With American Idiot, Green Day conquered the world. Not only was the album a colossal commercial juggernaut, it was critically heralded as an artistic masterpiece. So it’s really no surprise that the band’s follow-up, 21st Century Breakdown, would fail to be as good. The troubling aspect is that it’s just not good period.
The failure mainly stems from being lyrically awful. Singer/guitarist/songwriter Billy Joe Armstrong once again tries to tell a narrative of love amidst a dreadful modern life, one full of injustices worth rising up against. However, none of his points are pointed. To put it bluntly, it’s hard to tell what the hell he’s talking about. For an album that is clearly supposed to seem vital and gripping, it’s amazing how passively one can listen to it.
On the opener, “21st Century Breakdown,” Armstrong heavy-handedly sings, “video games and the towers fall, homeland security could kill us all.” But the song really has no clear message other than that life sucks. The problem persists on “Know Your Enemy.” By the end of it Armstrong is barking like a rabid dog to, “give me, give me revolution!” Ironically, the song gives no clue to exactly who this enemy is, let alone what they did to warrant an insurgency to rise up against them. “Last Of The American Girls” is almost archetypal example of how to force lyrics, the worst of which being, “She’s a runaway of the establishment incorporated.” It seems like the band threw a bunch of buzzwords regarding alienation and rebellion into a blender and spewed out the resulting muck.
The clearest of all the vague targets of Green Day’s lyrical rage seems to be religion. “A fire burns today of blasphemy of genocide. The sirens of decay will infiltrate the faith fanatics,” is the chorus of “East Jesus Nowhere” the track most squarely targeted at the church. And yes, that’s about the lyrical standard for 21st Century Breakdown (ie: weak.) It might be more acceptable if there weren’t so many vastly superior examples of religiously critical music (from the very good, Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible, to the incredibly great The Thermal’s The Body, The Blood, The Machine.)
The storyline’s two protagonists are Christian and Gloria, two lovers trying to overcome whatever it is that Green Day thinks is ruining the world. Unlike American Idiot‘s characters, Jesus of Suburbia (and his alter-ego St. Jimmy) and Whatshername, Christian and Gloria aren’t interesting, detailed, or reflective of society. They come off more like those kids in freshman year high school who didn’t stand out at all and then showed up one day with a dyed mohawk and a jacket with a bunch of patches of punk bands they had never heard of a week ago. To put it short and sweet they’re posers. Maybe that’s a really deep point Green Day is trying to make, that even the heroes are fake, but nothing really supports this theory.
The album even suffers on an instrumental front. It is hard to not tune out the music after a while because most of it sounds too similar. Part of this is simply because this is the worst collection of riffs Green Day has ever had on an album. Another part of the blame has to fall to the album’s producer, the living legend Butch Vig. After having a banner year in 2007 by producing the two best albums of the year (Against Me!’s New Wave & Jimmy Eat World’s Chase This Light), this marks his second straight weak effort (Tom Gabel’s Heart Burns being the other.) 21st Century Breakdown is horribly overproduced. Everything has to be huge, even though it’s clear many of the songs would’ve benefit from being stripped down.
The jaunty little piano part at the start of “¿Viva La Gloria? [Little Girl]” is actually very interesting, possessing feel similar to Green Day’s most underrated album, Warning. But unfortunately, it soon gives way to the big wall of guitar sound on that’s on every other track. “Restless Heart Syndome” would be far better as just a solo piano tune, allowing Armstrong to emote the lyrics fully, but instead the track is smothered by layer upon layer of drums, guitar, and bass. When “Horseshoes And Handgrenades” stands out for being a simple (yet still overproduced), unspectacular punk song, something is wrong.
21st Century Breakdown does have its moments. The vocal line on the chorus of “21 Guns” is hooky in a way that’s not easy to pinpoint. It’s slightly off for a pop song, but in a good way. But “Peacemaker” is far and away the best song of the bunch. It is akin to a mash up of mariachi sounds (complete with rolled Rs), punk rock, and Eastern belly dancing music. The tracks has an atypical frantic speed that feels like eyes darting around a hectic foreign bar. Even the lyrics depicting a power hungry ruler (knowing the band, it’s probably a caricature of George W. Bush) are spot on.
The problem with the album is that Green Day tried to recreate American Idiot, instead of attempting to spawn something new. Part of what made American Idiot amazing was how fresh it felt. The band was doing something musically revolutionary (not that punk rock operas hadn’t been tried before, but they’d never been perfected). 21st Century Breakdown scraps any notion of innovation. It is essentially American Idiot 2.0, and sequels rarely live up to the original.
Review Score: 4.0
2 Comments
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
belly dancing
…
[...] It is akin to a mash up of mariachi sounds (complete with rolled r’s), punk rock, and Eastern belly dancing music. The tracks has an atypical frantic speed that feels like eyes darting around a hectic foreign bar. … [...]…
[...] that Green Day has been any good post-American Idiot (in fact I’ve argued quite the opposite here and here), but there’s no conceivable way that they would have received such low a score when [...]