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Again just shows how subjective this all is. American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown are my absolute favourites of their albums.

Yeah, they very much started “using the revolution to sell their band” while masquerading as using their band to sell the revolution. Bush was in office and they literally changed their clothes and their sound to…capitalize on it. They became pop punk, whereas before they had found an organic sound that landed somewhere between punk and more traditional “rock.” I mean, dookie was a masterpiece that entirely captured the landscape—lightning in a bottle. And then everything that came after was still pretty good for a few years. But like a tv writers room that starts to lose the thread and starts writing a show that resembles the show that came before, like a copy of a copy, the quality starts suffering.

I haven’t listened to any Green Day since Warning. But you can very easily track the progression from their punk roots in (two thousand something) smoothed out slappy hours and kerplunk!, to a slightly more polished (mixed in a little grunge/rock) in dookie, (Slight stumble/“sophomore slump” at insomniac), picked up the thread at nimrod…and then the new millennium brought warning and it was sort of the beginning of the end.

Now, this is me remembering the band’s trajectory as I experienced it growing up. Dookie was my first tape, the first time I ever said the word “fuck” was because we showed our babysitter the secret song at the end and I didn’t understand, so I repeated it, they were my favorite band since I could have a favorite band. But I grew into adolescence and they…gave up. They tried to stay relevant and their quality took a nosedive. I mean, there was also a story of young kids who made it big, got addicted to drugs, and cleaned their act up as they started families and just became middle aged rich guys. So, a capitalist success story. But a typical punk/art/music failing, in my eyes. But that’s what capitalism does to art. Chews it up and spits it out.