Green Day (Music Group)

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares149 Views

    ‘American Idiot,’ Reborn in L.A. With American Sign Language

    by

    Inside the Mark Taper Forum in downtown Los Angeles on a recent Wednesday, the air was saturated with stage fog and preshow jitters. The first performance of a revival of Green Day’s “American Idiot” was just hours away, and the choreographer Jennifer Weber had some final instructions for the cast members, who were wearing their costumes — combat boots, eyeliner, enough artfully ripped jeans to fill a Hot Topic — while they ran through dance movements onstage. Weber, microphone in hand, sang the song “Homecoming” as she demonstrated choreography:“What the hell’s your name?/What’s your pleasure, what is your pain?”An American Sign Language interpreter, Maria Cardoza, stood alongside the actors, signing Weber’s directions. At one point, Colin Analco, the show’s ASL choreographer, was slipped a small flashlight to illuminate Cardoza’s signing motions under the din of the fog and ambient lights. Weber kept singing, then started counting the beats:“‘Blew his brains out’ … one! … two! … three! …”Around the theater, about a dozen other conversations, some in spoken English and some in sign language, were happening among the cast and crew. Their show is the latest interpretation of a set of songs that have had many lives: After all, “American Idiot” is many things. It’s an album that monopolized alternative radio in 2004, but also a present-day staple of nostalgic streaming playlists. It’s a time capsule of Iraq War-era political disillusionment, and a distillation of timeless teenage angst. A musical adaptation of the album debuted in 2009, and made its way to Broadway in 2010. Now, this revival of that show is proving, with gusto, that “American Idiot” can be yet another thing: a near-scientific study of the innumerable ways to give somebody the finger.Landen Gonzales (signer, on the right) and Brady Fritz (singer, on the left) perform an excerpt from “Jesus of Suburbia.”Chad Unger for The New York TimesOr at least how many different ways the human body can be used to convey the emotions behind a raised middle finger. The production, which opened Oct. 9 and is running through Nov. 16, is a collaboration between the nonprofit Center Theater Group and Deaf West Theater, a Tony Award-winning company that stages plays and musicals that blend American Sign Language with spoken English.The cast includes both Deaf and hearing performers. Certain lead characters are played by two people at once — one Deaf actor who primarily communicates using sign language, and one hearing actor who sings and talks in spoken English. It’s a well-established method for producing work for audiences of Deaf and hearing people. Deaf West has specialized in it for decades. But as one might expect, “American Idiot,” a fast-paced, loud pop-punk musical filled with wordplay (“alien nation,” for instance) and four-letter words, presented the artists with some novel challenges.An idiosyncratic musicalBuilt around rock songs that were not written for the stage — among them “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” “Wake Me Up When September Ends” and the title track — the “American Idiot” musical is almost entirely sung through, with little dialogue. Its book was written by Green Day’s frontman, Billie Joe Armstrong, and the Broadway director Michael Mayer. Its story, about three teenage misfits named Johnny, Will and Tunny whose lives diverge, is primarily conveyed through the staging.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Ease Into Fall With 7 Songs for September

      by

      Listen to tracks inspired by this month of transitions and memories from Green Day, Barry White, Fiona Apple and more.Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day, whose “September” song is often misinterpreted.Gabrielle Ravet for The New York TimesDear listeners,In previous installments of this newsletter, I’ve compiled collections of songs about specific months, like June and August. But we’re now entering one that has a particular and persistent hold on the musical imagination (sing it with me now): Sep-tem-ber. This definitely calls for a playlist.Why are there so many songs about September? I think some of it has to do with the musicality of the word itself — its meter, its mouthfeel and the fact that it rhymes with one of the more evocative verbs in the English language: “remember.” That moment when late summer gives way to early fall is also a period of transition, a handy metaphor for growing older and a poignant seasonal reminder that time is indeed passing. Exactly the kind of poetic sentiment out of which countless great songs have emerged.For all the wistfulness that the month inspires, I find it interesting that the song most closely associated with it — Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” — is ecstatic and joyful. It makes prominent use of that September/remember rhyme scheme, but the tone is far from the self-reflective nostalgia of, say, Frank Sinatra’s “The September of My Years” or Green Day’s “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” I wonder if that variation on the theme has something to do with the Earth, Wind & Fire song’s continued popularity. Plenty of tracks about remembering focus on loss. “September,” instead, reminds us that there is an alternative: to celebrate a beloved memory by throwing a party and filling the dance floor in its honor.Naturally, Earth, Wind & Fire kick things off on today’s playlist, which also features more introspective songs from Big Star, Barry White and — a great artist with a seasonably appropriate name — Fiona Apple.Sharpen those freshly purchased No. 2 pencils, pull that favorite sweater out of the back of the closet and press play.Also, if you’re not ready to say goodbye to summer just yet, there’s still time to submit your personal song of the summer for a future Amplifier playlist. Keep those recommendations coming!We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Green Day Comes Around, Celebrating Two Album Anniversaries

      by

      With a raised eyebrow, a wrinkled nose and lips curled into a defiant grin, Billie Joe Armstrong looked wide-eyed into the crowd at Citi Field in Queens on Monday night and mouthed the words “I love you.” Tré Cool sat, blue-haired and snarling, at the drum kit. Mike Dirnt planted his feet firmly in a wide stance, with his bass at his knees.Green Day, the long-running California punk band, opened the full United States leg of its Saviors Tour in New York this week, with a bill featuring contemporaries (Smashing Pumpkins, Rancid) and young upstarts (the Linda Lindas). The tour, supporting the group’s latest album, coincides with the 30th anniversary of its breakout 1994 LP “Dookie” and the 20th anniversary of its acclaimed 2004 release “American Idiot.”Both albums were played in their entirety before a cross-generational crowd that became a pulsing sea of black, red and neon pink. Despite the smothering humidity, there was gelled hair as far as the eye could see. Studded belts sat atop black skinny jeans and red ties adorned black button-down shirts.Green Day’s bassist Mike Dirnt, left, and drummer Tré Cool backstage.Billie Joe Armstrong preparing for the show.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 163 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      21 Savage Holds Off Green Day for a Second Week at No. 1

      by

      The rapper’s latest, “American Dream,” easily outstreamed the veteran pop-punk band’s 14th studio album, “Saviors.”21 Savage, the London-born Atlanta rapper, easily fended off a challenge from Green Day to hold at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart for a second week.“American Dream,” 21 Savage’s latest album, featuring guest spots by Doja Cat, Travis Scott, Lil Durk, Young Thug and others, remains atop the Billboard 200 chart with the equivalent of 78,000 sales in the United States — down 40 percent from its debut — including 103 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate. “American Dream” is the first new title to reach No. 1 on the chart in 2024, after holdovers by Taylor Swift and Morgan Wallen.Green Day’s “Saviors,” the veteran pop-punk stars’ 14th studio LP, opens at No. 4 with the equivalent of 49,000 sales; the majority of that, 39,000, came from traditional album sales, while songs from “Saviors” also garnered about 12 million streams. Green Day’s first appearance on the Billboard album chart was almost exactly 30 years ago: “Dookie,” the band’s breakthrough classic, made its chart debut in February 1994, at No. 127, and eventually rose to No. 2.Also this week, Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” is in second place, Drake’s “For All the Dogs” is No. 3 and Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” is No. 5. More

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Green Day Gets Loud Again on ‘Saviors’

      by

      On “Saviors,” its 14th studio album, the pop-punk trio returns to stadium-sized rock.Praising a return to form is a barbed compliment at best. It implies recent missteps, a decline, the waning of youthful inspiration, the toll of a long career — perhaps all of them at once. It suggests that the sensible way forward is to double back. Still, “Saviors,” Green Day’s new album, is a decisive, even overdetermined return to form.Ever since its beginnings in the late 1980s, Green Day has stayed contentious. Billie Joe Armstrong has sung about personal grievances — including struggles with himself — as well as the ways they intersect with larger political currents, most ambitiously on the band’s 2004 concept album, “American Idiot,” which went on to be adapted into a Broadway musical.The band can still cause a stir. In recent years, Armstrong has been performing the song “American Idiot” by changing the line “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda” to end with “the MAGA agenda” instead. But when he sang that phrase on broadcast TV this past New Year’s Eve, right-wing media seized on the line to raise a fuss.“Saviors” finds contemporary targets. It opens with “The American Dream Is Killing Me,” which goes barreling ahead as Armstrong derides conspiracy theories and anti-immigrant attitudes, touches on homelessness and real-estate exploitation and declares that as a nation, “We are not well.”In “Living in the ’20s,” Armstrong confronts a decade that’s brought supermarket shootings and murder hornets, while in the quick-strummed “Strange Days Are Here to Stay,” he sings about bleak expectations: “I can’t see this ending well/Now that it’s too late.”While Green Day has pushed against power structures, it has honored musical ones. With Armstrong on guitar and vocals, Tré Cool on drums and Mike Dirnt on bass, there has always been a virtuosic neatness behind Green Day’s blare.Green Day arrived as a proud heir to the fast, blunt, tuneful, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes candid punk that the Ramones had formulated in the 1970s. As Green Day’s catalog grew, it became clearer that the band was well aware of generations of guitar bands, from its grunge contemporaries back through Van Halen, Cheap Trick, Boston and Aerosmith to the Who and the Beatles.Green Day invariably delivers precisely arranged songs with clear-cut verses, choruses and bridges. Its 1994 album, “Dookie” — with hits including “Basket Case” and “Welcome to Paradise” — heralded the commercial breakthrough of punk-pop that was simultaneously raucous and high-gloss.“Saviors” trumpets its connections to Green Day’s past. For its international tour this year — to be joined along the way by bands including Smashing Pumpkins, Rancid and the Hives — Green Day has announced it will play all the way through both “Dookie” and “American Idiot,” coinciding with their 30th and 20th anniversaries. Green Day made “Saviors” with Rob Cavallo, the co-producer of both albums, who last worked on Green Day’s three stripped-down 2012 albums “¡Uno!,” “¡Dos!” and “¡Tré!”Green Day’s more recent albums had strained to be different: noisier, murkier and often using all its resources to simulate lo-fi recording. “Saviors,” by contrast, is forthrightly lavish. Guitars and vocals are multi-layered, and the drum sound is gigantic; orchestral arrangements appear out of nowhere. The band proudly blasts again in songs like the standout track, “Dilemma,” in which Armstrong — who entered rehab after an onstage tirade in 2012 — grapples with trying to stay sober. “I don’t want to be a dead man walking,” he proclaims over stadium-shaking guitar chords.“Saviors” revisits the production approach of the so-called “loudness war” of the 1990s and 2000s, when it seemed studios sought to make, as Meat Loaf sang, “everything louder than everything else.” The waveforms of nearly every song on “Saviors” measure as what recording engineers call “brickwalled” — pushed to a constant, flattened peak. On a playlist alongside tracks that include more ups and downs, that loudness is supposed to feel exciting. But on an entire unrelenting, 15-track album, it grows wearing.Perhaps it’s inevitable that on Green Day’s 14th studio album, some of the songs have beats and chord progressions that can feel like retreads. On “Saviors,” the production often strives to offset familiarity with impact. Yet “Father to a Son” — in which an uncertain parent vows to try his best — unmistakably echoes “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” even with an orchestra now supplementing the power chords.For sonic variety, Green Day flaunts its rock scholarship. “Bobby Sox” — with Armstrong singing about the homey comforts he’d offer a girlfriend, a boyfriend or a best friend — is an outright homage to Pixies, exploding from a quiet verse to a crashing chorus. And the depressive but stubborn “Goodnight Adeline” could almost have been an arena march from Oasis.“Saviors” doesn’t hide its craftsmanship or self-consciousness, but they are a means to an end. Green Day is still angry, disgusted, worried and no longer so amused about the state of the world. This time, the band has decided to shout about it.Green Day“Saviors”(Reprise/Warner) More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Why I Keep Listening to Green Day’s ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’

      by

      Sometimes you need an overwrought antidote to the overwhelming events of daily life.When I receive disappointing news, I allow myself to wallow for exactly four minutes and 22 seconds: the length of the 2004 Green Day hit “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” I focus on nothing but my feelings for the duration of the song, which expresses emotion in such cartoonish terms that, listening to it, I can indulge in maudlin self-pity.Green Day was my world’s soundtrack in the early aughts, providing pop-punk angst at mall food courts, graduations and birthday parties. “Boulevard,” from the album “American Idiot,” is an emo power ballad, full of mixed metaphors expressing the privileged blah of being bored and misunderstood in the suburbs of a morally compromised nation. Conceived of as a sort of rock opera, “American Idiot” follows the ups and downs of its protagonist, “Jesus of Suburbia.” As the character’s name might suggest, the entire album operates at a melodramatic pitch, with Jesus encountering adversaries and feeling misunderstood everywhere he turns. “Boulevard” narrates a low point in the hero’s journey. The singer, Billie Joe Armstrong, resembles a musical-theater protagonist when he sings lines like “I’m walking down the line/That divides me somewhere in my mind/On the borderline/Of the edge, and where I walk alone.”When “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” came out, I was 9. It made me feel like a kid from “School of Rock.” I appreciated its intelligibility and, from where I stood, its edge. I was not really into cool music back then. My prized album, which I listened to on my red CD Walkman from Radio Shack, was the soundtrack to the movie “Holes.” I was too cautious to participate when my classmates passed around burned copies of Green Day CDs on the playground at school. One weekend, though, I was delighted to be invited to a slumber party by classmates who did things like get pink streaks in their hair and wear little mesh gloves from Hot Topic. (I myself stuck to a uniform of “Life Is Good” shirts with black stretchy pants in this period; I sometimes wore foam earrings shaped like wedges of cheese to school.) But that night, I felt transgressive. We sang karaoke. We looked at pictures of Pink on the computer. We screamed the lyrics to “Sk8er Boi.” And, ecstatically, we listened to Green Day and Good Charlotte. High on rocking out and being included, I let another girl write the name of one of those two pop-punk bands — I can’t remember which — in huge letters on my arms in black Sharpie. It comforts me to face an operatic version of emotional reality, then to just shake it off and move on.Then I came crashing down. The party was over. I hid my arms in my hoodie when my mom came over to get me. I was embarrassed to reveal that, for a few minutes, I had escaped into a high-velocity version of reality. “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” mimicked the intensity I felt in my angstiest moments; it mirrored a heightened version of my emotional reality back to me. Now, years later, I look back with amusement and even jealousy at the purity of those feelings. So recently, I have found myself drawn anew to the earnest drama of this song. The central premise of “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” is that the character is walking around feeling isolated and bummed for reasons the band leaves vague — the better for the listener to insert her own experience. “I walk alone,” Armstrong sings in overwrought fashion. “My shadow’s the only one that walks beside me.” The lyrics are repetitive, as if trying to blow up the character’s suffering to widescreen proportions. At points, Armstrong sounds so swollen with emotion that he cuts himself off in the middle of a line. The dour F minor key and abrasive strumming give the gift of broad, atmospheric ennui to those who want to stew. Such dramatic displays of emotion are, of course, frowned upon in daily life. But overwhelming events continue apace even as the range of acceptable ways to react shrinks. In that context, it is validating to access and embrace high drama, even if only for a few minutes, in response to even minor provocations. I am not walking along the song’s proverbial boulevard of broken dreams, I realize. No — someone just failed to text me back. It comforts me to face an operatic version of emotional reality, then to just shake it off and move on. Listening to the song, I enter a world where people scream what they mean and am transported back to the simpler emotional state of my stretchy-pants days. This summer, I was standing on a subway platform heading uptown when I received an expected but still deflating rejection email from an editor. I had worked hard on my pitch and secretly nursed the fantasy that my story idea would be accepted. So when she very kindly told me it could not be, I felt my face get hot and my stomach sink in disappointment. But instead of bursting into tears, I popped in my AirPods and played “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” When the train pulled up, I sat down. I tapped into the childhood bluntness of feeling misunderstood, and by the time the fourth minute rolled around, I laughed. When I got to 96th Street, I felt fine. I met my parents for dinner.Much of my youthful angst has dissolved as I’ve aged, and that has been on the whole a positive and appropriate development. But in times when I feel swells of disquietude, I don’t try to suppress them. I honor them, ever so briefly. For just over four minutes, I walk alone on a lonely road. Then when it’s over, I remember the people around me and move on. More