THE DUKE ADORES
AMERICAN IDIOT BY GREEN DAY
AMERICAN IDIOT BY GREEN DAY
Green Day were, far as I remember, the first band to give The
Duke the shivers. You know how it is, right? There's a hook, a
melody, something so inspiring, so infectious, that you can feel
it burrow into your asshole and ascend your spine, beating every
organ, bone and muscle fuckless in the process. It only lasts a
couple seconds, but in those couple seconds, man, there’s enough
endorphins and shit released in the body to keep you soaked in
delirium for the next fortnight.
I’ve never felt ashamed, as I see some folks do, by the fact that
Green Day were my first love, and that I’ve followed their every
flatulent piff since that evening spent entranced by Top Of The
Pops. For a twelve year old kid whose only knowledge of the world
came from A Nightmare On Elm Street 3, (the motherfucking
pinnacle of all Freddies, by the way), living in a council estate
in the arse-end of nowhere in The Northern Ireland, you didn’t
worry too much about credibility. I can pretend that the first
record I bought was Stations Of The Crass or some equally kudos-
drenched record, but it wasn’t. Until I heard Green Day that
night, via satellite link-up, no less, I didn’t know that there
were rock bands in the world who you just fucking knew existed
only to catalogue and soundtrack your every waking thought.
I mean sure, I loved Iron Maiden, but it’s kinda hard for a
pubescent cinephile to identify with songs about WW2 bombers and
plots to assassinate unborn children.
The T-Shirts fucking rocked, though.
This is gonna be hard for a motherfucker from, say, California or
some shit to believe, but when Dookie was straddling the album
charts like some acne-riddled colossus, I was one of about five
folks in my high school who had even heard of these sons a
bitches, much less gave a rancid shit.
Of course, this had its benefits, like when I wanted to go out
with a lass and so gave her a piece of paper with the lyrics to
Why Do You Want Him scribbled on it, claiming it as my own.
Any damn way, what happened is that through time, Green Day never
let me down, never released a solitary under-par record. It’s the
old cliché about growing up alongside the band that changed your
life and all that horse-paste. That first trio, from Smoothed Out
to Dookie, talked about teenage lust and longing and all that
jazz just as I started wanting to sit with the lasses instead of
the blokes, and the lasses started wanting to sit with the
motherfuckers flinging footballs around the place. Insomniac, one
of the most underrated albums of all ever, was dark and
oppressive just when The Duke was starting to write self-pitying
poetry and getting all obsessed with Joy Division. Nimrod
encapsulated emotions and anxieties and political musings that I
was trying with varying degrees of success to articulate.
“What’s the difference between you and me?
I do what I want, and you do what you’re told.”
Warning, though, was streamlined, concise, when I was spiralling
into some god-forsaken netherworld of cheap cider and rancid gut-
juice.
The point of all this is to illustrate a couple things; A – That
even in the foulest of moods, The Duke has never been one to
treat Green Day with anything less than awe-struck reverence. And
B – That in light of all this, all this growth and so on, it’s
nigh-on miraculous that Green Day still produce the stuff that
gets The Duke spasaming and jittering like that freaky fucking
lass what crawled out the telly in Ring.
American Idiot, the band’s seventh album, is released on Monday.
It gives me nothing less than thunderous orgasms of back-breaking
intensity to report that it is sheer, unrelenting genius from
start to finish.
I remember mentioning Green Day in a chat room one time and being
greeted with the derisory sneer; “Yeah. I loved them when I was
14.”
Well let The Duke be the first to announce that if fourteen year
olds are the only ones listening to stuff as complex, as
inventive, as fucking gorgeous as 9-minute prog-punk opus Jesus
Of Suburbia, then all that yacking about The State Of The Youth
should be met with disdain, cynicism, and most likely a baseball
bat studded to fuck with twenty-inch-long razor-sharp nails. Beat
those fears regarding the malcontents sniffing glue at the bus-
shelter till it's foaming blood-laced bile from every orifice, is
what, if those 14 year olds are the only ones fit to grasp the
wonder of such a track.
Jesus Of Suburbia, in fact, would need a full review to itself
just to do it a shred of justice. Two minutes in, when it adopts
a piano-led melody, I almost fell on my fucking back, blinded
once more by those arrangements, those damn tunes, those lyrics,
that narrative that says less about the apathy of a nation, as
has been suggested, than it does about the jaded individuals who
make up those statistics.
“And there’s nothing wrong with me,
This is how I’m s’posed to be,
In a land of make-believe,
That don’t believe in me.”
American Idiot is an angry record, for sure, yet not
confrontational in the same way that, say, Brain Stew / Jaded
from Insomniac may have appeared. Here, the tunes are as sharp,
as catchy as anything from Nimrod, but lyrically, and more
specifically, in the manner in which those lyrics are delivered,
the thing is fucking raging. Billie Joe Armstrong has never
sounded so sarcastic, so defiant, and yet at other times he seems
to virtually sigh the lyrics.
Anyone who still, after all this time, equates Green Day with the
likes of The Blink 82’s or whoever the hell, they need to listen
to maybe Boulevard Of Broken Dreams or Are We The Waiting and try
to image The Some 41’s or Golfing For Soup ever writing anything
so spellbinding.
Are We The Waiting in particular is so evocative, so melancholic,
that when it eventually reveals itself to be possibly the most
beautifully anthemic thing Green Day have ever written, a fella
is left with nothing to do but just sit slack-jawed and staring
at the speakers.
This isn’t hyperbole, folks. These things are genuinely this good.
When I heard lead single (and album opener) American Idiot, I
gotta admit I was a little apprehensive. It sounded worryingly
close to Green Day-By-Numbers, and shit, man, there’s enough
Pennywise records for that kinda nonsense. That single, though,
is as close to generic as American Idiot the album ever gets. It
pushes the goalposts so far back that even if you squint really
really hard and bend down and everything, you still won’t have a
damn clue how any of their peers are ever going to get anywhere
fucking near it ever again.
If the talk of how it’s a concept album, and the whispered
ponderings regarding Progressive Punk have got you a bit worried,
then chill out, man, and relax. You ain’t gonna think you put on
Yes by accident or no shit. And some of it might fly the hell
over your head sometimes. Sometimes something hits you that’s so
astounding, it takes another couple listens to grasp the
following couple minutes. This is the kinda record the detractors
never imagined Green Day were capable of, and the kinda thing we
all knew they were gonna give us one day.
When Homecoming breaks into some rock n’ roll complete with
saxophone and Jerry Lee Lewis piano, before spinning around on
itself and turning into doo-wop punk, the only concern a fella
has any right to be feeling is something along the lines of, “How
can they ever follow this?” The next thought will probably be
something along the lines of “I can never love another fucking
album.”
Consistently inventive, tunes you could break a leg on, never a
solitary note wasted… I’ve never been more jealous of 14 year
olds.
Thanks folks.
Send The Duke An Email
Duke the shivers. You know how it is, right? There's a hook, a
melody, something so inspiring, so infectious, that you can feel
it burrow into your asshole and ascend your spine, beating every
organ, bone and muscle fuckless in the process. It only lasts a
couple seconds, but in those couple seconds, man, there’s enough
endorphins and shit released in the body to keep you soaked in
delirium for the next fortnight.
I’ve never felt ashamed, as I see some folks do, by the fact that
Green Day were my first love, and that I’ve followed their every
flatulent piff since that evening spent entranced by Top Of The
Pops. For a twelve year old kid whose only knowledge of the world
came from A Nightmare On Elm Street 3, (the motherfucking
pinnacle of all Freddies, by the way), living in a council estate
in the arse-end of nowhere in The Northern Ireland, you didn’t
worry too much about credibility. I can pretend that the first
record I bought was Stations Of The Crass or some equally kudos-
drenched record, but it wasn’t. Until I heard Green Day that
night, via satellite link-up, no less, I didn’t know that there
were rock bands in the world who you just fucking knew existed
only to catalogue and soundtrack your every waking thought.
I mean sure, I loved Iron Maiden, but it’s kinda hard for a
pubescent cinephile to identify with songs about WW2 bombers and
plots to assassinate unborn children.
The T-Shirts fucking rocked, though.
This is gonna be hard for a motherfucker from, say, California or
some shit to believe, but when Dookie was straddling the album
charts like some acne-riddled colossus, I was one of about five
folks in my high school who had even heard of these sons a
bitches, much less gave a rancid shit.
Of course, this had its benefits, like when I wanted to go out
with a lass and so gave her a piece of paper with the lyrics to
Why Do You Want Him scribbled on it, claiming it as my own.
Any damn way, what happened is that through time, Green Day never
let me down, never released a solitary under-par record. It’s the
old cliché about growing up alongside the band that changed your
life and all that horse-paste. That first trio, from Smoothed Out
to Dookie, talked about teenage lust and longing and all that
jazz just as I started wanting to sit with the lasses instead of
the blokes, and the lasses started wanting to sit with the
motherfuckers flinging footballs around the place. Insomniac, one
of the most underrated albums of all ever, was dark and
oppressive just when The Duke was starting to write self-pitying
poetry and getting all obsessed with Joy Division. Nimrod
encapsulated emotions and anxieties and political musings that I
was trying with varying degrees of success to articulate.
“What’s the difference between you and me?
I do what I want, and you do what you’re told.”
Warning, though, was streamlined, concise, when I was spiralling
into some god-forsaken netherworld of cheap cider and rancid gut-
juice.
The point of all this is to illustrate a couple things; A – That
even in the foulest of moods, The Duke has never been one to
treat Green Day with anything less than awe-struck reverence. And
B – That in light of all this, all this growth and so on, it’s
nigh-on miraculous that Green Day still produce the stuff that
gets The Duke spasaming and jittering like that freaky fucking
lass what crawled out the telly in Ring.
American Idiot, the band’s seventh album, is released on Monday.
It gives me nothing less than thunderous orgasms of back-breaking
intensity to report that it is sheer, unrelenting genius from
start to finish.
I remember mentioning Green Day in a chat room one time and being
greeted with the derisory sneer; “Yeah. I loved them when I was
14.”
Well let The Duke be the first to announce that if fourteen year
olds are the only ones listening to stuff as complex, as
inventive, as fucking gorgeous as 9-minute prog-punk opus Jesus
Of Suburbia, then all that yacking about The State Of The Youth
should be met with disdain, cynicism, and most likely a baseball
bat studded to fuck with twenty-inch-long razor-sharp nails. Beat
those fears regarding the malcontents sniffing glue at the bus-
shelter till it's foaming blood-laced bile from every orifice, is
what, if those 14 year olds are the only ones fit to grasp the
wonder of such a track.
Jesus Of Suburbia, in fact, would need a full review to itself
just to do it a shred of justice. Two minutes in, when it adopts
a piano-led melody, I almost fell on my fucking back, blinded
once more by those arrangements, those damn tunes, those lyrics,
that narrative that says less about the apathy of a nation, as
has been suggested, than it does about the jaded individuals who
make up those statistics.
“And there’s nothing wrong with me,
This is how I’m s’posed to be,
In a land of make-believe,
That don’t believe in me.”
American Idiot is an angry record, for sure, yet not
confrontational in the same way that, say, Brain Stew / Jaded
from Insomniac may have appeared. Here, the tunes are as sharp,
as catchy as anything from Nimrod, but lyrically, and more
specifically, in the manner in which those lyrics are delivered,
the thing is fucking raging. Billie Joe Armstrong has never
sounded so sarcastic, so defiant, and yet at other times he seems
to virtually sigh the lyrics.
Anyone who still, after all this time, equates Green Day with the
likes of The Blink 82’s or whoever the hell, they need to listen
to maybe Boulevard Of Broken Dreams or Are We The Waiting and try
to image The Some 41’s or Golfing For Soup ever writing anything
so spellbinding.
Are We The Waiting in particular is so evocative, so melancholic,
that when it eventually reveals itself to be possibly the most
beautifully anthemic thing Green Day have ever written, a fella
is left with nothing to do but just sit slack-jawed and staring
at the speakers.
This isn’t hyperbole, folks. These things are genuinely this good.
When I heard lead single (and album opener) American Idiot, I
gotta admit I was a little apprehensive. It sounded worryingly
close to Green Day-By-Numbers, and shit, man, there’s enough
Pennywise records for that kinda nonsense. That single, though,
is as close to generic as American Idiot the album ever gets. It
pushes the goalposts so far back that even if you squint really
really hard and bend down and everything, you still won’t have a
damn clue how any of their peers are ever going to get anywhere
fucking near it ever again.
If the talk of how it’s a concept album, and the whispered
ponderings regarding Progressive Punk have got you a bit worried,
then chill out, man, and relax. You ain’t gonna think you put on
Yes by accident or no shit. And some of it might fly the hell
over your head sometimes. Sometimes something hits you that’s so
astounding, it takes another couple listens to grasp the
following couple minutes. This is the kinda record the detractors
never imagined Green Day were capable of, and the kinda thing we
all knew they were gonna give us one day.
When Homecoming breaks into some rock n’ roll complete with
saxophone and Jerry Lee Lewis piano, before spinning around on
itself and turning into doo-wop punk, the only concern a fella
has any right to be feeling is something along the lines of, “How
can they ever follow this?” The next thought will probably be
something along the lines of “I can never love another fucking
album.”
Consistently inventive, tunes you could break a leg on, never a
solitary note wasted… I’ve never been more jealous of 14 year
olds.
Thanks folks.
Send The Duke An Email
