6 - Warning:

Warning: we've reached the end of the second chapter of the book of Green Day. It has been a 10 year roller coaster of ups and downs, popularity and rejection, redundance and experimentation. It's time for something new. I sure hope Al Gore doesn't lose the election to an ultra conservative frat boy who invites the corporate vampires into our fragile politico-economic landscape. Last time that happened we went to war for the opposite of a good reason (which 20 years later, we're still not officially engaged in fighting), not to mention the 4 times before that.

The result is an incredibly spastic mush of acoustic guitars, retro pop quotations, cabaret stories, and fables about growing up. To borrow the Conan O'Brien gag, in the year two thou....sa...nd, Green Day made a sort of folk punk album. It's just another Green Day album, but it's hard not to compare it to other things like Meat Puppets or Violent Femmes; it's pop-punk with a whole lot of acoustic instruments.

Critics bring up Brecht-Weill, people start saying dumb things like file-sharing is killing record sales, and say all sorts of generic maturity v professionalism v whatever statements that clearly indicate they don't know how sarcasm actually works. Yes, the word "sarcasm" vaguely means "saying the opposite of what you mean," but that's only the technical device, not the actual meaning. The actual meaning of using sarcasm is something along the lines of "you have created a context for this conversation that forces me to respond in a way that isn't true, i am forced to respond but i'm not in control so all i can do is try to get across that the whole context is absurd because any response is an untruth."

Punk isn't mainstream anymore. They can go back to Gilman. A little part of the world has scabbed over and our arms won't fall off.

And i hear you say bottle, where is all this coming from. I can't follow your story.

And i say sorry? I'm reading Billie Joe Armstrong's diary. I tend to take lyrics from before and after and around the thing i'm listening to and recontextualize them into some more meaningful statement. Billie Joe the narrator is dealing with all the false dichotomies in his own mind. Some of them are forced on us by society at large, some of them are our own special sado-masochistic creations, and we sure do tend to drive them staples deep (see, i reached all the way back to Tre Cool's song from Kerplunk for that one).

If we've learned anything from all this, it's surely that i don't think the way you think i think, and that's confusing. But, isn't that exactly what quoting Tony Hatch's "Downtown" as sung by Petula Clark on a pop-punk album published by Frank Sinatra's record label is meant to convey? You're welcome.

7 - American Idiot