Green Day - Boulevard Of Broken Dreams (Reprise)
Lead bawler Billie Joe Armstrong’s latest popcorn-rock antithesis to ‘burb boredom leads him defiantly down a wide avenue with a central, landscaped reservation containing trees and semi-deciduous shrubs, tugging at a haircut ravaged by years of peroxide abuse, and squawking with a maturity that appears to be developing quicker than one can net-publish tablature for the three chord hero.
Green Day is not all about Billie Joe though. He also has an entirely competent backing band. Without undertonist Mike Dirnt (real name Michael Pritchard) and avant-percussionist Tre Cool (real name Frank Edwin Wright III) layering warm rhythms like a benevolent, melodic and inebriated half-sister, Billy Joe would be nothing more than a straight-up, Nobel prize-winning poet. Billie Joe, punk to the core, has rejected poetry as a line of artistic enquiry, but when one burrows into his lyrics we find a depth matched only by the deepest paddling-pool. Not afraid to disagree with himself mid-chorus, the stumbling self-argument of “I walk alone/I walk alone/I walk alone/I walk a.../My shadow's the only one that walks beside me” shines with the confidence of a true bard.
While often Green Day are compared to more accomplished and mature acts such as McFly and Busted, it is to T.S. Eliot that one immediately turns. Like Eliot, Armstrong’s body of work shows the tribulations of a man discovering Christianity, and like Eliot, Armstrong refuses to compromise with the public or indeed with language itself, following his belief that lyric and song should aim at a representation of the complexities of modern civilization in language and that such representation necessarily leads to difficult, dense music and a slot on MTV Punk’d.
Music is what sets Armstrong apart from Eliot though. Eliot’s Four Quartets, as though addressed direct to Billie Joe, asks “Who is the third who walks always beside you?/When I count, there are only you and I together/But when I look ahead up the white road/There is always another one walking beside you.”
Oh T.S., your poor pathetic banker. Who is the third that walks beside you?
Even you T.S. should know that. It is, of course, none other than the pogo-ing, brat-riffing, derriere-revealing sound of the Green Day juggernaut ploughing across a tree-lined road and into the shop-front they call the Top 40. Shame on you…
Green Day is not all about Billie Joe though. He also has an entirely competent backing band. Without undertonist Mike Dirnt (real name Michael Pritchard) and avant-percussionist Tre Cool (real name Frank Edwin Wright III) layering warm rhythms like a benevolent, melodic and inebriated half-sister, Billy Joe would be nothing more than a straight-up, Nobel prize-winning poet. Billie Joe, punk to the core, has rejected poetry as a line of artistic enquiry, but when one burrows into his lyrics we find a depth matched only by the deepest paddling-pool. Not afraid to disagree with himself mid-chorus, the stumbling self-argument of “I walk alone/I walk alone/I walk alone/I walk a.../My shadow's the only one that walks beside me” shines with the confidence of a true bard.
While often Green Day are compared to more accomplished and mature acts such as McFly and Busted, it is to T.S. Eliot that one immediately turns. Like Eliot, Armstrong’s body of work shows the tribulations of a man discovering Christianity, and like Eliot, Armstrong refuses to compromise with the public or indeed with language itself, following his belief that lyric and song should aim at a representation of the complexities of modern civilization in language and that such representation necessarily leads to difficult, dense music and a slot on MTV Punk’d.
Music is what sets Armstrong apart from Eliot though. Eliot’s Four Quartets, as though addressed direct to Billie Joe, asks “Who is the third who walks always beside you?/When I count, there are only you and I together/But when I look ahead up the white road/There is always another one walking beside you.”
Oh T.S., your poor pathetic banker. Who is the third that walks beside you?
Even you T.S. should know that. It is, of course, none other than the pogo-ing, brat-riffing, derriere-revealing sound of the Green Day juggernaut ploughing across a tree-lined road and into the shop-front they call the Top 40. Shame on you…
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