“So Yeah Just Again… The New Green Day Album is Fu**ing Orgiastic”

It happens just when you think all the conversations have dissipated into dust. All of the portals into the cosmos are closed for repair — Saturday night, flannel, the café, as good as boarded up. A band comes along steeps its own flavor into something completely fresh and new and once again the art form gives you what you need.

To me, the Green Day story goes something about like this: they have a directness and simplicity that makes their music, when they’re at their best, come off very clear, direct and purposeful, and also draws its aggressors. In fact, very few bands are capable of meeting with such rancorous, manufactured “distaste” upon their mention — proclaiming a fandom of Green Day is likely the most hazardous move possible in music conversation. It was this way always, even in their anthemic yet strangely esoteric early days of the Dookie singles, and upon the release of “Oh Love” which was their best song until Father of All… [1] came out in early February. One person would post liking it and almost immediately a jealous scab would pipe in and declare it not a classic, or flawed in some seemingly arbitrary way or whatever.

So almost true to form, my laudatory clatter on Father of All… has all but fallen on deaf ears indiscriminately. It almost seems par for the course but at the same time we’re in this pointedly, noxiously “flavor-of-the-week” alt-rock culture these days of the blogosphere where this month, The 1975 is more copiously discussed than Green Day for the very fact of their album being more contemporary, despite what I’d think any oaf should see as that band’s inferior discography to the godfathers of mainstream pop punk.

What I’m still sorting out is where it stands in their catalogue. My typical mantra in the past few months has been “best Green Day album since Nimrod,” but, as I allude to earlier, I’m not entirely convinced they have a song better than “I Was a Teenage Teenager” [2]. And the scary part is I could say that about multiple other songs on this albeit brief LP, from “Graffitia” to “Take the Money and Crawl” to “Junkies on a High” to “Stab You in the Heart” [3]. And an interview would be fun but I don’t have to ask their activities of late because, as Rollie Pemberton once said of Tricky’s album Maxinquaye, “The influences peel off like stickers on a notebook.”

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[1] And how about Green Day’s prescience? I remember when Revolution Radio popped in ’16 and thinking it so ham-handed until Donald Trump got elected president, which made it make perfect sense. Then, with Father of All…, I assume they’re droning on about Trump being the “father of all motherfu**ers” (to amass the unofficial complete album title there), only to in the next month find my society plunged into deadly pandemic and unsavory entropy, and hence gather that title’s salience.

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[2] Along these lines Tommy James wrote the mighty “Crimson and Clover” when he already had a kid and I think Billie Joe’s child growing up into a teenager might have infused him with a special vial of inspiration toward this sort of objectives-based songwriting which piles up as very substantial, I must submit.

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[3] Interestingly all four of these numbers fall on side b of Father of All…