Green Day: What Happened?

I still remember the first time I heard Green Day. I must have been about 10/11, young anyway, and I was going through that period of adolesence in which one first becomes 'musically aware'; a strange time when you have an unexplainable yearning to move beyond the tapes your parents play in your car and the fare at school discos. It was a summer afternoon and I was in the 2nd floor of a Virgin megastore in Glasgow, wandering listlessly among punk/metal/alternative section. I say listlessly because I wasn't sure what it was I was looking for. I didn't know what type of music I was into but I did know that my current CD collection (a best of the Beatles, "Smurfs go Pop", an Iron Maiden CD and a never-listened to Chillis album) was inadequate, I knew that I wanted to like stuff that no-one else liked and I knew that I hated 'soft' music.

I picked up the album I did becuase I'd seen an older guy wearing a Green Day t-shirt at school once. I'd never heard any of their music, I didn't even know what dookie meant. Anway, I took it over to the sample headphones section, put the barcode under the red light and pressed play.

For the first couple of tunes I couldn't believe it. I honestly couldn't believe it. Just how...words escape me. I couldn't believe just how fucking good it was. I fucking loved it. Short, fast, very loud and definately not soft, each song was better than the last one. This was it, I decided, this was fucking it, this is what I liked, this was my music.

I bought the CD, and of course I got every other one. And I loved them. The bombast of 'Dookie' to the charming Gillman Street innocence of "1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hour", the aspirational 'Kerplunk', "Nimrod" with its easy, focused intensity that belied a subime confindence and the joyous resignation of "Insomniac", it was all Green Day and it was all great. I even thought "Warning" was a good album.

And then they released "American Idiot". What happened? Where was the modesty, the austerity and pop sensibility that had made them endlessly listenable? 9-minute multi-part epics do little but bore. What happened to the ease, the grace and the swagger that was central to Green Day's charm? Before every song, no matter how much work had actually gone into it, sounded like it had been thought up during a jam on a lazy Calfornian Sunday afternoon, they had sunshine in them. Now, it sounds like they were written to schedule during a 9-5. And what in the name of God was going on with the lyrics? Billie-Joe was the best when he wrote about what he knew, moving into politics leaves him sounding like an idiot (Pulverise the Eiffel Towers/That criticise your government) It wasn't like they took a risk with this approach, taking to pot-shots at Bush to an audience of punk fans is singing to the choir in a very obvious way. There's precious little joy in this album and, for all the tempos, a surprising lack of exuberance. It was Green Day with a bad cold.

Also, they just did a song with U2. U-fucking-2. On this last point all I can muster is what the fuck?

What happened? Where did my favourite band go? What the hell were they thinking? Are they ever coming back?