The reports of punk rock’s resurrection are greatly exaggerated.
“The Trump Administration May Be The Best Thing For The Punk Scene,” blares a BuzzFeed headline. “Trump makes political music great again,” says Agence France-Presse.
If only. The AFP story treats a familiar pop whinery as the avatar of “punk”: “Green Day chanted ‘No Trump! No KKK! No Fascist USA!’ while performing at the nationally televised American Music Awards in November — refreshing a punk slogan which has since been embraced by anti-Trump demonstrators.”
Ah yes, Green Day. The mass-market teenybopper posers of “punk.”
Nothing better represents the impoverishment of modern rock than the obsession with making Green Day into some kind of spokesband for punk’s spirit of rebellion. And nothing better illustrates modern “punk’s” ignorance of its own history.
After some commercial success in the ’90s, Green Day started to fade. Then George W. Bush came along, inspiring the band’s 2004 opus “American Idiot.” It was supposedly a “punk rock opera,” and has since been adapted into a Tony-winning Broadway musical, with a film now likely.
The album itself was a masterpiece — of marketing, infusing the band’s typical mediocre collection of songs with enough anti-Bush agitprop to sell.
And now the band is at it again.
In 2015, Green Day was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In October 2016, the band released “Revolution Radio.” In November came the “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA” performance. This month, Green Day released a video for the single “Troubled Times.” Here is MTV’s Hillary Hughes’ effusive description of the vid:
“The faces of Martin Luther King, Jr., suffragettes, and various men and women speaking out against hatred with ‘NO BORDER WALL!’ and ‘UNITE AGAINST ISLAMOPHOBIA AND WAR!’ signs are abruptly shoved aside to make room for a fanged Donald Trump and the sinister hoods of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Subtle. But this supposed throwback to punk’s salad days misses the point.
As it happens, this year is the 40th anniversary of punk’s big breakout year. And there are lessons the members of Green Day either never learned or have forgotten.
Such as: Punk rock is a lot more than palm-muted power chords and spiky hair.
The modern punk scene, and Green Day in particular, needs to look back to the Sex Pistols’ massively influential 1977 release, “Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols.”
Pistols frontman John Lydon (then going by “Johnny Rotten”) was, like most punks, a dedicated foe of political correctness. The song “God Save the Queen,” a snarling, subversive anthem of the fed-up British working class, earned denunciations and threats from Parliament.
And “Bodies” is a shockingly graphic critique of abortion:
“Dragged on a table in factory, illegitimate place to be / In a packet in a lavatory, die little baby screaming / Body screaming f- - - - -g bloody mess / Not an animal, it’s an abortion.”
In defending the lyrics to Spin magazine in 2007, Lydon said: “I don’t think there’s a clearer song about the pain of abortion. The juxtaposition of all those different psychic things in your head and all the confusion, the anger, the frustration, you have to capture in those words.”
Another song on the record, “Problems,” is about personal responsibility. “Holidays in the Sun” is a sendup of the misery tourists who live comfortably in the West but enjoy vacationing in socialist dystopias in order to feel (as we would say today) “woke.”
Political correctness, Lydon said in 2013, is a tactic used by the powerful against the powerless “to stifle our freedom of thought.” He believes the concept of racism as it’s used by the societal elite is a middle-class invention: The “biggest racist statement is when the Hampstead elite invite a ‘person of colour’ to a dinner party; that condescending tone that goes with that. That’s racism.”
Green Day, meanwhile, carries the torch of political correctness. “The biggest Trump supporters are uneducated white working-class people,” frontman Billie Joe Armstrong told NME in November. “And that’s the problem right there.”
He elaborated in an interview with Patrick Clarke of The Quietus: “I think voting for Trump was the biggest revenge therapy I’ve ever seen in my life . . . You’re just as racist as the person that’s running if you’re letting racism slide.”
So, what does Lydon think of Green Day? “I’ve never been a fan of them, I just don’t understand it,” he told Rolling Stone after Green Day’s Hall of Fame honor. “I think it’s kind of a tinny, two-bob version of something that was far deeper and carried more significance.”
Indeed. Green Day represents the stifling and suffocating groupthink of our age. Maybe that’s merely an accurate reflection of the culture. But it sure ain’t punk.