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Green Day - 21st Century Breakdown
| Rollingstone |
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Since Green Day were the Nineties punk brats nobody expected to grow up, everything they do comes as a surprise. What's more bizarre: the fact that they sound so ambitious and audacious on their eighth album, or the fact that they even made an eighth album? Either way, the losercore mutts who crashed the radio in 1994 chanting "I got no motivation," with Billie Joe Armstrong wasted on his mom's couch — they've ended up the last band standing, the ones living up to their era's loftiest ideals and still writing their toughest songs long after they should have landed on Sober House. And they did it with a goddamned rock opera. American Idiot seemed like their career kamikaze — a concept album about American hopes and dreams, with characters named St. Jimmy and Jesus of Suburbia? Nice try! But it not only rescued Green Day from midlife limbo, it charged their musical batteries. With nearly 6 million copies sold and counting, Idiot became the sort of multiplatinum rock blockbuster that isn't supposed to exist anymore, because Green Day blew up into the sort of band that isn't supposed to exist anymore — raging with heart-on-sleeve passion, willing to risk falling on their faces with a grand statement. Even the songs that didn't work or the plot threads that didn't make sense just increased the fun, because Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tré Cool were refusing to go down slow.21st Century Breakdown is even better, so masterful and confident it makes Idiot seem like a warm-up. They're back in rock-opera mode, dividing the album into three parts, "Heroes and Cons," "Charlatans and Saints" and "Horseshoes and Handgrenades." But there are no nine-minute excursions this time — only two of the 18 songs crack the five-minute mark — and Green Day focused their ideas into their sharpest, toughest tunes. Armstrong brings a compassionate edge to his snarl, even when he's spitting out self-lacerating lines like, "My generation is zero/I never made it as a working-class hero."...full text |
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| Avclub. |
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Who would have guessed that the band playing dopey pop-punk on an even-dopier-titled 1991 disc (1,039/Smooth Out Slappy Hours) would find its commercial peak a decade after breaking through—and with a punk “opera,” no less? And then follow it up with another concept album? Is this the same guy the world met in a video where he sat on a sofa singing about smoking pot and jerking off? The metamorphosis seems fantastic, except it isn’t real. Perhaps Green Day’s best trick has been fooling the world into dismissing singer-guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt, and drummer Tre Cool as brainless pop-punks. Among the “Why don’t girls like me?” songs that dominated the early years, Green Day hid ambition and emotional depth. Still, it isn’t as if the goofballs who wrote “Dominated Love Slave” turned into Frank Zappa. No one will mistake the new 21st Century Breakdown for anyone other than Green Day, but the band seems completely comfortable in its ability to try new ideas—and to own the concept album, the bloated beast its punk forefathers rebelled against. Breakdown’s concept is harder to distill than 2004’s American Idiot, but the themes remain. Divided into three “acts”—“Heroes And Cons,” “Charlatans And Saints,” and “Horseshoes And Handgrenades”—the songs extend Idiot’s deep anxiety and exhaustion. That album epitomized the guilt and despair of the Bush era, but 21st Century Breakdown, which the band started writing in early 2006, wallows in its aftermath. A downer in the Obama age, it’s also a gloomy reminder that these issues remain....full text |
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| Guardian |
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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....full text |
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