Does the heart of rebellion's battle cry fall flaccid when the megaphone is held by Grammy-winning multimillionaires? You bet your ass it does, especially when the figurehead of their ire is no longer calling the shots. So how does Green Day deal with the incoming tide of inevitable hypocrisy and outdated rage against the very machine that put them on top of the world? Rebrand, of course! Fashion that rebellion into a freshly-packaged sweeping pop-punk opera, a blazing, 10,000 jigawatt Broadway spectacle.
The trio - Billie Joe Armstrong, Tre Cool & Mike Dirnt - put the old playbook away and reworked their multiplatinum pop-punk aesthetic for 2004's American Idiot, stripping off the long-outgrown skate clothes, washing off the crust-pride and going absolutely huge with anthems of love, sorrow and, above all, rebellious indignation at the ever-downward-spiraling state of Americana and its cultural, spiritual and political leaders. They redefined themselves as pop-theater revolutionaries, and no transition has been so successful - or profitable - in a full generation of music history.
So where does a band go from there? Taking a leap of faith into even deeper uncharted waters is far from a surefire success model - Chris Cornell did the same thing, and look at what happened there. The only difference, and the reason 21st Century Breakdown, Green Day's new album, will absolutely dominate radio this summer, is that Billie Joe & Co. have actually risen to their own wildly ambitious challenge. These songs are surefire huge-selling big-bang anthems of theatrical rebellion (Horseshoes and Handgrenades) and heart-stroking sentimentality (Last Night On Earth). The dagger's still sharp, as evidenced in the searing anti-evangelical anthem East Jesus Nowhere, the chorus of which is as hooky as anything in their catalog: A fire burns today/ Of blasphemy and genocide/ The sirens of decay/ Will infiltrate the faith fanatics! Don't believe me? Check out a Green Day show in about a month and see who sings along. My money's on about 75% of the audience.
That's right, Green Day is back, and they've gone in the only direction American Idiot left for them when it laid their entire history to waste with five smash singles and more Grammys & accolades than they could carry. It redefined them entirely, and left little room for error in follow-up. The commercial and critical fawning over Idiot was like nothing Green Day had ever seen, giving a sense of definition to the collective underlying sociopolitical discontent muted by an America! Fuck Yeah! culture, rife with gluttonous indulgence and distraction. It blasted their demographic wide open and redefined them as respected, serious rockers, not the type of punk novelties that were so reviled in the days of Dookie.
