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Judgment
Day
Billie Joe Armstrong is
still deeply, elaborately
bummed—sorry,
Obamaniacs!
By Steve Kandell

T ONLY FOLLOWS that a band whose breakthrough hit contemplated the virtues of lazing around on a couch and jerking off would go on to cra t an apocalyptic concept album condemning institutionalized lethargy. In 1994, Billie Joe Armstrong whined, “I got no motivation”; in 2009, he’s shouting, “Gimme gimme revolution,” rallying a doomed generation to save themselves, or to at least put down the Wii long enough to acknowledge that they need saving.

For 20 years, Green Day have tried to navigate the chasm between their punker-than-thou Gilman Street roots and their everydude appeal. The band’s post-Dookie output yielded diminishing returns until 2004’s American Idiot married proggy architecture—it’s an opera!—and meaty pop-punk hooks to W.-bashing screeds for an unexpected blockbuster that, ironically, pushed Green Day from snarky navel-gazing toward a rancorous agitprop that even their most orthodox detractors might begrudgingly appreciate.

Conventional wisdom dictates that the follow-up, even one that comes five years later, should be a gritty grab for street cred. Instead, Armstrong,

 

[RATING

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Trash Classic

bassist Mike Dirnt, and drummer Tré

Cool push Idiot’s conceits even further on 21st Century Breakdown, a slick, class-obsessed, 70-minute, 18-song, three-act cycle that trades Bush-era indignation for Obama-era resignation. So much for

and .

There’s some stretching stylistically:

Two different songs called “Viva La Gloria!” open with piano, while the lush, mid-tempo “Last

Night on Earth” and “Restless Heart Syndrome” ape mid-period Beatles, or maybe just Oasis. (Armstrong has bemoaned the cultural ubiquity of “Good Riddance [Time of Your Life],” yet he keeps rewriting that song.) If the Cars did a tune about impending nuclear winter, it might sound like

“Last of the American Girls.” Yet most tracks that start off on unfamiliar terrain generally return to a

GREEN DAY 21st Century Breakdown

•••••••••• REPRISE

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS KING

DO WNLOAD NEW MP3s AT SPIN.COM JUNE 2009 85