Monday, March 30, 2009

Is 'Green Day' Really Punk?


You have been warned:

Green Day's album American Idiot has been turned into a musical by fanboy Michael Mayer, who "discovered American Idiot while he was still in the early stages of directing [Tony-award-winning] Spring Awakening, Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater's musical about the pubescent struggles of 19th-century German youth."

Discovered? I think 'assaulted by' is more appropriate.

How do you discover something that is as omnipresent as the sun? We're not talking about some obscure, self-produced punk 45 found at a garage sale--we're talking about a pop album that sold 12 million copies, that played everywhere in the world for what seemed like forever. We're talking about a band that everybody and their parents know about--a Green Day song (Time of Your Life) played over the ending montage to the last Seinfeld episode, for Devil's sake!

As if only to encourage me, Mayer goes one further:

I can only hope this wasn't a thought he had while listening to Mozart, although, sadly, I can't take that for granted at this point.

Get your extremely expensive tickets through Ticketmaster soon, or all your Abercrombie-punk friends will make fun of you until you intentionally overdose on Advil in the suburbs!!!

_

3 comments:

Paz said...

not as funny as

SPIDER MAN THE MUSICAL

matthk said...

Green Day, as much as I like them (esp. the album Dookie) have never, EVER been 'punk'. They're 'Pop-Punk', or 'Indie Pop Punk' at best. And neither are most US bands that have called themselves 'punk' since 1990. Rancid are punk. Stiff Little Fingers are punk.
Early Clash were punk. Generation X were punk. Suicidal Tendencies are STILL punk (among other things).
And as for the bands like Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Goldfinger, Area 7, Smashmouth etc who use a Ska beat but still called themselves punk, they should all use the term 'Skunk', a contraction of Ska-Punk I invented when bands like these started to get airplay. :-)

Goodtime Charlie said...

I agree, which was hopefully communicated through my sarcasm.

Fun trivia fact: until Malcolm McLaren & the Sex Pistols hijacked the term "punk" and made it synonymous with leather, dog collars, mohawks, tattoos, shouting, and political posturing, it was used to describe the 1970s music scene in New York--Velvet Underground, New York Dolls, Iggy & the Stooges, Dead Boys, etc.

If you have not read it already, I highly recommend the book "Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk" for further, fascinating reading on the subject.