10/2/2009
Written By: Kate Foley
Category: Entertainment  
School(s): Ames  

Do you know your enemy?” These lines are the theme of the new Green Day album, 21st Century Breakdown. The eighth CD by punk-rock legends Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool is as epic as their last album, the 2004 multi-platinum American Idiot. After much anticipation, the trio’s latest CD hit music store shelves on May 15 and in less than two months it had already sold over 600 thousand copies.

21st Century Breakdown follows the same rock-opera style as American Idiot. The album is divided into three acts:  “Heroes and Cons”, “Charlatans and Saints”, and “Horseshoes and Handgrenades”. The acts follow the story of two characters, Christian and Gloria, who are trapped in the “modern age”. Christian (who resembles the main character in American Idiot) is a troublemaker with a vendetta against the government. “I’m a hater/ and a traitor/ in a pair of Chuck Taylors” he rants in the hell-raiser’s anthem “Christian’s Inferno”. Christian seems to echo the voice of Green Day’s earlier music, and can be compared to songs like “Minority” (Warning) and “Jaded” (Insomniac). In fact, Armstrong stated that many of Christian’s first-person narratives are based on his own personal life experiences.

Gloria is a lower-class girl who fights to overcome her own demons and social status. She falls in love with Christian, and finds a shred of hope in trying to save him as well as herself. “Viva la Gloria!” describes her character as “the saint of all the sinners”. Together they face the obstacles created by a distorted world full of rage and chaos.

The album closes with the song “See the Light”, in which both characters make one last effort to “know what’s worth the fight”. The album compares the state of the nation with the lives of these two anti-heroes, and how “the enemy” has become part of our society, unrecognized by those who attempt to fight it. The album also clings to the idea of “static noise”, that the messages invading society are corrupt. Armstrong’s lyrics seem to beg for deliverance from the static age and the resulting “mass hysteria”.

In a time where America is faced by the election of a new president, 21st Century Breakdown takes a strong, critical look at the state of our civilization. This strategy is very similar to the Bush Administration-bashing that fueled American Idiot. With over an hour of hard-hitting politico, one would think this album is trying to follow in American Idiot’s footsteps as the next “Album of the Year”. However, the tone of this new CD seems to fuse the Green Day from the 90s with the Green Day of today (which any fan will agree is a big difference). It takes their early punk-rock ideas of anti-establishment and combines it with the strength of the band’s new rock-opera structure.