Father of All...
“Rock ’n’ roll has become so tame,” Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong told Apple Music in late 2019, just after unveiling “Father of All…,” the opening track and semi-titular single on his punk outfit’s 13th full-length. “A lot of rock acts are always trying to look for the feel-good song of the year. I think rock music should make you feel bad.” The irony was that the Motown-inspired “Father of All…”—all handclaps, blistering guitars, and Armstrong singing in an unrecognizable falsetto—was nothing if not feel-good. Green Day has become a cross-generational punk band by pairing bright, unshakable melodies with thoughts on death, war, anxiety, insomnia, masturbation, the fall of empires, masturbation, and so on. Imagine how they’d respond to the Trump era. *Father of All...* finds them at their most succinct, clocking in at just 26 minutes—less than it’d take you to listen to “Jesus of Suburbia” just three times. (“I realized I hate long songs,” Armstrong said.) Though 2004’s *American Idiot* is channeled in spirit—its iconic album art is referenced on the cover here, just behind the unicorn puking up a rainbow—Green Day trades operatics for dystopian jukebox fare. There are slightly ominous calls to the dance floor (“Meet Me on the Roof”) and tales of love gone violent (“Stab You in the Heart”) and Springsteenian scenes of crumbling cities, each gifted the natural bounce of an early rock ’n’ roll or R&B single. “Oh Yeah!”—itself a psychedelic skewering of social media addiction and American gun violence—lifts its opening notes from Joan Jett’s 1981 take on now-disgraced glam artist Gary Glitter’s “Do You Wanna Touch Me?” It feels highly intentional—a provocation wrapped up in a catchy riff. “There’s a lot of depression, but with a sense of humor,” Armstrong said of the record’s balance between light and dark. “I think we live in just a time of complete and total chaos—or else we’ve always been, but now it’s turned up to Trump. So it’s just trying to reflect what’s going on. And it’s not really writing political songs, but just writing the shit that you see every day.”
The pop-punk stalwarts resist political commentary in lieu of making the most convincingly carefree Green Day record of the new millennium.
The political punks – shock horror! – eschew the politics and have a good old knees-up on their raucous 13th album 'Father Of All Motherfuckers'
Following a chaotic sprawl of messy concept albums in 2012, Green Day returned to form in 2016 with the serviceable Revolution Radio.
What the hell are Green Day doing? The ugly-ass cover; the unnecessary profanity in the title; the ridiculously short runtime (26 minute...
Billie Joe Armstrong is 47 years old. When he turned 18, George H. W. Bush was the president, the Internet was not widely used, and the number one song in the U.S. was "How Am I Supposed to Live Without You?" by Michael Bolton.
In 1994 Green Day seemingly blasted out of nowhere with an explosion of guitars coupled with disenfranchised lyrics that helped make a generation of
Green Day have been struggling to stay relevant, necessary, and exciting for at least a decade.
Green Day - Father of All Motherfuckers review: My downward spiral, oh yeah
The Californian punk trio embrace rock'n'roll as they reach their teens. Album review by Barney Harsent