On a billboard that has since gone viral, Green Day proudly proclaimed that their newest record, “Father of All Motherf***ers” had “no features, no Swedish songwriters, no trap beats,” and was, instead, just “100% pure uncut rock.”
You’ll forgive me for thinking this is more than a little corny, I’m sure.
With this billboard — and with the singles leading up to “Father of All…,” the band’s 13th record which I’ll now refer to by its censored title — Green Day has shown us they’ve done what so many other rock groups have done: become a nostalgia act that just fetishizes the glory days of rock.
It’s really incredible to think of Green Day looking at this short, derivative album and thinking it is worth heralding as if its some sort of grand return to the virtuous days of “real” rock n’ roll.
Gatekeeping like that always leaves a bad taste in my mouth, so I went into this record with low expectations, but not even those were met.
“Father of All…,” despite being shorter than your average EP, is an incredibly boring record. That cannot be overstated.
A big part of this is caused by the fact that Green Day seems to have approached all of these songs with the single-minded obsession to just rip off classic garage and glam sounds, adding nothing to them in the process.
The songs are soulless and dead. There’s no real rock n’ roll energy in these songs. Sure, they all sound like your standard rock songs. But they’re all just missing that effortless je-ne-sais-quoi that actually makes rock interesting to listen to. These songs sound like rock-by-the-numbers, with Green Day just mimicking the styles of old and thinking that counts as creativity.
Often, the songs are incredibly stupid. “I Was a Teenage Teenager” is a perfect example, with a title that pretty accurately describes how dumb the lyrics are going to be. One of the album’s few “slow” songs, it weirdly echoes traditional R&B songs like “Last Kiss,” just, you know, with way dumber lyrics.
“Stab You in the Heart” tries really hard to mimic the swagger of early rock n’ roll with Chuck Berry-style guitar work and Beatles-esque vocals and screams, but it’s all just too cleanly produced. There’s no dirt and grime here. This isn’t what makes rock “rock.” This, along with most other songs on “Father of All…,” just sounds like it was written for a Chevy commercial.
And I won’t even get into how “Sugar Youth” apes on the melody of a previous, and far better, Green Day song, “She’s a Rebel” on “American Idiot.”
It’s truly sad to see what Green Day has become in recent years. Once a band that was at the forefront of pop punk creativity, and later a band that somehow accidentally made the most important political music of the Bush-era, Green Day is now just a shadow of itself.
After a series of really rough records, they’ve now settled on being merely forgettable, throwing together an album that entirely sounds like it was written by someone else. In a time that seems more primed than ever for “American Idiot II,” they decided to write uninspired 50s-style rock songs about dating. Why?
Maybe one of those Swedish songwriters could’ve helped. It certainly couldn’t have made things worse, considering Green Day’s last good album came out in 2004.
