I was convinced to listen to Green Day's newest album, "American Idiot" on the way home from a band trip and kept an open mind while it blasted through the bus's speaker system.
The end result? These guys aren't anything special. Like Aerosmith, they suffer from overhype when in reality none of the band members are really talented at all. Musically, it is a complete bore. My friend and I were listening for a while, then started insulting it. The fact that it's not classic rock doesn't mean it can't be good, but the fact remains that this music is so boring that it's nothing to listen to at all, and after a while we tuned it out without knowing it. The backround noise we were hearing later on, we realized, was supposed to be music:
1) Extremely predictable chord progressions. Anyone with musical talent could write this. Not only are the chord progressions dumb and predictable, they're very repetitive repetitive repetitive. Seriously, these songs may look like they're six minutes on music but in reality it's a minute of music repeated over and over again.
2) Lack of guitar solos. You must first understand that Green Day doesn't follow the rules, or heck, common sense, of music. These songs build up and build up time after time again. My friend and I were like "all right, guitar solo time!!" about 5,000 times only to be completely let down as the song builds up to... nothing. They just plunge back into their boring chord progression and lyrics. I'm guessing the guitar player lacks the talent to do a proper guitar solo, so they just don't have one. Heck, they don't have any drum solos or anything else interesting either, contributing to the boring factor.
3) Lack of variation. There's no progressiveness here at all. Don't get me wrong, though my favorite music is progressive, the majority of my music is verse/chorus (or whatever you would call this) like this. Still, most of these somgs have SOMETHING that changes to keep them interesting. There's nothing keeping these songs going. Whereas you could get bored with these songs after five "listens" as I call them, it takes that many listens before you can ever comprehend everything in other songs. There is almost nothing up and down about these songs, which means NO EARGASMS whatsoever.
4) Annoying singing. My God. Just listen to these guys. Bob Dylan's voice sucks, probably more than this dude, but at least he doesn't have that gay sing-songey scooping and overshooting sound of this guy. The lyrics are also pretty dumb. I don't care for politics in my music unless it's serious.
All in all, this music will probably please the majority of uneducated people, but for us musicians and people with knowledge of more genres and better, more complex music, this is boring.