Pop has become something that is largely governed by sensations, like tennis.
If you believe that you are going to achieve it and if you make believe - or your label and your marketing campaign manage to make believe - that you are going to achieve it, you will surely achieve it.
Talent, technique and inspiration are secondary to the ability to fabricate a favorable scenario.
During the weeks prior to the release of
Saviors
, Green Day's 14th album, the machinery around one of the longest-running and most successful American
punk pop
combos has released messages announcing a return to the
punk
spirit of their early years at the beginning of the decade of the nineties and the political commitment that marked his second advent in 2004 with the imperial success of his anti-Bush album,
American Idiot
.
In case appealing to nostalgia and promising a return to a happy era was not enough, for weeks we have been reminded again that the sound, the attitude and even the aesthetics (if the latter exists) of Green Day are very Fashion.
If you are around 30 years old you know it because you listen to Olivia Rodrigo, Willow, Yungblud or Machine Gun Kelly.
If you are over 30, because at some point in the last couple of years you are likely to have seen Blink 182, Sum 41 or Simple Plan live.
Interestingly, if you are the same age as the members of Green Day, it is very likely that you did not know about all this.
With the feeling established that this album is going to be a success, the album, released on January 19 and produced by the legendary Ron Carvallo, obviously is.
Saviors
kicks off with the most Green Day song that Green Day may have ever written.
'The American Dream Is Killing Me' is a perfect compendium of the sound of that 1994
Dookie
with which they became superstars and the politics that defined
American Idiot
.
It's a great topic.
If this were still the band that performed in a squat house in Vila-real in front of 150 people or in the La Báscula civic center in Barcelona in front of 50 in the years before signing for a major label, the other 14 cuts that make up the album would have There would have been slight variations on this and the result would have been absolutely countercultural, almost situationist.
Magnificent and punk.
But Green Day is too big a band and its members are too old (all three of them already in their fifties) to deliver an album with only fast-paced shots like 'Look Ma, No Brains', playful melodies like the wonderful 'Livin' in the 20'. ′s' or first division punk melancholy like that marked by 'Coma City'.
Nobody goes from touring the European squat circuit to appearing on MTV just with that, not even in those distant and idealized nineties.
Thus, the album must deliver its required dose of stadium rock, lighter ballads and mid-tempo borrowed melodies.
In short, all that tacticism that has always given them such good returns that they have forgotten that distant ambition of theirs to have their
London Calling
, or failing that, their
Sandinista
.
The sound of the American group has influenced Olivia Rodrigo, with whom they have said they aspire to collaborate, Machine Gun Kelly or even K-Pop
Legend has it that everything happened in just three weeks in 1994. One night they were playing at the Garatge Club in Barcelona and, in a flash, they were presenting their candidacy for best seller on the Woodstock stage.
That was a strange year, perhaps the last in which so many opposing musical subcultures have coincided in full swing.
The
grunge
of Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, the
Britpop
of Oasis or Blur, the
trip hop
of Massive Attack and Portishead or foundational stones of modern
hip hop
published that year by Nas or Beastie Boys.
To make matters worse, Kurt Cobain died in April.
Although seemingly disconnected, all these albums and all these artists formed a perfect ecosystem of scenes created to complement the others or, directly, as a reaction against them.
But that last great party of the scenes—urban tribes for the young staff of El Corte Inglés—had an unexpected and absolutely decontextualized guest: the pop punk of Green Day.
With the solitary help of The Offspring, the
sitcom
version of Billy Joe Armstrong, they had to find a place in the middle of that sea of sharks.
Against all odds they achieved it, and that happened because the response to the seriousness and nihilism of
grunge
that came in the form of
Britpop
never seduced American audiences, nor those who had sucked rock from the cradle.
Then, as the need to degrease was still there and the public had discovered that, after all, they didn't want to die in the Seattle rain so much, Green Day's
punk pop
fished in the seas in which Blur and Oasis were shipwrecked.
And they dominated the planet singing songs about hating themselves
hahaha
in response to what had swept the world to date, which was singing songs about hating themselves,
bang bang
.
Curiously, all the relevance that is sought from Green Day today has nothing to do with what happened 30 years ago, but with the great advent of
punk pop
at the beginning of this century, the first great
millennial
catharsis .
The era of
American Pie
, of homophobic jokes and that high school spirit that they say is what has seduced generation Z, from whom the pandemic stole those years and who now seeks to recover them, whether by viralizing songs from Simple Plan or Avril Lavigne on TikTok, whether listening to Olivia Rodrigo – the real boss of all this, with whom Green Day have said they would like to collaborate –, Willow or even some of the K-Pop bands like Tomorrow X Together, who have signed up to this sound and this way of understanding life and the width of pants.
Although Blink 182 has had to deconstruct itself because, if the girls think that
Friends
was offensive, they were going to hallucinate with these people's lyrics, the new generations of punk pop artists already know that fart jokes are not made, and not because they involve trivialize climate change.
Fart jokes are not made because they are simply not funny.
A
revival
is not only nostalgia, it can also be correction.
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