The Singles Jukebox

More like, wake me up when their career ends, right?

[Video][Website]
[3.29]

David Sheffieck: Remember when Green Day’s songs were explicitly about masturbation?
[1]

Katie Gill: Writing a song about the pov of a mass shooter? Now That’s What I Call Edgy! Alternatively, Now That’s What I Call Infantilizing. I don’t care what pov you’re attempting to go for, talking about playing with your toys and calling yourself “daddy’s little psycho” really isn’t a good look for men in their forties.
[1]

Alfred Soto: It’s got force, guitars, and weird accents. As pop punk it’s unimpeachable. Reading the Wiki, I learn the band wrote “Bang Bang” from the point of view of a mass shooter. Which is why I remain grateful to force, guitars, and weird accents.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: Remembering that back at my school you were either Team Offspring or Team Green Day (and I was firmly in the latter camp), I’m disappointed to note that this sounds like the sort of thing The Offspring might have put out towards the end of the 90s, i.e. loud but thin pop-punk with violence in the lyrics but no guts in the execution. Billy Joe has never been enough of a jester or pierrot-like figure to pull off any significant social commentary that weighs more than an anecdote, so the song’s dumbness doesn’t have a point either. It would have made a neat Avril Lavigne song in 2002 though.
[3]

Jonathan Bradley: Green Day has existed long enough that its every move can be reduced to an interchangeable part: not just these riffs, but each of these lyrics can be channelled as impulses that might easily be pastiche as much as personality. It’s not given that this band should be out of step with the politics of the current day. Many of their 1990s concerns have enduring counterparts in the 21st century: if anything, the Bernie Sanders generation should be more attuned than ever to ideas of suburbia as the failed locus of the American dream (“Longview,” “Jesus of Suburbia”); the conventionality of uncommon sexualities (“Coming Clean,” “King for a Day,” “Blood, Sex, and Booze”); or the alienating nature of elite American politics (“Minority,” most of American Idiot). Yet where “Bang Bang” suggests immediacy, it is situated ahistorically: the chorus nods at a 1983 Social Distortion album and though close lyrical scrutiny might unearth allusions to Reddit Red-Pillers or ISIS converts, there’s neither the specificity nor the empathy present that would suggest this band has an illuminating perspective to offer on these subjects. In an alternate universe, Green Day never realized their Bush-era cris-de-coeur and followed the “Church on Sunday” path towards a non-conformist’s uncertain maturity. What seemed such a vital reinvention in 2004 has increasingly become a millstone for a band that could have grown up but found a reason not to.
[4]

Rachel Bowles: A fitting update to Green Day’s Bush-era American Idiot. Hate, homophobia and the Baudrillardian hyperreal experience of war are still key to this experience though the emphasis here is on male entitlement, toxic masculinity and its roots in the rigid heteronormativity of the nuclear home. It’s a heady cocktail with the American patriotic discourse that keeps firearms easily available. Stylistically, the music is standard 21st Century Green Day: reliably listenable if not transcendent. 
[6]

Lauren Gilbert: This sounds like a Green Day cover band.  It’s not a half-bad Green Day cover band, but I’ve heard all these musical ideas before, and the extra distortion on Billie Joe Armstrong’s voice doesn’t make it better. It starts to build to an epic “Los Angeles Is Burning“-style chorus and then… doesn’t. Pop-punk was never notable for its incisive social commentary, but “daddy’s little psycho and mommy’s little soldier” sounds a bit too much like a tabloid headline for me to take it seriously. Basically, wake me up when this song ends.
[3]