. But I really enjoyed hearing the wide range of Warning return with this album, and I think that I enjoy it much more than American Idiot.
Do you know the enemy? Because I don’t think they do.
The political message in Breakdown is just as stupid and shallow as it was in Idiot. The band really does come out sounding like a bunch of liberal posers with no message other than, “hey, Bush sucks, let’s rebel!” It’s purely just jumping on the bandwagon, and I hope that the next opera can tell a story that doesn’t involve politics, because that’s clearly something that they don’t have a clue about. Why not do something like The Decemberist’s latest opera and tell the story of centaurs, witches, and scally wags, hmm?
But still, despite it’s message of political ignorance, Green Day still rocks. I love the new album, and I just bought tickets to see them in Madison Square Garden in July. My first concert in many years, I’m so excited! (^_^)
