If progress were tracked inside a bubble, Green Day would be an enormous success with their latest release, ¡Uno!. In fact, if Green Day’s career existed in such a bubble they’d be magnificently revolutionary. But they don’t, and never will. They sit in a state of middling mediocrity that will forever allow them to be able to put out bland, angsty teenager music.
¡Uno! initiates itself with an exceptionally solid track, “Nuclear Family”, and perches listeners hopes high. After deviating from their ‘”punkier” sound and lyrics with American Idiot and21st Century Breakdown, older fans may have something to be excited about. By the second track, however, Green Day does a swift and clean job of kicking the feet out under from hopeful, older fans.
Each track manages to succeed in highlighting how little Green Day has grown since American Idiot. While moderately successful pre-American Idiot, Green Day languished in an existential crisis after the release of Warning and disappeared for a number of years. Upon their return, they had undergone a massive transformation. Sporting unappealing guy-liner and a hyper saturated clothing style, they had entered into the realm of the Teenager, an odd group for a bunch of 32-year olds to relate to.
That’s the crowd that they’re aiming for, with their standards so low that it’s hard to miss. That’s the brilliance of ¡Uno!. It appeals to such a low denominator that the artists hardly had to invest any amount of effort into their work.
Emerging with a sound cleaner than ever and clever song compositions (if one can call musicians such as Green Day composers) and cheeky, short familiar solos, the trio has managed to emit another clean pop album bound for success.
What makes the album so dull is Green Day’s insistence on purveying to teenagers. After years of undeniable change and growth, one could see the maturity that Green Day experiencing. Warning left listeners with a mature tone and moderately well thought out lyricism. Dookie was an album of frustration and boredom. Nimrod was an experiment in style. ¡Uno! manages to sink any boat of maturity on the horizon. It does its job: make money.
With lyrics that yawn on about being in love, resisting authority, lost love, being young or rife with gratuitous swearing, Billie Joe manages to fall short. Coupled with standard time signatures and flavorless, catchy chord progressions, ¡Uno! shows more the desperation of an aging group of men and their desire to make profit instead of art. Not that anyone is blaming them, but it’s more often humiliating to watch as forty-year-old men prance about dressed as teenagers.
You’re adults now. You’re more sophisticated. There are scores of musicians that do the genre you pretend to do better and with an adult tone. Any number of artists can approach the younger demographics and produce excellent art.
It’s sad to see Green Day sink to the level of such an atrocity that is ¡Uno!.