Green Day: C/D?

Interesting that the Green Day fans you knew at the time were confused about the "Kinks fixation" on Warning, given that the title track was far from the first time that Green Day had half-inched a Kinks riff (see: 'Walking Contradiction' vs. 'Do It Again' for a notable example) - the Green Day fans that I knew at the time were down on Warning mostly because of the relatively softer sound and slightly increased emphasis on acoustic guitars. For me, personally, I don't think the songwriting is as strong as on previous records.

American Idiot was critically acclaimed, sold well, and brought quite a fair amount of new fans on board, which I was pleasantly surprised by because I thought they were just about done prior to releasing that record. However, I do know more than a few Green Day fans that were dissatisfied with the record for numerous reasons: the Wonderwall-isms of 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams', ballads like 'Wake Me Up When September Ends', and the sense that Green Day were now trying their hand at being a stadium rock band.

warning is easily their best record with their best songwriting. of course the people i knew weren't literally against the kinks-isms but it was the dimensions of that sound (softer, more acoustic) that alienated them

xpost:

Of course, the first time the words "stadium rock" were brought up in conversation regarding Green Day, I thought "eh?" ... but thinking about it, and listening to American Idiot again, I can see how the cavernous drums on tracks like 'Are We The Waiting' and 'Wake Me Up When September Ends' can code as "stadium rock" to some.

Funnily enough, I never heard anyone slag off or criticise either of the two multi-part suites on the record.

That you and I disagree completely on the merits of Warning is not a surprise to me in the least.

ime no one was mad about american idiot

pretty much everyone i knew who still had a modicum of affection for this band was rolling their damn eyes at billy joe super saiyan-ing himself into bono 2.0.

omg looool at "Fuck Time"

what's most amazing to me is that it's on the *second* of the three albums, like was that really not among the bottom-scraping material

pretty much everyone i knew who still had a modicum of affection for this band was rolling their damn eyes at billy joe super saiyan-ing himself into bono 2.0.

― a basset hound (strongo hulkington's ghost dad), Friday, September 30, 2016 7:05 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ha, yes! I remember there being a lot of this amongst many that I knew who were still bothered about Green Day at that point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNq9gmY_Oz4

this was my favorite Insomniac = more Dookie track

'Fuck Time' is surely something that Tre Cool had a lot to do with? It feels like it's one of his.

Insomniac was everything I wanted as an 8 year old Green Day fan. My sister wrote new lyrics for "Walking Contradiction" about being stuck in traffic, it was pretty great.

holy shit @ the "do it again" / "walking contradiction" rip. that's fucking insane

I remember, despite not being a huge Green Day fan at the time (tho I like them now), being anxious to hear the new Green Day single around the time Insomniac came out, because they kept playing short snippets of it during MTV commercials for about a week, and those clips sounded massive.

woke up early for high school one morning and flipped on MTV and they were showing the video (think it had debuted the night before and they were replaying it), and I dug it. my brother was a Green Day fan, but was asleep as he was in middle school at the time, so I left him a note - "Hey bro - new Green Day video is out, Geek Stink Breath!".

my mom called me later and said my brother was upset because he thought i was insulting him.

So

Has this been discussed

https://www.uphe.com/movies/ordinary world

Ugh

https://www.uphe.com/movies/ordinary-world?utm_source=m.facebook.com&utm_medium=referral

would've seen it if it ever came here. definitely dig billie joe going into acting, makes sense

D

Billie Joe Armstrong leads an all-star cast in the candid and heartwarming comedy, Ordinary World. Perry (Armstrong), a former punk rocker, is ten years into his band's "indefinite hiatus" and is struggling with his adjustment to the real world, which includes working in his family's hardware store. When Perry's hotshot attorney wife (Selma Blair) and precocious young daughter forget his 40th birthday, his brother (Chris Messina) takes pity and gives him the money to throw a huge rockstar blowout in a fancy New York hotel. At the party, Perry's punk past clashes hilariously with his grown-up reality as he encounters crazy former bandmates, including best pal Gary (Fred Armisen), and an old-flame-turned-manager (Judy Greer), who offers him a chance to revive his stalled career, all in one outrageous day!

lol this sounds/looks even worse than that Strummer movie

people getting upset because they felt that Insomniac was just "more Dookie"

it was the 90s, every artist was supposed to mature and throw on some cellos or discover accordions or ondes martenots or whatever on album 3 or 4

Oh, the cleverness.

Bump some #FatherOfAll to get going pic.twitter.com/erl8BTFCAT

— Green Day (@GreenDay) February 7, 2020

(WE DID USE BUTCH WALKER THOUGH)

album's at least a little livelier than their last few exhausted directionless things

I had to.

_Uncut Rock_ (2020, dir. the Safdies, starring Adam Sandler as Billie Joe.)

— Ned Raggett (@NedRaggett) February 7, 2020

not going to lie, i kinda liked their uno/dos/tre chaos.
yeah, it ended in a full on meltdown, but there are some decent tunes on the trilogy.

This new album is so wildly awful that it give me secondhand embarrassment but it's also hilarious and somehow better than their last several records?

it doesn't SOUND like any kerplunk-onward members are still left in the band and yet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18EmOXEsmlw

honestly they should just go full rockabilly

Sounds like Weezer if Weezer was influenced by Havana 3am. Which is to say ... fine.

Their music is very real, and you can tell it all comes from them, which is what sets it apart from what other pop acts are doing.

not going to lie, i kinda liked their uno/dos/tre chaos.
yeah, it ended in a full on meltdown, but there are some decent tunes on the trilogy.

― mark e, Friday, February 7, 2020 1:11 PM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

putting myself through the trilogy a second time is one of the most depressing things i've ever done for the sake of a review. even the good songs sound empty

21st century breakdown is the best green day album though

this ad campaign has definitely done its job.

...in that it's made me listen to it. wow is this really Green Day? I mean, it's not good but I've got to applaud them for not sounding anything like their usual selves

wait... what

why is the second track the same song as the first one? Is this some In A Silent Way shit?

It’s because it’s 100% Pure Uncut Rock. No trap beats. No Swedish songwriters. Do you want Realness, or do you want fake pop crap?

Okay I'm at work and I'm 5 songs in and... Okay, the ad campaign was ridiculous, and the change of direction is ridiculous and the whole thing is daft, but... Am I kind of secretly enjoying this? Much more than whatever I heard on that awful trilogy anyway...

i've also been having fun revisiting nimrod instead of listening to the new record. "redundant" is a great power-pop song

new record better than the trilogy otm

I always listened to Nimrod at arm's length. You know that point in your teenage years where you're painfully aware that your favourite band might have sold out because suddenly everyone's singing along to the songs? (not that people didn't know all the words to Dookie, but the difference between being a 14 y/o listening to Dookie and 17 y/o listening to Nimrod was significant)

but like you Brad, I'm going back to Kerplunk and the stretch from 80 to No One Knows is a serious madeleine moment

He would also state that the lyrics are about "the life AND death of the party" and the "lifestyle of not giving a fuck."

this album sounds too intense for me, might steer clear

i've always felt nimrod was a little uneven with its mix of genre shuffling and the classic green day sound you know and love, but "uptight" gets it just right by being both. maybe their best song

insomniac: 32 minutes, not one of them wasted

this was my gateway band to rock music that wasn't the beatles or beach boys and every time i revisit insomniac i remember 1) being confused out that it came out so quickly after dookie, like was this a real new record? 2) having that dubiousness sort of confirmed by the runtime even though i bought the cassette and didn't actually know how long it was but the songs really whipped by. "no pride" was my favorite at the time 3) thinking "geek stink breath" was such an ugly, gnarly song yet so so catchy and every time i turned on mtv i hoped to catch the (gnarly, ugly) video

insomniac confused me a bit too. not sure what the release schedule was in the UK but I was still quite young at the time so the gap between the two albums didn't feel that short

i think i ended up getting dookie for christmas '94 (in my stocking, which now that i think about it, is a very funny joke by my parents), so by the time october '95 rolled around i was like "fuck i gotta buy another green day album now???"

I had a few friends totally into that Gilman Street scene. One of them had not one, not two, but three Green Day tattoos ... before "Dookie" came out. That's kinda like getting a Raffi tattoo right before he released "Singable Songs for the Very Young."

Anyway, I was never into them, but I did see them play a small club show right when "American Idiot" came out. They played the whole album and introduced the expanded band, then played a long greatest hits set, and I thought, huh, I guess they do have a lot of great hits. It was a really good show.

One of them had not one, not two, but three Green Day tattoos ... before "Dookie" came out.

lol i think this is so rad