The final album by Michael “Meat Loaf” Aday and Jim “Jim Steinman” Steinman arrives bedecked in heraldry. It knows it has to matter. It pulls out all the stops. It brings back Ellen Foley and Karla DeVito. There’s “All Songs by Jim Steinman” glaring off the cover with point-making intensity, with “Desmond Child was taken out back and shot” in small print (wait, it’s not on yours? It’s on mine. Mostly because I added it in Sharpie.). Every work of art might turn out to be your last. Both men clearly sensed—maybe knew—that this was the end.
Even if you agree with producer Todd Rundgren’s view of Bat Out of Hell (Interview Q: “Do you ever put on the record and listen to it?” Todd: “Not much.”), it’s impossible to see the Julie Bell cover art—two figures vs the apocalypse; a giant with his slumped shoulders Atlas-huge and Atlas-weary, and a scrawny brave lion with his hair blowing behind him—without feeling a sting of sadness. What an incredible forty-year partnership these men shared.
And so it is with regret that I pronounce the Braver Than We Are a bin fire. If you love it, you’ll have to love it for both of us.
I knew he was sick. I still wasn’t prepared for how bad Meat Loaf sounds on this record. On Dead Ringer his voice was only worn-out and haggard, here he sounds like Mr Burns. Hearing him mutter and cough and bark through songs is demoralizing experience, turning his glorious last stand into a glorious last sit (amusing witticisms like that are the reason I am known as a “card” at parties), and sucking the panache from lyrics because you can hardly understand what he’s saying.
I am not exaggerating. This is awful. There’s a moment in “Souvenirs” (after “…cold cold night”) that’s just “Guhh-buhhh-gahhh” lip-flap that I couldn’t in a million years decipher without a lyrics sheet, plus a conspicuous cut in the audio where two salvage-job vocal tracks were spliced together. “Only When I Feel” has some of the most horrendous singing I have ever heard on a record (“End-less…payyyyyeen!”). I am just in awe of the fact that *this* was the best recording they could get out of Meat Loaf. *This.*
It doesn’t help that Foley and DeVito still sound fantastic and whenever there’s a duet they just flash-burn him to a skeleton like the Terminator 2 kid clutching the chainlink fence. On “Paradise By the Dashboard Light” Foley was a stronger presence than Meat, but that was a deliberate choice and made sense in a battle-of-the-sexes story where she had the upper hand. On “Going All The Way Is Just The Start” she steals the show from Meat in a way that isn’t planned. She’s singing against a decrepit singer whose vocal range is so limited it’s more like a vocal melee. Of course, it’s not hard to do that when you’re mixed twice as loud. It’s not every day you hear a record where the the backing vocalists are louder than the singer.
Jim Steinman described Meat Loaf’s vocals as “heroic”, which is a courteous way of saying “he’s trying as hard as he can”. But that brings me to a question that I assume I won’t like the answer to: what did Steinman do here, exactly?
Braver *doesn’t sound like a Steinman record*. The bombastic Phil Spector 2.0 loudness and opulence (the wall of sound gilded and plated in titanium) is absent, backup vocals aren’t layered the way Steinman would do it, and so on. Then you see the credits, where Steinman is credited as a “Creative consultant” and think “oh, right”.
Quoting a Jim Steinman message board post from “steven_stuart” (who seems to know what’s up).
It’s basically a Paul Crook production. These days it’s difficult for Jim to actually produce in a studio but he can still produce when he sends Rink [sound engineer Steven Rinkoff – ed] to the studio as his representative. But a while ago Jim said that Rink hasn’t been invited to get involved. It’s Paul Crooks show but Meat will keep mentioning Jim because it’s good for publicity. I am sure that Jim is commenting through emails though. I think Meat said that. But I think this album is going to be more of a Dead Ringer than another BOOH. Although I like Meat a lot, so I hope it works. Especially since it could be his very last album. Meat is one of the great icons of rock. He deserves respect.
The thing Steinman certainly did not do is write tons of new music. Every song on Braver is at least several years old, and much of it is far older. The earliest tracks date back nearly half a century, and were the first he ever wrote.
Song by song:
– “Who Needs The Young” was written in 1968, when Jim was a student at Amherst College. It was composed for *The Dream Engine* (1969) and became “In der Gruft” (“In The Crypt”) for 1997’s *Tanz Der Vampire*.
– “Going All The Way Is Just The Start” is a medley of “Draußen ist Freiheit” (“Outside Is Freedom”) / “Stärker als wir sind” (“Stronger Than We Are”) / “Das Gebet” (“Say A Prayer”) from various versions of *Dance of the Vampires/*Tanz Der Vampire*. Basically, the lead chorus melody (which originally comes from “Sail On Haym” in Steinman’s 1970s play *Little Friend from Front Street*) is “Draußen ist Freiheit”, the “*sometimes it’s the flesh…*” bit is “Stärker als wir sind”, and *”say a prayer…”* is “Das Gebet”. I am a bit uncertain about which segments date from which run of the play.
– “Speaking in Tongues” was (supposedly) written for the 2007 musical adaptation of the 1990 John Waters film Cry-Baby. Information about this is scarce. Jim Steinman claims the bridge was rewritten for this release.
– “Loving You’s a Dirty Job (but Somebody’s Gotta Do It)” is from 1985, and is found on Bonnie Tyler’s 1986 album *Secret Dreams and Forbidden Fire.*
– “Souvenirs” is from the 1973-1974 anti-war play *Souvenirs* (later retitled to *More Than You Deserve*.)
– “Only When I Feel” is apparently part of a larger composition that also spawned “If It Ain’t Broke, Break It”. I believe it was written in 2003, along with Jim Steinman’s other contributions to Suri Krishnamma’s film *Wuthering Heights*.
– “More” is (as all TRUE goths know) from My Chemical Romance’s 2006 album *The Black Parade*
– “Godz” is “The Song of Defencelessness” from Steinman’s 1972 student production of Brecht’s The Good Woman of Szechuan. It was later used in an unfinished conceptual rework of *The Dream Engine* called *Neverland*. “Godz” shares a title with a composition from the 1972 musical *Rhinegold*. This is a musically unrelated piece. It was also performed as “Great Boleros of Fire” (amazing title, also) on the *Bat Out of Hell* tour.
– “Skull Of Your Country” is “Come in the Night” from *The Dream Engine*, where it exists in the libretto as “Invocation and Formation of the Tribe” (and it was also famously reused in Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”).
– “Train of Love” is another The Dream Engine piece, apparently from an attempted 1970 production of the play.
So, that’s a lot of very old songs.
“What else is new?” you might ask. Steinman was always rock’s biggest recycler: his “use every part of the ox” approach extended to melodies, leitmotifs, themes, lyrics, and entire songs, which would appear over and over, in different formats and mediums, decade after decade. Steinman fans enjoy this little easter egg hunt, tracking the evolution of bits of music down through the years. It’s no different to how a painter would work—returning to the same themes over and over, emphasing and de-emphasing certain features, always seeking perfection, never quite getting there.
But the truth is, Steinman worked this way out of practical necessity. He wrote at the speed of molasses dripping down a tree trunk. There’s an extensive list of one-time clients—from Def Leppard to Bonnie Tyler—who ditched him just because they got sick of waiting for the Steinman lightning to strike. Even *Bat Out of Hell II* only has about four new songs.
And yes, it’s fun to notice the changing context of Steinman’s music. (A vivid example is “Who Needs the Young”, which was written by a young man and repurposed by an old one). Few rock composers allow you to see their work flux and mutate in front of the public eye like this. His music could feel almost like a continuous thing: ideas and motifs rippling and resurfacing like flotsam decades later. Anger at the smallmindedness of the Vietnam war turning into anger at smallmindedness in general, and a desire to create the biggest and loudest art possible. A desire to top Phil Spector and Richard Wagner at their own game. A desire to peel off the face of even the blandest, most milquetoast acts (Air Supply, Westlife) and find something braver than they were underneath. An admirable interest in performance as a unifying thread over human history, transcending stylistic trends. Few producers had his ambition, or his hit rate. Steinman was probably the best songwriter to have ever lived at writing in the style he did. When he came up with music, he typically hit it out of the park. But he simply was not productive enough for a mainstream music industry that demands 40-60 minutes of new material every few years, and had to bulk up his catalogue with old music. That’s reality.
It’s also reality that you will not find anything as excellent as “Bad For Good” and “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and “Ravishing” and “Faster Than the Speed of Night” and so on. Instead, you will find covers sung by a man with a very bad voice, plus various very old works from his college-era theater productions that don’t work on an alleged rock album. “Who Needs the Young” is not even a song, it’s a bizarre bit of tin-pan alley slapstick. Was it necessary for the world to hear this? On a Meat Loaf record? This doesn’t feel like Steinman recontextualizing his work for a new audience, new medium, or new interpreter. It feels like “Steinman raking through his trunk for old sheet music to mail to Paul Crook.”
I don’t believe Steinman changed anything much in these songs: most of the alterations would have been Paul Crook’s work. And they were clearly only “changed” to 1) be easier for Meat Loaf to sing and 2) smooth over stylistic deficiencies. For example, “Godz” now has its piano line replaced by a snarling guitar lead over a stroppy martial beat. That’s fun. I don’t hate it. But it’s clearly a producer trying to toughen up a ballad-heavy album with some token Jack Black “meh-tuhhlll” heaviness.
Even if we accept all this, I just don’t find these songs compelling examples of Jim’s craft. “Going All The Way Is Just The Start” is a good song that needed to be great. It occupies the slot that “I’d Do Anything for Love” did, and although energy does build at times, that goddamn crowdkiller of a chorus just hits the song like a shovel to the face, stopping its momentum dead. And I have never particularly loved “Loving You’s A Dirty Job”. In the late 80s Steinman started to lean into AOR blandness that didn’t suit him and overall hasn’t aged that well (“It’s All Coming Back to Me” is another egregious case). “More” has chugging guitar riffs thrown in. Great. It also loses the sparseness that made the original Sisters of Mercy song compelling.
Meat Loaf was always a parody (Todd Rundgren produced Bat out of Hell was because he was sick of hearing Bruce Springsteen on the radio and thought Jim Steinman was making fun of him) that became serious and heartfelt. Here, sadly, it collapses back to parody. Very, very sad to listen to.
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This album is exactly how you want it to be. If you (like me) find the John 5-era Rob Zombie albums a frustrating experience, with Rob’s signature creative vision mired among bland riffs and awkwardly-integrated “experiments”…well, terrible news on that front: John 5 is gone. He left the band to pursue his childhood dream of sitting on a tour bus with three middle-aged millionaires who hate each other, and we wish him the best. But this forced Rob to make a horrible decision…rehire his original guitarist, who co-wrote what many fans would regard as his best material and best solo albums. Oh no, anything but that!
Straight away, Mike Riggs (and returning bassist Blasko) just fix everything that was wrong with the last four or five Rob Zombie records. It’s brutal and direct and immediate and has more energy than a tokamak reactor. The Great Satan has three thoughts in its deranged caveman prefrontal cortex. 1) Keep it short 2) Keep it simple 3) Refer to steps 1 and/or 2 as appropriate. The album ends with its idea of a slow and meditative epic dirge. One that’s three minutes and thirty seconds in length.
This is not a return to the Hellbilly Deluxe sound. If you want tons of samples and loops and electronic textures, that’s not what he’s doing here. But if you want heaviness of the (shall we say) “metal” variety, you are feasting. The opening salvo of “FTW ’84” and “Tarantula” is almost overwhelming in its destructive firepower: staccato riffs are palm-muted out at machine-gun speed and backed with Ginger Fish’s double-bass drumming, something I’ve not heard on a Rob Zombie song in thirty years. . Dare I say it, “Tarantula” even has some slight melodeath influences—those harmonized pitch-bends Riggs plays after the first chorus could be on an At the Gates record. The album’s stripped-down and raw, but bristling with surprising influences. It takes cues from genres and styles that I never thought Rob would go near.
Oh, and there’s punk, too. The Misfits have always been more of an inspiration than a direct influence for RZ, but near the end of the album we get “The Black Scorpion”, an all-out tribute to “Green Hell” and “Skulls” and so on—fast, neck-wrecking moshing under a blaring farfisa organ. It’s really good! As is “Punks and Demons”, a nasty, lo-fi Venom-sounding track with an 80s Slayer riff over the chorus.
“(I’m a) Rock ‘N’ Roller” is a soul-deadened tribute to literally-deadened Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream”. (T-Rex, too. I’ve always suspected that Rob might be a secret Marc Bolan fan: he has the same psychedelic lyrical approach.) It has tense, thundercloud verses. What do ten thousand people sound like to ears ringing with tinnitus? Like nothing. The rockstar is in the masses, but not of the masses. Then the chorus arrives. Or falls on your neck like a guillotine. “That doesn’t sound like fun! Also, probably fatal!” Buddy, you’re in the Spookshow International. Having your head severed by a stainless steel blade is an inconvenience, yes, but not necessarily a fatal one. It’s pretty much the price of admission.
Then there’s the fourth track and possible album standout “Heathen Days”. Propulsive and addictive and fastfastfast, the track just attacks the listener like a demented skeleton and holds up with the best stuff Rob Zombie has ever put on a record. I like the under-the-verse riff, where Riggs picks natural harmonics on the 10th and 12th fret (or something like that). Like, that’s all the sonic diversity I want, you know? I don’t really need bluegrass and chicken-picking and lap-steel slide guitar on a Rob Zombie record. I’m a simple man: just give me a natural harmonic now and then.
The album does lose some energy in its middle stretch: “Sir Lord Acid Wolfman” and “The Devilman” feel like they could be John 5 studio leftovers. They are a bit slow and baggy for my tastes. The former is apparently a pirate character Rob came up with (the patriarch of a Manson family on the high seas). But the closing track “Unclean Animals” is wonderfully eerie. A psychedelic Iron Butterfly freakout that feels like being dead. You’re wandering down a long hallway, maybe some dark woods. You can’t tell whether you’re going to the good place or the bad one, but from the smell of sulfur hanging in the air, it ain’t looking great.
So do we have a bona-fide comeback on our hands? I guess. Rob Zombie has returned. The Great Satan slaps, and I am beyond happy with 80-90% of it. “Who Am I”, asks track 5. For Rob, the answer is self-referential: *this.* I struggle to imagine a Rob Zombie fan who dislikes this. If you are that person, I choose my next words with love and pity: I do not understand you. It might be time for the state to step in and make you comfortable. Music cannot bring you happiness. Perhaps medication will.
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In 2004, George Bush campaigned for re-election. Musicians wrote songs about it. And about about him. “Songs about how he was cool and awesome and doing a great job?” Well, you’d think so but in many cases it was the opposite, actually.
At the time, I was a poster on a gaming forum. I remember watching a 3-page thread erupt overnight about something called American Idiot by Green Day. It was controversial, although few people had a clear grasp on why. A long, annoying “debate” followed—unsullied by the slightest contact of anything resembling a fact—about whether the album was offensive, or to whom it was offensive, or whether *all* Americans were being called idiots, or just *some* Americans, or whether it even mattered, and so on. The band’s name was spelled twelve different ways—I got a kick out of “Green’s Day”.
This was my first (indirect) exposure to protest art and the (non) reaction it usually inspires. I was watching gamers perform rote poses of shock, indignation, and defensiveness they’d seen in others, while clearly not actually caring that much. Many had evidently not heard the album, and were relying on second hand outrage. A provocative gesture had just rocked mass culture: that much was clear. They knew they had to react. But the provocation had no meaning for them.
This aligns with an oft-repeated claim about the Bush years: the kids were fucked. Vast teeming numbers of the young were politically disengaged, if they even cared, they were stuck repeating the talking points of others, mimicking the shadows of outraged adults on Plato’s wall. A friend of mine once said “it’ll suck when they make Boomer-style documentaries about our generational moment—instead of the Beatles and Woodstock, it’ll be about Bush and financial crimes.” He had a point. By 2004, Bush stood revealed as a thousandfold joke, and the case for war was sagging like piss-soaked paper before our eyes. Vietnam 2.0 could and should have produced Counterculture 2.0—an articulate, mobilized, and ultimately successful youth reaction to the war. We could actually top the boomers—we could stop the war before it even began! Wouldn’t that be nuts? Wouldn’t that be crazy?
It was. None of that happened. On the eve of war, a massive protest came and went and achieved nothing. Subsequent ones were much smaller. They also achieved nothing. Soon after, the antiwar movement fizzled out, as though it was a dead carcass and nobody had the energy to keep carrying it forward. Bush did not win in Iraq, but he won against us. Coalition forces would remain in Iraq for the next nine years.
No, nobody would cite any part of the Iraq war as America’s finest hour. And obviously kids are not to blame. But the failure of the protests is particularly depressing to think about. Why did they fail so miserably? What had changed since Vietnam?
Conscription, I guess. The antiwar protests of the 60s and 70s were fueled by the draft: as a service-age man, you couldn’t remain unengaged. Vietnam could easily become your war. In the years following Operation Rolling Thunder, thousands of young men were going overseas and filling coffins, millions more scrambled to secure college deferments, and you were ignorant about Vietnam at your mortal peril. People had to care, because politics (as the cliche goes) cared about them. The defining act of protest became the burning of a draft card.
But active conscription ended in 1973, and the threat of dying in a ditch in Buôn Ma Thuột disappeared. Youth vote turnout collapsed. Throughout the 1960s, the youth vote turnout stood at around ~35% for congressional elections. It dropped nearly ten percentage points in 1974, and continued to fall from there. War in foreign countries became an increasingly abstract thing—I remember the joke about Iraq was that America couldn’t find the country they were invading on a map. A decades-long dumbening process had rippled like an earthquake through Gen X: they’d dropped out, but had failed to turn on or tune in.
(Another thing: the Vietnam war escalated over many years, and the protests slowly snowballed to match it. Organizers like SANE and the Young Socialist Alliance received years of runway with which to build networks, scale up logistic capacity, and learn valuable lessons about putting bodies in front of gears. By contrast, the Iraq protests were rapidly-organized and front-loaded in attendance: their massive initial size proved unsustainable. After a gigantic protest on 15 February 2003, numbers fell off a cliff. It didn’t help that the initial stage of the invasion went really well, with the Coalition taking Baghdad after three weeks. Could it be that things would work out, after all? No. It couldn’t.)
And by 2003-2004, the internet was maturing into its current form: a ruiner of everything. It cheapened the value of protest art and satire, making rebellious gestures easy and meaningless. There’s only about six different jokes you can make about Bush, and if you had a 56k modem, you too could hear them repeated a dozen times a day. It got to the point where I just didn’t want to hear anything at all about Iraq or war or US politics. It just seemed like a radio tuned to static: with no signal and no meaning poking through the hiss. The Vietnam protests benefited from this lack of an omnipresent scream-machine. One Timothy Leary speech or Mickey Mouse in Vietnam is a rare, valuable artifact. A million is just a sea of noise. The nonstop news cycle around Iraq felt like a dry-run for Trump Derangement Syndrome. If I see Trump’s face on a news story, I click off. I’m sorry. I’ve had enough. His name exists in a numbed-out part of my brain, worn dead through overuse, and has ceased to mean anything. I will talk about American Idiot now.
There are two ways you can look at this record. The first is as a piece of music. On that front, it’s great! I fully listened to American Idiot on a car drive the other day. It has fine, fine, fine songs. Particularly “Holiday” and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” (which I remember hearing before). No complaints there.
I know a guy who was friends with Billie Joe Armstrong growing up, and reports that he’s actually a guitar prodigy who plays the music he plays as a conscious choice. I believe this. There’s all these subtle fingerprints all over the music (and a fussy sense of perfectionist micromanagement), which you hardly notice because of how violent, visceral and blood-drenched Rob Cavallo’s mix is. There is incredible craft on display here. It’s not kids fooling around, it’s smart adults dressed up as kids fooling around. The album is all the better for it. Would that the Iraq war itself had been this thoroughly planned.
But American Idiot is also a protest album. What is it protesting? For that, we turn to the lyrics of its infamous title track:
Overseas, yeah, we tryna stop terrorism
But we still got terrorists here livin’
In the USA, the big CIA
(…)
Why are there pieces of love that don’t belong?
Nations droppin’ bombs
Chemical gases filling lungs of little ones
With ongoing sufferin’ as the youth die young
So ask yourself, is the lovin’ really gone?
(…)
A war is goin’ on, but the reason’s undercover
The truth is kept secret, and swept under the rug
If you never know truth, then you never know love
Actually, those are lyrics to “Where is the Love” by the Black Eyed Peas. Mangement regrets the error. Here are the lyrics to “American Idiot”.
Don’t wanna be an American idiot
One nation controlled by the media
Information age of hysteria
It’s calling out to idiot America
Welcome to a new kind of tension
All across the alienation
Where everything isn’t meant to be okay
Television dreams of tomorrow
We’re not the ones who’re meant to follow
For that’s enough to argue
Okay, what is this song saying? There’s a new kind of tension. Tension over what, though? Is it a good or a bad thing, that people are feeling tension? Is the band for or against said tension? I don’t know.
Lyrically, I was struck by how…unconnected to reality the album seems. It’s just punches slung out in a dark room. Billie Joe never sounds that angry, and never sounds like he’s singing about anything in particular. Yes, I’m sure he was (and is). But the intense clarity of message you get on Vietnam-era protest records (like Phil Ochs) is not present on *American Idiot*. No wonder the gamers on that long-moribund forum were confused. Heard out of context, you’d never guess “American Idiot” was about the 2004 election. In 2016, Billie Joe Armstrong made the song about Trump by changing literally *two words*. For better or for worse, the song was always a cipher.
For me, it’s “worse”. Slamming 3-chord pop punk doesn’t really benefit from subtlety. Fuck abstract interpretation, I wanna know which Coalition-owned IPC pipelines Green Day want their fans to bomb, you get me?
The closest Billie Joe Legweak gets to naming and shaming the guilty is his mention of the “redneck agenda”, plus a “faggot” or two. (I learned while writing this that he is bisexual).
But does this connect with its target? I am unsure. George Bush was not a yee-haw cowbow redneck: he ran on compassionate conservativism. Yes, in February 2004 he supported a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, but also supported civil unions—his views on gay marriage were broadly in line with the mainstream opinion of the Democratic Party (including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton) circa 2004-2008. It’s difficult to find quotes from him on the subject, beyond rote pablum about how the institution of marriage must be respected. It simply wasn’t a major cornerstone of his campaign or his presidency. Certainly not a stick to beat him with on the same scale as, say, the intelligence failure in Iraq.
It’s also striking that American Idiot—for all its anti conservative bombast—is musically as conservative as it gets. Ignore the lyrics: if music could vote, this album voted for Bush and then wore a fake mustache to vote for Bush a second time.
The title track is a shameless Sex Pistols nostalgia-fest: Johnny Rotten’s vocal rhythm (“I don’t wanna holiday in the sun” -> “don’t wanna be an American Idiot”) sung over the main riff of “Pretty Vacant”. It’s followed closely by a song called “Holiday”, just in case the album’s musical forbears aren’t clear.
Which strangely, they aren’t. The album is sold as the force that brought pop punk back to the mainstream, but it actually has a surprising amount of conceptual, rock opera storytelling as well. It’s more of a piece with Meat Loaf and Bruce Springsteen than, say, Blink 182 (let alone DRI or Black Flag). “Jesus of Suburbia” is a collage of musical quotes slashed out with a Bowie knife (I noticed references to “Life on Mars?”, “Time”, and “Moonage Daydream”). You could rebuild the bulk of this album out of 1972-77’s scavenged parts. Is this the voice of the downtrodden youth? The most recent musical reference is to Oasis’s “Wonderwall” in “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”.
To be clear, I have no qualm with conservative music. We should honor and respect the traditions of the past (as said Bush about marriage)…but I have to be honest: Green Day seldom live up to their inspirations, and direct comparison usually does not flatter them.
Green Day are not the Sex Pistols, and the title track’s forced, direct comparison does not flatter them. “American Idiot” is a force to be reckoned with in isolation, but if you’ve heard John Lydon’s glottal-reinforced “ANTI-CHRISSSSTT-UGHH”—with epenthesis *spat out* like a wad of phlegm in his throat—it sounds so square you could play chess on it. Billie Joe Armstrong is certainly no Meat Loaf in the vocal department; and where Jim Steinman really leans his whole ass into Wagnerian rock opera shtick, Green Day seem to lose interest in theirs halfway through. And attempting to imitate Bowie is a contradiction of terms—Bowie’s whole persona was a lifelong spirit-quest to not ever sound like himself.
The album was a success, and largely rescued pop punk from the clearance bin. (It was a runway for My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade in particular, and I remember Sum 41, Good Charlotte and Avril Lavigne also doing solid trade in its wake). I am not sure it takes much courage to be a punk band and strike a generic “fuck the government” pose. Not after The Dixie Chicks and Willie Nelson took their anti-Bush messaging into the lion’s den of the Nashville country music market. But maybe bravery wasn’t the point.
I kept hoping for a more concrete and focused lyric. Instead, they’re more like Mad Libs you fill in with your own anger. (If anything, conspiratorial tropes about media mind control have aged uneasily in the Trump era). These are very much what you’d expect the lyrics of a Bush protest album to sound like, if it were written by 14 year old kids on a videogame forum whose level of cultural engagement was “whats a green day??” It is angry in a way that feels shallow and rote and fill-in-the-blanks.
The charitable read is that Billie Joe wanted to respect the listener’s anger. He didn’t want to crowd out their anger by forcing his own upon them.
The uncharitable read is that he felt that getting too specific would alienate people (across the alienation) and perhaps invite actual censorship. So he played it safe and made a record about confusion and ignorance instead. Which is fair: both are common reactions to war, and not even wrong reactions. How did you first hear about 9/11? Someone came up to me and blurted “A PLANE HIT A BUILDING IN AMERICA AND A MILLION PEOPLE ARE DEAD!” Tally up the carnage of the next decade, and he wasn’t far wrong.
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