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Originally Posted by Aman /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Elementary garbage.
Greenday changed their image, their looks, their sound, and their style, and added a bunch of political agendas, and found themselves at the top of the money-making artists of the music industry. Nothing better than a good producer and promoter to make sub-par musicians and "poets" look brilliant to a huge demographic of stary-eyed young consumers.
Don't call "American Idiot" a work of punk rock. It's not. It's pop music, manufactured by a major record label and its employees to sell the most amount of copies. Down at NYU, the marketing strategy for this particular approach is called the "pseudo-art" campaign. In practice, it's meant to make the consumer feel a false sense of maturity and artistic comprehension upon listening. I wrote an entire thesis on it.
'Revolutionary' works of music come from people who completely reinvent the wheel for music. Believe me, if a pop group did this, the scholars would be up in arms and cheering - many would claim that we'd be entering a musical golden age. In reality, however, this is not so.
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Arm-chair, white tower garbage.
All right, this is going to be my last rebuttal before I go my own way. In the end, I like the music I like, I think what I think, and you feel free to do so yourself.
First of all, it's Green Day, not Greenday. Not to nit-pick, but when the first word you type is the band's name misspelled, you lose credibility. Of course they changed their look, their image and their style - they've been around since 1989. For those keeping track at home, that's rounding on 18 years now. Any band that makes it for more than a couple of years has, to some degree, roll with the punches. You say they're political and money-making, I say listen to
1,039 Smoothed Out Slappy Hours or
Kerplunk...these are DIY albums in every sense of the word punk, and they still contain political elements. And no, they are not as overtly political as
American Idiot, but then again, it is indeed a new direction for them. As for "starry-eyed young consumers," I again refer you to the fact that a huge portion of their fans have been following since
Dookie, so, a good 13 years now, if not from before. People who were old enough to make up the demographics of
Dookie 13 years ago are definitely not "starry-eyed young consumers". As for them being sub-par musicians...well, if you're looking for technical mastery of an instrument, I don't think you should exactly be looking at punk. Try classical music.
American Idiot is punk rock. It also is pop right now. The Beatles were pop. These bands are indeed pop-ular. They are not pop in the sense that pop has become a musical genre in the last couple of decades. Unfortunately, any band that breaks into the mainstream gets labeled with "pop": it happened to the Beatles when they broke rock into the mainstream, it happened with Nirvana when they released
Nevermind and brought alternative music to the mainstream, and now it's happening to Green Day for bringing in the new wave of punk to the mainstream. It doesn't help that their followers are definitely less than able. This is part of where Green Day gets so much of its bad rep - because bands like Blink 182, Simple Plan, Good Charlotte, etc, were derived from the success of Green Day, people automatically assume that Green Day is indeed Blink 182, Simple Plan or Good Charlotte.
As far as revolutionary goes, I still stand by my original thought. Green Day is bringing the new wave of punk to the scene. After the Big Three - the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Ramones - the '80s were dominated by experimental post-punk. Not since the early '80s has a band tried to extend the original punk legacy as successfully as Green Day has. And again, of course they've changed. The music scene today is not what it was in 1977.
I haven't seen any marketing of
American Idiot that goes to any of the ridiculous lengths that you claim. If anything, the marketing around
American Idiot was focused around the 2004 elections and ensuing political disasters, as well as the three singles. And in that respect, yes,
American Idiot does seem bloated. But, as usual, those who do not understand a work of art end up looking at the sky from the bottom of a well.
As far as feeling a false sense of maturity and artistic comprehension, well, the feeling is quite subjective. You could argue that when encoding the album's semiotics in Stuart Hall's sense, the record label pulled from the available discourse to manipulate our emotions. Sure, all rebellion could be manufactured - we can never know. People who listened to the Sex Pistols could feel exactly what the dominant ideology needed them to feel in order to pull that sector of the population within its hegemonic fold. When decoding it, I like to believe that texts, especially works of art, are pluralistic, rather than polysemous. You feel what you feel from the text. I like to believe that 1977 punk is a real rebellion. It would make me sad to think that it was all a farce, and in the end the culture industry impresses the same stamp on everything. So, your thesis believes it's fake, I - the consumer, the listener, and most importantly, the fan - love to believe it's real.
