Love, Bacardi, Green Day

I’ve spent the last month trying to figure out why people like U2—asking everyone within earshot if threatened with expedited ejection from this mortal coil could they sing any of their 234 songs for me. Results varied. I altered my experiment over time—no, not the chorus which is just the title, give me a verse, a melody—and according to everyone this bit has gone on way too long, much like any U2 song. I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. By now, jokes about U2’s end-credits-to-a-stealth-Christian-movie music are banal as The Edge’s effects pedal nonsense, and yet their legacy is apparently unshakeable. In reading every word of the band’s Wikipedia pages, I was devastated to find the frontman of my U2 quoted at length: Billie Joe Armstrong.

Bono, he says, “[is] a physical singer, like the leader of a gospel choir, and he gets lost in the melodic moment. He goes to a place outside himself, especially in front of an audience, when he hits those high notes… [He’s] not afraid to go beyond what he's capable of". Unfortunately, BJA is correct. But we’re not talking about U2.

This is probably not also an accurate description of Green Day, whose best work is instantly recognizable and tends to stay inside the lines they inscribed for themselves: the sound of a wedding cake drop-kicked in the parking lot by your shithead younger brother. However. As a lifelong devotee to a band whose music primarily soundtracks Hot Topic and early YouTube AMVs, I can’t help but enjoy some of their reaches.

I love 21st Century Breakdown, their 2009 version of American Idiot that would never, could never, and will never live up to its predecessor, despite clocking in at 70 minutes—13 minutes longer that AI and about 30 minutes longer than anyone wanted. It is an audition tape for a Broadway musical that inexplicably worked. There is a good album hidden inside the 18 song smorgasbord here. Of these 18, I imagine few would pick out “Peacemaker” as worth saving. According to setlist dot fm, it is one of Green Day’s least played songs, with only 6 performances on record, the fewest of any 21CB song. They’ve played “Fuck Time” live twice as often, a song that made sex so uncool the birthrate in America dropped after its release [citation needed]. Bassist Mike Dirnt says that Green Day is like sex or pizza—even when it’s bad it’s still good. And as anyone who has had bad sex or bad pizza or listened to the entirety of Uno, Dos, Tre!, can tell you: that is not true.

What I enjoy most about “Peacemaker” is how it does not sound like a Green Day song—at least until BJA trumpets his blasé whine, but even then, he’s trying something a little different. The way he rolls the r’s on “serenade” is essentially the entire inspiration for this essay. The band forsakes their power-chord comfort zone for some “Knights of Cydonia” drones. BJA doesn’t make any ham-fisted similes, opting instead for something, while short of wordplay, that remains playful and not so self-serious as the rest of the album.

It sounds like a sundown shootout. A telenovela of a song, all sneering high stakes revenge and sex and revenge sex. The flamenco strumming, Tre Cool hitting that ride cymbal like a church bell, the bated breath pause on the outro that stretches for three full seconds. I can’t help but think BJA loves that “serenade” shares half its centaur with “grenade”, how he plucks the first two syllables like a pin, let’s the last one cook, til you’re sure it'll explode in his hands. (Insane to me that this song wasn’t deployed live more often, if for nothing else we know BJA looooves the drag out a dramatic pause.) When the rhythm section rests at 2:12, and the guitar creaks like loose floorboards, it’s the moment before the jumpscare. The villain isn’t dead! It’s all so cinematic. You can picture the band on a stage in the saloon, playing frantically while the bullets fly.

Green Day, like U2 and The Beatles before them, have often toyed with performing as something else: Foxboro Hot Tubs, The Network. It’s the mad desire to reinvent, to be undefined by the past, and escape the fetters of expectation. The past will be obliterated even as it shapes our present—this is one of the lessons haunting American Idiot; we will miss our memories, and we are often helpless to preserve them, and helpless to escape them. Those dual dueling impulses towards severance and the eternal archival are what allow Green Day’s music to endure. Every favorite Green Day song is tied to the memory of escape—a stay-home-from-school smoke session taking in the acid-inspired bassline of “Longview”, a late-night sneakout tear through the town under the auspices of “Holiday”, a high school graduation where they played “Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)”. Green Day will forever be defined by their highpoints, and the rest forgotten, forgiven, because of what their music meant to us at a time when we were more nakedly vulnerable. We still hurt and hold grudges, but the pains of adulthood are so boring. Remember when heartache and hedonism had the color of new? The past is no better, we only know it better.

“Peacemaker” has no legacy in the Green Day hagiography, both because it is too different from what makes Green Day so beloved, and because it isn’t different enough to standout as truly experimental. To bring back around BJA’s hyperbolic assessment of Bono, the pop-punk princes do not go beyond what they are capable of here. They do, however, deliver something to which their choir will happily sing along; it’s catchy, and as always the delivery demands devotion. We wish we could be as earnest and apathetic a bard as BJA, and graft his groans onto our own for the sake of self-preservation. Look here: this is someone who gets it. Someone who makes it look easy. Like the imagined events in the paragraph above, Green Day’s music fills the space between shared suburban recollection. We are not all that unique, nor are the songs we can’t help loving. I have to assume U2 devotees feel something akin.

In the case of “Peacemaker”, it’s three men at the height of their musical abilities (a low ceiling some critics might condemn) making a movie at home with all the production and power money and fame can offer. It’s the thesis project of your film-school roommate whose dad is a producer in Hollywood, another aimless noir knockoff genuflecting at Tarantino and Brando and landing somewhere closer to Tommy Wiseau. But like “Love, Bacardi, Boston”, it has its own prurient charm. I mean, who doesn’t want to dress up as someone else from time to time? Imagine a life better understood through lights, camera, action, where everything is important, where the heroes and villains are only acting, and in the end, they stand up, dust themselves off, wash the spaghetti western red sauce from their clothes.

Y’all ever seen Green Day live? Shit rules. What’s the first Green Day song you remember? Can you sing me a U2 song right now? I’ll venmo you $5 for an unrehearsed, unaided, acapella performance of a full minute of any of their songs.