The Cult of Green Day - by Vijith

A few weeks ago, I started to get involved in a technology project for a public radio station. I'm kind of a super-dork for mp3s, and I don't think I've owned more than a clock radio or so much as tuned it to an actual station since I got my first PC ten years or so ago, because its primary purpose was to wake me up, and jarring-beep-mode did a better job. Now I use iTunes Alarm for even that. As a result, I had to spend a lot of time thinking about why people still listen to the radio today before we could move forward.

I touched on one of the major reasons in a post from a few weeks back: the expertise of the DJs. Another, or so my pedestrian ass is often told, is that many people don't outfit their cars with MP3 hardware.  I recently discovered -- or, rather, rediscovered -- a third.

As you may already know, Green Day released their latest album on Friday. These days I often feel conflicted about my mid-90's run as a raving teenage alt-rock enthusiast, and I do my best to avoid following my one-time favorites into artistic and commercial oblivion. For example, I kept the faith with Live for far longer than I should have only to eventually realize that they were never going to get it together. I'm a little more cautious now.

But Dookie was close to gospel for me when I was in seventh grade, because it was one of the only albums I had which was consistently awesome enough to listen to all the way through on my old (mono!) portable cassette player. (See also: Smash.) I still didn't have a CD player at that point; I know it's hard to believe, but there was a time when I was what you might call a late adopter. Home stereo issues notwithstanding, though, I'm not alone here; this is a sentiment I've heard echoed by pretty much every kid within about five years of my own age who grew up in the suburbs. That album is definitely one of my generation's major shared cultural reference points.

Ordinarily, I'd still have been able to keep any potential enthusiasm at bay and instead spend my time with something hipper, artsier, or more intellectually rewarding. But man, the advance reviews for this thing were unbelievable. Four and a half stars from Rolling Stone. The Village Voice said it might be the greatest rock album of the last decade. It got the highest score to date in the Twitter music review project 1000 Times Yes.

I didn't have to try too hard to find a copy by legally dubious means before the release date, but for some reason I suppressed the urge to actually listen to it. I'm glad I did. Instead, I spent about a week listening to their old albums, catching up on all the parts of the back catalog I'd missed, and reading even more advance reviews to stoke my (OK, fine, I'll admit it) excitement.

The album was available for pre-order via the iTunes Music Store in the weeks leading up to its release, which led me to believe that it would actually be made available at midnight on the dot. I finished tangling with the last of the back catalog scraps at 11:59. I checked out the #greenday tag on Twitter a few moments later, and lo and behold, there was a huge spurt of activity. Finally, I had my green light to start listening, and for the first time in quite a while, clicking "Play" didn't feel quite so isolating.

I love the way listening has become so personalized recently, but the mechanics surrounding this album's release reminded me that "personal" is almost diametrically opposed to "social." I wonder if the next generation might lose their shared reference points into the little white earbuds, but I'll leave it at that, because better essays than this one have been already written about that possibility.

And as for the album? Totally a letdown, critics be damned -- it's overproduced, it's Autotuned to death, it's Green Day for My Chemical Romance fans, and it's not at all deserving of the escapade I tried to turn it into. But the escapade was still awesome in its own right, and totally invigorating; if the album didn't live up to the hype, maybe this time that's just because it was some seriously great hype.