Close Your Eyes Now, JeepersTseepers
So, there's this band. While I'm in junior high school, this band skyrockets to the peaks of popularity. I don't buy into them, not yet; I'm not ready. Then, at some seemingly random moment in my early days as a high school student, something clicks. I get it. A few months later, they release an album named after a great hunter, and I'm well and truly hooked. They're not my favorite band of all time. They're not even my favorite band of the moment. Their raw, lyrically beautiful, minimalistic, semi-punk music does, however, fill some hole in my musical experience that needed filling.
I eagerly await the release of their next album. What will it sound like? What treasures will it contain?
Crap. None.
And with that completely disappointing excuse of an album released, "love" becomes "loved". The music is the bland and boring remnants of a band that suddenly seems old and washed-up. I shrug, frown, and go on with my life.
Then, a few years later, I hear that this same band has released a new album, a heavily political album. Whatever. A has-been band is leveraging their fading fame to make "music with a cause". It's been done before. It sucks. By now, I'm no longer really listening to the radio, so I simply ignore it. And that's how it goes. Periodically I get the urge to listen to the good stuff, and I do so. But, I heed the Warning and blissfully ignore everything released from that point forward. And, somehow, living in my own little hole, I manage to basically hear nothing from this latest and certainly awful album (a snippet of "American Idiot", probably, and the chorus of "When September Ends" sounds vaguely familiar, but not much else).
Then, as you have probably guessed, arbitrary, pseudo-random circumstances find me, today, sitting at my brother's school computer listening curiously. "This 'Jesus of Suburbia' song doesn't actually suck: amazing," I think beside myself. "Actually, it's pretty good." ... "Hmm, I think I kind of love this song. I wonder if there's anything else worthwhile." And so I listen. And it's good. I like the album. I don't like all the songs, but it is by all means vastly superior to Warning.
American Idiot has salvaged my musical love for Green Day. There, I said it.
I eagerly await the release of their next album. What will it sound like? What treasures will it contain?
Crap. None.
And with that completely disappointing excuse of an album released, "love" becomes "loved". The music is the bland and boring remnants of a band that suddenly seems old and washed-up. I shrug, frown, and go on with my life.
Then, a few years later, I hear that this same band has released a new album, a heavily political album. Whatever. A has-been band is leveraging their fading fame to make "music with a cause". It's been done before. It sucks. By now, I'm no longer really listening to the radio, so I simply ignore it. And that's how it goes. Periodically I get the urge to listen to the good stuff, and I do so. But, I heed the Warning and blissfully ignore everything released from that point forward. And, somehow, living in my own little hole, I manage to basically hear nothing from this latest and certainly awful album (a snippet of "American Idiot", probably, and the chorus of "When September Ends" sounds vaguely familiar, but not much else).
Then, as you have probably guessed, arbitrary, pseudo-random circumstances find me, today, sitting at my brother's school computer listening curiously. "This 'Jesus of Suburbia' song doesn't actually suck: amazing," I think beside myself. "Actually, it's pretty good." ... "Hmm, I think I kind of love this song. I wonder if there's anything else worthwhile." And so I listen. And it's good. I like the album. I don't like all the songs, but it is by all means vastly superior to Warning.
American Idiot has salvaged my musical love for Green Day. There, I said it.