Green Day: Know Your Enemy

I had a thought about Green Day winning a Grammy yesterday for Best Rock Album for 21^st Century Breakdown. In a way, this is unsurprising – Green Day won their first Grammy for Dookie back sometime in the mid-90s (some things in my pop culture sponge mind stay put – I can say with certainty that they won the Best Alternative Album there in 1996, announced on stage by Melissa Etheridge), and the Grammy win this week merely cements the band’s incredible ability to have managed sustaining life in the pop-punk form.

One only needs to look at the past 15 years or so in music since Dookie – from Blink 182’s dumbasses-with-tattoos-and-shimmying-pop-melodies to the no-jet-black-hair-out-of-place emergence of emo bands 5 years ago, Green Day, all of whom are now in their 40s, clearly have done what they do very successfully.

But I feel the need to voice my sort of objection to 21^st Century Breakdown and also reaffirm my love for it. A couple of months ago, I named Green Day’s American Idiot the best album of the 2000s, a judgment I very much stand by. Actually it was an album only a Green Day could pull off. It was a last stand for albums that absolutely must be heard straight through, from beginning to end. It was full of righteous, compelling, intoxicating anger, and in anthems like “Holiday,” no rational person could possibly hear the song and argue that their defiance wasn’t totally compelling. Yet the album was also pop shined to perfection, its biggest hit, “Boulevard Of Broken Dreams” featured not a yell or grunt in sight and succeeded on the very solemn nature of its melody. Hearing that American Idiot was being adapted into a Broadway musical then (the performers of which joined Green Day on stage at the Grammy’s for “21 Guns”) should not be a bit surprising – the band even spoke of West Side Story as one of their key influences.

Well, 21^st Century Breakdown seems to be a massive success, showing the success of American Idiot to be far from a fluke. But 21^st Century Breakdown, I know American Idiot, I’ve loved American Idiot, and you, sir, are no American Idiot.

Which isn’t to say 21^st Century Breakdown is without charm. Actually, it suffers from an overabundance of the ambition of American Idiot. American Idiot, an old-school concept album a la Tommy succeeded in spite of its tendency towards grandiloquence. If anything flagged in the album, it was the plot-heavy songs the like of “Extraordinary Girl” that purported to “tell” us something about its “characters.” Still, considering the energy around it, the song was never such a drag as to hurt the album, and indeed, some of these “plot” songs yielded moments of spitfire triumph, like the speed-metal “St. Jimmy” and the transporting “Letterbomb.”

21^st Century Breakdown is absolutely, deadeningly weighed down by its sense of story. Is there a story? It alleges to take place in three parts, introduces a chick named Gloria, calls her the “last of the American girls,” rallies against a Christian’s inferno, and winds up, I don’t know, giving a eulogy to America or something. Yet I just described the 4 or 5 worst songs on the record, which already has 15 damn songs. And try as it might, not a one of them is as good as “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” or “Holiday.”

Let me pause for a second to talk about “21 Guns” and my sadness at how much I hate “21 Guns.” I cannot, still, every time I hear this song not think about another song it reminds me of – Heart’s “What About Love.” That song, full of theatrical keyboard bombast, is the type of song only someone who, like me, was a child in the late 80s and early 90s could love. It’s fun and cheesy and ridiculous and impossible not to sing along to. Heart, remade in the 80s, is everything to love about the 80s. “21 Guns” pretends to be a punk ballad, which should be a form Green Day knows a lot about as they basically perfected the form on their last album with “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” “21 Guns” sucks. I understand that Billie Joe Armstrong wanted to put in a song about when to give up, wanted to fill it with bombastic resignation, and wanted it to be resonant in spite of itself. It is, however, not especially good at that.

Actually bombastic resignation is not Armstrong’s strong suit. This is what I mean about the part o f21st Century Breakdown that I love. I think there’s a good album hiding inside of it, one full of the type of pissy, easy to swallow anger the band has always made its strong suit, and it would’ve been a terrific record if he’d ignored absolutely everything else. Let me start with that other single of Green Day’s from the record that everyone maligns – “Know Your Enemy.” Try as I might to listen to why this song is terrible, I think it’s extraordinary. Two chords, firingly loud, not overly complicated, ridiculously catchy – this is a pop-punk masterpiece. This is, in fact, the album’s best contender to stack up to “Holiday.” Or maybe that’s “East Jesus Nowhere,” or “The Static Age,” or “Horseshoes and Hand Grenades,” despite that song getting bogged down in a plot-bound chanting of “G-L-O-R-I-A” that’s pretty annoying.

There’s one other very good song on the record, and it is, in fact, the exact type of power ballad that “21 Guns” shoots the moon on becoming. The song, “Last Night On Earth,” is tuneful and pretty, but actually it’s the exact opposite of “21 Guns” – thematically at least. “If I lose everything in the fire,” Armstrong sings, “I’m sending all my love to you.” Or so I think of it at least. Ones song is about knowing when resignation is appropriate, the other about refusing to resign. I hope it surprises no one to learn that the Green Day I love is much better at the latter.