I wanted to like American Idiot. Really. Mostly because I was a Green Day fan, but also because of the soul-numbing run-up to the 2004 U.S. presidential election, one of those rare moments when even those wary of politicized art wouldn't mind some big-time act addressing the evils of those pissing on us from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Any pop cultural port in a liberty-eroding shitstorm, and all.
Two listens in, though, and it was clear: American Idiot was musically dodgy and politically empty. Political pop has its place, at least when didacticism doesn't drain the wit and life from a band's songwriting. But American Idiot failed utterly as coherent propaganda and as rock invigorating enough to agitate the pleasure centers. Have you tried to parse the lyrics to "Holiday" or "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" lately? This wasn't anti-imperialist dissent set to kick-ass. It was gaudy, way-too-impressionistic, self-congratulatory garbage warbled over lumbering AOR dressed in strings and conceptual malarkey.
The fact that American Idiot had an undercurrent of lukewarm liberal backslapping, and was released during the blackest days of the W. era, certainly gave it a big contextual profile boost at the time. But what really assured its success was the fact that the band had smartly made a grab-bag of proven gestures swiped from the ignoble history of Big Rock, along with some earnest, commercially canny self-cannibalization. And then there was the icky transparency of the band's attempt to shuck their lingering entry-level pop-punk rep, the last of the slack-and-proud generation to reveal their sad, predictable need for "boomer respect."
When a record like that sells a bazillion copies, you can be assured that the band won't be scaling back its ambitions on the follow-up. And 21st Century Breakdown is indeed another hour-plus slab of jumped-up alt-rock as political/musical theater-- overlong, exhausting, and corny as hell.
If American Idiot was an aesthetic failure, you certainly never doubted the band's conviction. Sure, you might cringe when you realized all that effort was in service of fulfilling Billie Joe Armstrong's dreams of merging boneheaded pogo-pop with Broadway shlock. You might have lamented that no one pointed out the inanity of many of the album's creative choices, like naming a protagonist "Jesus of Suburbia", perhaps because Armstrong was a grown-ass millionaire with carte blanche from his corporate masters. Nonetheless, the band really put its backs into that vapid, humorless trash.
21st Century Breakdown is just as pompous and dumb, but it lacks even that old misguided passion. It's a slog, but not the kind that results when a band forgets the importance of editing when in the throes of "trying to say something." Its sprawl feels entirely unearned, three men worried about meeting expectations rather than driven by urgency. The performances are blandly professional, because any major-label rock band of Green Day's abilities could shit this stuff out in their sleep, and emotionally inert. This is the crafting of a modern epic as a dreary day-job routine.
Tré Cool-- a drummer who's never really progressed beyond "fast with a lot of rolls" and "mid-tempo militaristic oompah"-- flaunts his competence level with a metronomic anti-creativity. Mike Dirnt's bass playing, once reliably adding needed punch to band's flimsier tunes, is often buried under Armstrong's claustrophobic, monochromatic guitar. As a songwriter, Armstrong was always juicing the platonic pop-punk tune at best. Listening to him try classic rock moves is cringe-y in the way you'd expect when a guy with a limited skill set pines for stadium godhood. Having exhausted his new tricks on American Idiot, he's descended into repetition, almost self-parody. And what he's recycling wasn't much worth hearing in the first place.
Just count the number of times he falls back on the lame bait-and-switch of the pretty acoustic intro, setting the listener up to expect one of Green Day's oft-regrettable ballads, only to kick in with a faceless blast of ur-mall-punk. Or the lifeless Frankensteins of songs from International Superhits, the sound of man stitching his past hits together out of desperation or callowness or both. It's kind of amazing an album with so many multi-genre suites and deliberate mid-song shifts in mood can also feel so maddeningly static for long stretches. You start to cling to the novelties and experiments, however bad: the way "Peacemaker" sounds like a cutting-room leftover from some ersatz American International Pictures surf/spy movie, or the more-Wings-than-Fabs McCartney bite of "Last Night on Earth".
As for the album's storyline, I plead the most willful kind of ignorance. It seems to be another loosely sketched state-of-the-union about how far up shit creek we are as a nation/planet, with a slight positivist tinge given this weird pause we seem to be in between reconstruction and total collapse. So "desperate, but not hopeless" is about as close as Armstrong gets to a memorably bite-sized universalist sentiment. The lyrics are otherwise another do-you-really-have-the-time-to-unpack-this jumble of inscrutable storytelling, pseudo-profundities, and just-add-bile anti-authoritarianism. Which means I could be mistaking plain ol' love songs for Major Statements. Or it could be that Armstrong's pretensions now completely obscure any remaining bubblegum charmers. You can listen only so long for something catchy and human-scaled while being consistently rewarded with lines like, "When your mind breaks the spirit of your soul, your faith walks on broken glass."
Green Day had been augmenting the three-chords-or-less thrashing since the trad power-pop touches of Nimrod, taking it further with the Brit Invasion homages that peppered Warning. Musically, a self-consciously eclectic and ambitious Green Day had been a reality long before Armstrong began gorging on Headline News and the Springsteenian mythos. But Green Day's late-decade addiction to scale, and reinforcing their own stature, has drained all the immediacy and pleasure from their music. Without some sort of attitude-correcting flop, the band will probably continue to abuse your tolerance for ego-driven padding. And if the CD format finally expires between now and the next one, watch out when Billie Joe convinces Reprise to disseminate his next Economist-meets-Vegas horrorshow on snappily branded external hard drives.
