October 15, 2008

Green Day have recently announced that they’ll be enlisting the help of Butch Vig to produce their next album, which is due out next year.

Really? Another album?

It’s times like this that you wish bands knew when to quit. If only they could see the world from our eyes, and more specifically a fan’s eyes, then they would see that American Idiot was the time to lower the curtains.

I can’t help but picture the new album as a tragic whirlwind of label-driven fanfare that will involve three heavily weathered dudes pulling a tired, fat old hare out of a hat as their once-adoring fan base look on in relative disinterest as it limbs languidly about, stopping to gnaw on itself occasionally.

Green Day were THE SHIT in my day. Dookie was the pop punk album of our generation and subsequent releases Insomniac and Nimrod though increasingly lightweight were still stunning. Warning paired with my own gradual maturation was a bit less exciting but then there was American Idiot, the (admittedly fantastic) ‘punk rock opera’.

With a number one Billboard debut, one Grammy for Best Rock Album and Record Of The Year, seven MTV Music Awards, a record-breaking sixteen weeks at number one for Boulevard of Broken Dreams, a cameo in The Simpsons Movie and one phenomenally successful arena world tour (they sold out Telstra Dome for God’s sake) to their name, I’d picked a serene and well-timed retirement was on the horizon.

It’s not that I doubt they’ll be able to produce some neat pop rock packages especially with mastermind Butch Vig at the helm, but if I hear the embodiment of my mid-teen rebellion, unbridled lust for music and discovery of punk rock littering the Triple M airwaves, television, advertising at every turn I may just cry.