Although it ’s nothing more than a summing up of previously reported information and some speculation and thoughts from various sources, the article published by NME on Green Day’s “comeback” contains some interesting food for thought. Reading it, I find myself wishing that some predictions will turn out to be truer than others. [The scans are from GDA]

Page 1, Page2, Page 3, Page 4.

I love what Ben Myers says: “I think they may retreat into something less commercial. They seem like a band that are sometimes uncomfortable with being a big stadium rock act.” I suppose it’s purely selfish to hope that they will do something quieter, put out an album that won’t make such a huge splash, but being a fan of a hugely popular band like Green Day can be exhausting. Even a simple task like buying tickets to see them play becomes an ordeal fraught with anxiety, because if you’re not exactly on the ball the show will be sold out in seconds. But I also love the idea of the band getting closer to its roots, or even creating entirely new and unexpected shoots, both of which they have been doing in so many ways, with a seemingly inexhaustible resourcefulness for reinventing their relationship to their music and their public. I don’t know if it would be possible to carry over some of the playfulness and coyness of the Foxboro Hot Tubs, both in terms of the music itself and how it was released, or the unassuming humility of putting on intimate pub shows with Pinhead Gunpowder with very little publicity, to something that has the actual Green Day name on it, but it would be lovely. At least it would be lovely to me, and probably to some of you reading this, but Green Day is many things to many people, and they’re a constant moving target: you can’t pin them down to being any one thing.

It may be frustrating to me, and maybe to some of you, to read the complaints of people who don’t want to hear about the Foxboro Hot Tubs because they want their Green Day dammit! Personally, I love that they’re doing the Foxboro Hot Tubs. But I’m just as guilty of wanting Green Day to be what I want and have come to expect, and just as ornery in being unwilling to give up my own perception of what I think the band is best at. Lucky for us, they don’t give a shit about conforming to anyone’s expectations — mine, yours, or anyone else’s — so they keep doing their thing, and it’s always great.

Personally, what I love most about Green Day, other than their ability to write great tunes, of course — I don’t think anyone who is a fan would disagree with that — is the statement that NME closes the article with: their “talent for cutting through bullshit.” It’s not unique to Green Day: bullshit detection is one of the cornerstones of punk rock, but I was mostly unfamiliar with punk rock when I first heard Green Day, and their unwavering honesty and rejection of falsehood and pretense was the clearest sign I got from them, and it was like a blast of air that cut through so much of the confusion that is created by the clamor of voices in our culture vying for attention, from advertising to politics to media spin.

Which is why I welcomed the overt political content of songs like American Idiot and Holiday. To me, they are a natural part of Green Day’s passion for exposing falsehood and spin, and telling the truth as they see it in a way that is blunt and forthright, as well as artistically and musically elegant. I don’t see it as any kind of departure from their passion for being honest and airing their strongest feelings, whether they’re singing about the state of the world or their own state of mind. NME continues the debate, which I find tiresome, on whether their next album will be “political.” To me, everything they have done has been political. Telling the truth is a political act. Refusing to lie, even when it means admitting your own vulnerabilities so others can see that they are not alone with their confusion, is in itself liberating and subversive. And writing songs about the things that strongly affect you necessarily includes openly political themes among the many options available, if you’re at all conscious of the world around you, as well as other, more subtle and personal themes.

I suppose it’s not surprising for a major music magazine to see everything in terms of trends, but NME writes about the end of the Bush era as if that’s the end of worrying about the state of the world. Or, rather, they seem to be implying, which is somewhat insulting to the depth of Green Day’s political statements, that Billie Joe’s beef was with Bush and not with the broader, underlying political issues. “Having found his voice with the neocon-baiting American Idiot, if regime change comes to the US, will Billie Joe be able to channel his voice into something entirely different?” The problems will still be much the same, so there’s no need to worry about where Billie Joe will find material for his passion and outrage. The open question is how will he channel it and what will Green Day’s artistic statement be, not whether or not it will deal openly with global politics, which by itself is a narrow, and to me rather uninteresting, question.

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