DownTuned

21 Guns is a Green Day single that featured on the Transformers 2 soundtrack. It’s hard to imagine that anything could ever live up to a billing that shite, but Green Day give it a damn good try. To put it briefly, Billy Joe Armstrong appears to have just heard Pablo Honey and decided that welding some quiet/loud whinge-rock on to emo-based pop-punk is the Olympian pinnacle of musical endeavour. If you’re 15 or mentally incapacitated, you probably think that sounds just dandy.

It’s this latter point, Green Day’s bizarre affinity with 15 year olds, that really raises 21 Guns from being a common-or-garden puddle of goo to something more problematic.

Green Day’s youthing-it-up has long since crossed passed the point of mid life crisis daftness and is now deep, deep inside the realm of properly fucking creepy.

The problem isn’t just that 15 year-olds listen to Green Day – that’s obviously true of a lot of bands. It’s that Green Day actively and explicitly pander to the mid-teen demographic. Whether it’s Billy Joe Armstrong telling the NME that he plucks his lyrics directly from his sphincter his lyrics come from a ‘dark place’, the ludicrous penchant for eyeliner that increasingly makes him look like a fat drag queen or the use of the alienated teen-goth couple in the video, it all seems disturbingly calculated to appeal to an age group well below the creepiness threshold.

For a band like Green Day, there are basically three options for dealing with the onset of middle age:

1. Ideally, jack it in, get a reasonably paid non-job in some kind of media or ‘creative’ industry and look back and laugh at your younger self.
2. Gradually mature and shed your old sound for something a bit more sophisticated – resulting in either creaky middle age broadsheet-rocking or, occasionally, something quite good.
3. Keep banging out essentially the same album over and over and hope your original fanbase’s nostalgia reserves don’t run dry.

Green Day have made several stuttering attempts at 2, but clearly don’t have the capacity to pull off even a half-arsed ‘mature’ record. The logical thing would then be to attempt 3 and just keep selling remakes of Dookie. Instead, they appear to have gone for a mutant version of 3 where, rather than getting older and acting immature which would be merely undignified, they appear to actually want to be younger and reach a never-never land of eternal teenager-dom. The kind of strategy that worked famously well for Michael Jackson.

It really is rather unpleasant.

Tweet This!