Monday, May 25, 2009

ANOTHER TURNING POINT, A FORK STUCK IN THE ROAD: I've never linked to my friend Howie Klein here before -- as most of his blogging these days is political, which is the context in which we know each other -- but I dropped him a line tonight to thank him for his previously-unknown-to-me role in Wilco's album Being There back when he ran Reprise Records, and he pointed me towards his rave review today of Green Day's latest, and it's worth a moment of our time.

He calls 21st Century Breakdown "in some ways it's the band's best ever, their most mature, the fulfillment of all the promise they've always had. It's the best record of the year so far, and possibly the best of the new decade. There are no weak cuts." And then, after much talk about the state of Warner Music as a corporate concern, he reprints this recent quote from lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong regarding the band's ambition:
"Maybe that's the reason most people don't go for it," he says. "You can scare yourself with ambition-- having the audacity to want to be as good as John Lennon or Paul McCartney or Joe Strummer. There has been so much great s--- before me I feel like a student: Who the f--- do I think I am."

"But you have to battle past that," he insists in his rapid fire punk chirp. "It's the people who are overconfident who are the ones putting out the biggest piles of s---. If you're at that place where you're working hard but don't feel like you know what you're doing anymore,then you're on to something."
Part of what has always drawn me towards U2, and made bands like Oasis, Smashing Pumpkins and Public Enemy so attractive in their respective heydays, was that level of ambition and audacity. Each band believed (and U2 always believes) in its obligation to capture and dominate the cultural moment with something bold and big.

And now, for the second straight album, Green Day apparently has attempted the same -- and through punk, of all things. I once called Green Day "the Jim Edmonds of rock and roll" (Kingsley said they were the Curt Schilling of rock) to acknowledge what appeared to be a late-career leap from Pretty Good to HOF-level, but this doesn't feel like late career any more; these guys are all my age, and they're not close to done. I'm excited to download 21st Century Breakdown; we're due for a little Greatness again, aren't we?

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