If Green Day can be credited for anything it is their ability to consistently churn out pop machine ooze that’s high quality sound. With a teenage metamorphosis beginning with American Idiot, Green Day embarked on a boring adult crisis. Glimpsing a fading career prior to American Idiot they changed their image and appealed to the dullest of American teenagers with a series of dull concept albums.
Finding solace in their teenage identity, Green Day’s growing middle-age crisis seemed to have abated. With reassurance, however, each album reinforced the lurking presence of an aging crisis. They are a band afraid of age and short on talent. With what ability they do have, they utilize fully. They deftly vomit out catchy and clever pop (not even close to punk) music and do it well.
With their latest series of concept albums reaching the middle of their journey, one wonders if their current artistic approach is viable by releasing a rapid fire series of three albums (wryly titled) Uno, Dos, andTre one month after each other. Uno released in October and displayed a poor attempt at writing developed music. With grainy, burnt-crisp lyrics and motif drenched composition, it did little to deviate from the basic premise of Green Day fare: posturing as a teenager.
Dos fairs little better than Uno did. Promulgated as a garage rock album it was billing itself as something drastically different from Uno. Problematically, Dos barely deviates from absolutely standard corporate production: quality, crisp sound with boring and uninspired lyrical quality. If there is anything to be said about Dos it’s this: it’s a series of rapid, short songs that are a cheap imitation what it claims to be, from a group that’s disenfranchised from the genres they claim to associate with.
The composition of the album is delightfully insipid. Short songs lasting little over three minutes for our ADHD bullet-riddled generation and are full of solos of magnificently bland proportions and an overall album sound that begs a strong question (which will assuredly be addressed later). Each song is handcrafted by the group and displays their lack of in-depth knowledge of music, which in the face of their enormous success is embarrassing and blatantly unsurprising.
Even blander than their success is the lyrical content. Billy Joe’s ineptitude truly shines here as he waxes on about subjects dear to incompetent teenagers. Garbling melodies of similar sounds play over each song that he uses to unpoetically write about stuff. Relationships, love, heartbreak, relationships, love, stuff, Amy Winehouse, love, stuff and sex. This heaping pile of stuff is generously lathered in the most sensual of ways with excessive amounts of useless profanity. This is the kind of profanity where you’re painfully aware that the speaker is trying far too hard to fit in, to posture in a “cool” manner.
We get it Billy Joe: you think you’re hot sauce because teenagers swear too. You think you’re one of the crowd. That they’ll relate and include you. They accept you, maybe, because they’re too stupid and inexperienced to realize how much of a pretender the forty year old in front of them is.
They don’t notice that the duct tape, bandages and other injury and repair related paraphernalia that Green Day is wearing isn’t covering actual injury. Look at the Rolling Stones: they’re a train wreck and deserve the respect that they’ve earned from their fans. Hell, look at any other set of musicians from a variety of genres and look at the legitimate duct tape, bandages, eye patches and whatever else they are wearing. They earned it and lived the life they preached.
Green Day isn’t a train wreck, they barely lived the lifestyle they imitated. Hell, Mother Teresa went harder in the paint than you did. This sad attempt at Van Halen’s triple album begs an all important question: Is it really worth it?
The quality of production is low thus far for both Uno and Dos. For a band that definitively lacks in musical talent, it would behoove them to spend more time crafting each piece of music with all of their candor. They’re too concerned about image and meeting the demands of the demographic for whom them model. They need to feel vindicated to assuage their aging crisis.
If they’re that worried about aging then they don’t need to fret, Dos proves that they still have it.
Despite reaching ripe middle age, Green Day is still snappy and tight. It may help them to slow down as they approach these taxing middle years, as things tend to begin drying up creatively. For now, though, they can rest assured that they can manage to produce bland and universally mainstream appealing pop.
And when they finally run dry, there is always creative lubricant.