Green Day’s Latest Album was the Worst Album They’ve Ever Done
When Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong doted on Billie Eilish for her unique musicality in a Rolling Stone feature in October of last year, it seemed as though he was taking a shine to contemporary artists and becoming open to new styles of music. I was hopeful that perhaps this signaled that he would consider adopting newer avenues of creativity in his songwriting. Now, I just feel bad for getting my hopes up.
Green Day, a band that has championed themselves as being in-your-face and rebellious, released the album Father of All Motherf*ckers back in February, and it coasted to the top of the charts. On the album’s surface, they sonically changed up their oft-lampooned three-chord punk rock formula and threw some glossy archetypes from different rock and roll genres into the mix. The album was marketed as “100% pure, uncut rock.”
In albums prior, Green Day has made a name for themselves as a band that makes bold social and political statements. One of their seminal albums, American Idiot, unabashedly bashes the Bush administration, and more recently the band chanted anti-Trump slogans on nationally televised award shows. They’ve explored topics like school shootings and economic fallout. On Father of All Motherf*ckers, they seem to be making the far less risky statement that “rock and roll is alive and well.”
On listening to the album, however, one can’t help but sense just how hollow of an attempt they make for this cause. In the first place, “rock is not dead” seems like such an innocuous argument that not many people seem to be concerned about, much less disagree with. Aesthetically, the album adopts musical tropes from different rock and roll genres, all the while ignoring or misunderstanding why each were popular and transgressive during their time.
Doo-wop and Beatlemania, which Green Day channel in “Meet Me On the Roof” and “Stab You in the Heart,” came at a time when sexual and social repression was being broken down. Eighties arena rock and hair metal, which makes a cameo in tracks like “Take the Money and Crawl,” were big and brash enough to catch the attention of the US congress who then implemented “parental advisory” labels for music that was deemed lyrically promiscuous. Joan Jett’s “Do You Want to Touch Me”, which Green Day knowingly echo on the track “Oh Yeah,” was a defiant affirmation of women’s sexual agency for the eighties. But the Green Day version is a flat critique on social media escapism that comes across as a cringey old-man rant about “kids and their damn instagrams.”
Green Day’s album adopts these old sonic standbys, but without any of the dangerous bite or cultural significance they’re supposed to carry with them. It’s the musical equivalent of selling a Nirvana t-shirt at Forever 21; toothless, devoid of the original sentiment, and yet packaged like a rebellious statement.
And why this statement, after all? There’s a myriad of social issues that pervade the generational consciousness, and as consequence, we’re living in some of the most anxious times in recorded history. Green Day could have touched on the constant anxiety about never ending wars, climate disaster, financial collapse, and the looming rise of authoritarian governments across the globe. And these were just a few from a long list of issues before the world was struck with the Coronavirus pandemic. Almost any issue would arguably have resonated deeply and broadly enough with the listening audience, so why would a band, one so formerly outspoken, choose a hollow, flashy defense of outdated musical tropes?
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It’s already been said, in ways far superior than how I could put it, that nostalgia is a big money-maker for media industries. Movie theaters are flooded with remakes, reboots, and re-imaginings of old and fondly-remembered franchises. They’re safe, tested, and don’t require a whole lot of effort to get people excited about. Part of it, too, is because nostalgia is a part of our cultural psychology.
Eras like the nineties and eighties or before are looked back on so fondly because we view them through rose-colored glasses as “simpler times.” This is either because the target audience were themselves children during these periods, and therefore had far less to worry about than their parents may have, or because they haven’t actually experienced that period at all. Media industries, especially corporate media industries, are very aware of this, and they’ve capitalized on it in a BIG way.
Disney, for an obvious example, added another dozen or so billion dollars to their already imposing net worth with the latest string of Star Wars movies, not including the myriad of Star Wars titles set to come out on their streaming platform, Disney Plus. Admittedly, some of these re-imaginings may have their own merit, but ours is a generation that is starved for something new to associate and identify with.
Green Day’s newest album doesn’t even come close, much less make any attempt to offer something new. Instead, as Rolling Stone magazine put it in a fawning review, Father of All Motherf*ckers is “a bunch of songs about being middle-aged rockers in love with their record collection.”
At least with their seminal works Dookie and American Idiot, there’s a distinct fingerprint to them. Each work is identifiable, top-to-bottom, front-to-back. The style, the sound, and the presentation all stand out as unique, and were presented at times that made them culturally important. Dookie reinvigorated adolescent frustration after grunge fizzled out in the mid-90s, and American Idiot encapsulated an angst coupled with the political anxiety of the Bush era.
But even the songs like “Sugar Youth”, which sound like something from Green Day’s older catalogue, are just another cheap re-hashing of something that’s already been done before. Even the goddamned ugly–ass cover art is just a bastardization of the cover art to American Idiot. The one attempt they make at a social statement on “Junkies on a High” just borrows the chord progression from “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and slathers on a cynicism reminiscent of impotent and grumpy retirees.
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Green Day, a group that has spent their career positioning themselves as the mavericks of mainstream rock and roll, has either succumbed to the corporate production stratagem of writing easy and vapid love letters to times past, or they have mired themselves in a self-aggrandizing narcissism as the faithful defenders of a genre that’s slowly dying.
Father of All Motherf*ckers is a musical nostalgia-trip that offers nothing rebellious or new. What’s the rebellion in crying out, “back in my day, we had real music” other than daring to sound like the stuck-up parents in a campy teen movie?
The band are very obvious disciples of the “rock’s not dead” frame of mind, but if rock and roll is really alive and well, then rock artists need to risk trying something new and stop reminiscing on “the good old days” like they’re circle-jerking in an old folks’ home.
Tyler Faurot 