As a teenager, my wife had a friend, another teenage girl, who was taken on tour with Billie Joe Armstrong and trafficked across several European nations for his pleasure. Although, I didn't mention it in the review of Play, this is also true of Moby. I won't be taking seriously any politicking - on American Idiocy or Animal rights - let alone moralising from them. Ignoring the lyrics and attempt at a narrative - much more a musical than an opera - it is hard not to hear The King is Half Undressed by Jellyfish and The Passenger by Iggy Pop and a dozen other popular riffs, chord sequences, and tunes. This is not decry plagiarism, which is an open hazard of any pop songwriting, but to identify American Idiot's music for what it is: repentant, reconstructed, barely considered rock'n'roll. There is nothing daring or inventive here and, if the politics are naïve, the music is even more so. 1.5 Yesterday, on the daily album drop page in the Reddit community for this project I encountered an all-too familiar response to Joanna Newsom’s Ys - 1 star, couldn’t listen to her voice. That Newsom’s music - for me as powerfully beguiling and absorbing as anything I’ve heard this century - can be fatally hamstrung for a listener by a simple distaste for the particular timbre of her voice seems tragic to me. However, that’s perhaps as far as I can criticise that (common enough) response to Ys without hypocrisy. Truthfully I have only listened to 4 of Green Day’s 14 studio albums but I know for certain that I cannot stand any of them, because Billie Joe Armstrong is the singer on every one. Billie Joe’s voice - to my ears Yogi Bear with pretensions - defeats me before a shot is fired. To my credit, over those who abandon Ys before Monkey and Bear have even got out the gate, I listened to American Idiot in full, twice today. “Well done you!” the Green Day fans may well concede, “For does not American Idiot, just like Ys, have multiple songs over 9 minutes long?” Honestly, no it doesn’t *really* although it does have Wake Me Up When September Ends, which lasts forever. Yes - the tracks Jesus of Suburbia and Homecoming clock in over 9 minutes, but each is really a volley of several short, simple songs, only bearing the most superficial of musical and lyrical connective tissue between. In the ‘Digital Edition’ of this album - whatever the significance of that is - all of the tracks between Jesus of Suburbia and Wake Me Up.. are presented as part of a diptych. This is novelty and window-dressing and that’s all the name-calling I will do about that. So I listened twice and it was no great trial of concentration; instead my energy was focused on trying to be fair. Because I am aware that lots of people - not least among my own generation - treasure this album, not enough to have gone to see American Idiot the Musical of course, but still - treasure it, so they do. So what, in fairness, should I focus on here? Not the musicians. Can any Green Day fan pretend that there is any distinctiveness in the guitar, bass or drums? Could be me doing all that sawing and palm-muting, could be my wee brother - you’d never know. There are no musical ‘ideas’ in Green Day’s playing outside the ordinary gestures of their genre, large though the band may loom within that genre. So everything must be staked on the songs themselves. Surely then, with the divisiveness of Billie Joe’s voice also acknowledged, we can do no less now than invoke a comparison between American Idiot and the work of Bob Dylan. It’s only fair. Jesus Christ, this is fairer than fair. Whoever enjoyed such magnanimity from a listener? Bringing out Dylan is perfect justice. For is not American Idiot celebrated as one of the iconic popular political texts of its era? There was George W Bush and Iraq and what not…’grrrrrrr‘, said America‘s youth, before a pitifully small number of them turned out to help stop him being reelected in a landslide. Still, it is doubtful that American Idiot would have had the same resonance under a John Kerry presidency, useful to America and I dare say the rest of the world as that would have been. Like Green Day, Bob Dylan did a decent bit of resonating back in the day as well. Yet when I think about the songs of his ‚protest‘ era and American Idiot, you might be surprised to learn that it is the differences rather than the similarities that really struck me. There are notable examples of Dylan in protest mode using the narrative ‚I‘. A Hard Rain‘s… God on our Side, and Masters of War spring to mind, and let’s keep the generosity flowing here: ‚But I see through your eyes/ And I see through your brain/ Like I see through the water/ That runs down my drain‘ ..is by no means too good to have come from the pen of Billie Joe Armstrong. Just as often however, the ‚I‘ is entirely absent from Dylan‘s protest; Blowin‘ in the Wind, The Times They are a Changin‘, Hattie Carroll, and Hollis Brown among others. Dylan (as ever) was capable of becoming poetically absorbed enough in his subjects that he was never stuck navel-gazing. There is no ‚I‘ in Like a Rolling Stone either, a song often understood as being caustically personal. Can the same compliment be paid to Billie Joe? ‚I‘m not a part of a redneck agenda‘ (America Idiot) ‚I beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies‘ (Holiday) ‚I walk alone, I walk alone‘ (Boulevard…) ‚Is she dreaming what I’m thinking?‘ (She’s a Rebel) ‚I don’t wanna stay/ Get me out of here right now/ I just want to be free‘ (Homecoming) These are not examples of an isolated ‚I’ (as we find for example at the end of Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom) these songs hinge on the narrator’s own belly-button. These are not the only songs that do it and in fact I also exclude here anything from the most egregious example - Jesus of Suburbia - because it is far too rich in self-obsession, whether or not one reads some of it as the mere portrayal of a ‚character‘, to be reduced to one or two lines. Lies and injustice are only as significant as the effect they have on Billie Joe‘s experience and identity. Where there is any respite from this torrent of energetic egotism, the results are worse: "Sieg Heil" to the president Gasman Bombs away is your punishment/ Pulverize the Eiffel towers/ Who criticize your government The poetic poverty of those lines is only eclipsed by the crassness of the sentiment; Billie Joe indulging in imagining a violent suppression of political dissent when America’s government had not only actually, back in reality, bombed and invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, but passed the Patriot Act which defaced its own citizenry‘s rights to free speech and privacy. Billie Joe found himself entirely unable to address those realities. The less said about the ‘gasman’ bit the better. Billie Joe was simply not the songwriter for the hour that had come. 9/11 - a subject Springsteen gamely devoted an album to, even if he didn’t cover himself in glory in the analysis - is here quietly folded away as a subtext to a confessional about Billie Joe’s loss of his father 20 years before. Perhaps that struck some listeners as a touching juxtaposition. I thought it was, again, crass, the worst song on the album, and in my personal opinion one of the worst songs ever to rhyme ‘rain’ with ‘pain’, which is to say one of the worst songs ever written. Is there really ‘protest’ at all here? There is perhaps a spittle-thin veneer of disapproval for America’s governance, and the influence of the increasingly powerful right-wing media; although not even that much is observed - it’s just ‘the media’, and if we are being that inexact with the term, why shouldn’t Green Day of Warner Music Group be thrown in there with the rest of the accused? Of course almost all bands who claim any kind of outsider status to the maschinations of consumerism and corporate oppression are indulging in a spot of hypocrisy. But I well remember walking past Clinton Cards in the early to mid noughties and seeing a whole Green Day stand; posters, wrist bands, patches, key rings, who knows what else… not Rip-Off mind you, where you could dump your money on pruck from any number of rock bands, CLINTON CARDS where you would typically pop in to grab an emergency birthday card for your granny and the fuckers had their OWN STAND. No wonder America’s youth forgot to vote in November 2004 - they were all out buying Green Day stickers for their skateboards. I fear ‘fairness’ may have fallen a little behind me now but I would like to point out that Billie Joe isn’t exactly fair either. In the midst of any such flurry of accusations that Green Day’s material is too shallow to pass for real protest or decent art there is a subtle sense here that Billie Joe (and those fans just here for the puerile thrill of the chunes) can always fall back on not caring: I don’t care if you don’t care/ I don’t care/ Everyone’s so full of shit (Jesus of Suburbia) Yes there it is. That’s the essence of punk rock isn’t it? We target authority in superficial ways and take credit for anything resembling a palpable hit against it but we don’t really ‘care’ at the same time - go listen to your Joan Baez, boomer. Not caring is a powerful piece of rearguard defence and part of the defining spirt of every true punk from Joey Ramone through to Dick Cheney. Hard to believe that there are people out there who think Green Day ‘sold out’ in some way. Who are these ‘American Idiots’ though? ‘Rednecks’ is it? Because to be fair to rednecks, it is often less that they are idiots than that they, too, don’t care. Watergate does not bother them. Does your conscience bother you? 0/5