They're all out without you, having fun
Marisa took me on a press-pass trip to see the new Broadway production of American Idiot last night. I was excited to see the stage version of Green Day's punk opera because of the divisive reaction it's been generating, with the New York Times flipping for it while New York magazine dismissed it outright. It's fitting that Green Day would be the first punk-rock band to launch a potentially successful Broadway show, as they've been at the forefront of commercialization, some might even say mallification, of punk, or more accurately pop-punk.
I don't necessarily think of that as a bad thing. Although apparently issues of cred can still come up when dealing with pop-punk bands, Green Day has made an impressively consistent bunch of music, much of it within the major label system, over the course of, wow, almost twenty years now.
They've been dinged for going major-label, for getting on MTV, for getting insanely popular, and especially for writing a ballad that can be played at graduations or proms when "Good Riddance" came out in 1997. I remember seeing some interview with them after the fact, and the band said that actually, breaking unwritten punk "rules" by writing and recording a radio-friendly ballad was, under the circumstances, about as punk a move as they could've made. Of course, that rationale can be applied to just about anything a punk-ish band does: wouldn't selling a song to GM actually be the most unexpected and therefore punk thing we could do? Wouldn't doing a soundtrack to a DreamWorks movie be actually incredibly punk? Wouldn't it be totally punk rock to do a bloated rock opera, and then put it on Broadway?
I'm devil's-advocating, of course; I think it's awesome that Green Day wrote a rock opera (of sorts) and became, for a few years, more or less the biggest band in the country. Again. Good for them. But I did feel a little uneasy walking into the theater on Thursday and seeing a merch booth with a couple of punk-outfitted kids selling forty-dollar t-shirts and seventy-dollar hoodies; it does, perhaps unavoidably given the state of Broadway musicals, feel a bit like a punk-rock theme park ride. Even when the show starts with a blast -- I love the way it kicks off with an audio collage that finishes with a clip of Ryan Seacrest saying "this... is American--" cut off by the opening chords to "American Idiot" -- it takes a few minutes to adjust to actors on stage doing coordinated dances (however energetic and nontraditional in the Broadway sense) to Green Day songs. But after a few minutes, that dissonance fades and the songs fit naturally on stage: they're more dramatic than most pop-punk songs, and catchier than many modern musical songs.
The show isn't a pure nostalgia trip for me, not just because American Idiot is a relatively recent album (although: it did come out six years ago! God we're all so old) but because I did not grow up loving Green Day. In fact, when they were hitting their first peak in popularity when I was in junior high, I semi-inexplicably thought they were lame. This had at least something to do, I think, with my lack of experience in newer pop music at the time, and also with walking my sister home from school behind a pack of fourth-graders singing "Basket Case" in unison -- which I now consider totally awesome. Good job, fourth graders of 1994. As a fourth grader of 1990, I mainly listened to the California Raisins. So in the mid-nineties, I was disdainful of Green Day. But I softened as I got older (yes, I had to mature in order to better appreciate Green Day), and one Christmas my brother, who spent a fair amount of time as an actual hardcore punk, complete with spiked hair and studded leather jacket and confusion about how to treat skinheads, got me International Superhits! as a gesture towards what seemed to be, by comparison, my hopelessly pop-leaning sensibility. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it on this LJ before, but I am not so much of a greatest hits person, but the Green Day greatest hits album is absolutely fucking awesome. I've listened to it approximately a million times. Even the standard new songs added to the collection to entice hardcore fans are awesome. International Superhits! is pretty much the best singles collection ever. That said, I appreciate that American Idiot is based on their post-hits concept albums, because the last thing we need is another awkward jukebox musical.
Although I do like the American Idiot album quite a bit, the creators of the show have, admittedly, made a small mistake in thinking it provides a suitable story structure for a musical. It has recurring characters and thematic unity and song suites, yes, but American Idiot doesn't offer much in the way of coherent narrative. Even the most unified concept albums don't always offer as much detail as a single good story song, and Green Day, while talented songwriters in many respects, don't really deal in story songs. The idea that American Idiot can vividly reflect a specific time and place -- the Bush years in the United States -- ignores the fact that apart from some vague references to Bush II, the War on Terror, and the general ugliness and despair of the political climate circa 2004, the album doesn't actually offer a lot of details about where its characters are or what they're doing.
Rather than filling those details in, the show runs with the vagueness, sending one character off to an unnamed city with so few characteristics it might as well be called Unnamed City, and leaving another in an equally ill-defined dead-end hometown. This shortcutting lends the show a refreshing briskness: ninety minutes, no intermission, not even much dialogue. But it doesn't have the currency its creators (including probably Green Day) would probably like to imagine, and the characters essentially make an initial impression, sing their hearts out, suffer, and repeat those last two a few times.
Character development, an original story, political edge, a sense of time and place -- all of that is what the show more or less leaves out. What it leaves in, though, are a series of excellent stagings of Green Day songs: mostly the American Idiot record, of course, with some bits from 21st Century Breakdown slipped in. I especially like the way "Last of the American Girls" from the latter is woven into "She's a Rebel" from the former, and almost wish they had taken a few more similar liberties. Even when sticking closer to the Green Day originals, though, the arrangements and performances of these songs, on a single towering and visually overwhelming set, are often spectacular in a way that nonetheless feels gritty and impassioned -- not, in other words, like a punk rock theme park. It has the rock concert vibe that rock-tinged musicals have been edging toward for a bunch of years now, especially in shows about young people fighting to survive or whatever.
Other musicals that tackle essentially similar subject matter -- Rent, Spring Awakening, or the film Across the Universe, all of which I like to some degree -- tend to have a lot of breakneck, exciting, emotionally charged set-up and then a lot of vague scattering and incidents substituting for actual character or story progression. The difference, though, is that American Idiot makes less of an attempt to tell an engaging story, and so uses far fewer cliches simply by virtue of speeding past them.
Relationships in the aforementioned shows are often reduced to archetypes, so it doesn't actually matter too much that American Idiot makes this reduction immediately.
In a way, it's the stage version of Across the Universe (although I realize that description will scare some people off): a thin story with some truly exhilarating visualizations of familiar songs, without the haphazard hit-mongering of a true jukebox musical. Instead of a bunch of terrific music videos surrounded by some boilerplate storytelling, there are a bunch of terrific live performances strung together at a sometimes ferocious pace. As a story, it's kind of a dud, but then, so is American Idiot the album; if you want a concept album about disaffected, broken-down youth with literary-style detail, maybe you've heard a record called Separation Sunday (and even that isn't exactly plot-heavy; come to think of it, rock music isn't really about plot, which is probably why rock operas are interesting in theory and often kind of dodgy in practice). As an impressionistic performances of these interconnected Green Day songs, it's extremely entertaining, right down to the post-curtain "encore" with the entire cast armed with their own acoustic guitars, singing and playing along with "Good Riddance." It was not very punk rock. It was also wonderful.
I don't necessarily think of that as a bad thing. Although apparently issues of cred can still come up when dealing with pop-punk bands, Green Day has made an impressively consistent bunch of music, much of it within the major label system, over the course of, wow, almost twenty years now.
They've been dinged for going major-label, for getting on MTV, for getting insanely popular, and especially for writing a ballad that can be played at graduations or proms when "Good Riddance" came out in 1997. I remember seeing some interview with them after the fact, and the band said that actually, breaking unwritten punk "rules" by writing and recording a radio-friendly ballad was, under the circumstances, about as punk a move as they could've made. Of course, that rationale can be applied to just about anything a punk-ish band does: wouldn't selling a song to GM actually be the most unexpected and therefore punk thing we could do? Wouldn't doing a soundtrack to a DreamWorks movie be actually incredibly punk? Wouldn't it be totally punk rock to do a bloated rock opera, and then put it on Broadway?
I'm devil's-advocating, of course; I think it's awesome that Green Day wrote a rock opera (of sorts) and became, for a few years, more or less the biggest band in the country. Again. Good for them. But I did feel a little uneasy walking into the theater on Thursday and seeing a merch booth with a couple of punk-outfitted kids selling forty-dollar t-shirts and seventy-dollar hoodies; it does, perhaps unavoidably given the state of Broadway musicals, feel a bit like a punk-rock theme park ride. Even when the show starts with a blast -- I love the way it kicks off with an audio collage that finishes with a clip of Ryan Seacrest saying "this... is American--" cut off by the opening chords to "American Idiot" -- it takes a few minutes to adjust to actors on stage doing coordinated dances (however energetic and nontraditional in the Broadway sense) to Green Day songs. But after a few minutes, that dissonance fades and the songs fit naturally on stage: they're more dramatic than most pop-punk songs, and catchier than many modern musical songs.
The show isn't a pure nostalgia trip for me, not just because American Idiot is a relatively recent album (although: it did come out six years ago! God we're all so old) but because I did not grow up loving Green Day. In fact, when they were hitting their first peak in popularity when I was in junior high, I semi-inexplicably thought they were lame. This had at least something to do, I think, with my lack of experience in newer pop music at the time, and also with walking my sister home from school behind a pack of fourth-graders singing "Basket Case" in unison -- which I now consider totally awesome. Good job, fourth graders of 1994. As a fourth grader of 1990, I mainly listened to the California Raisins. So in the mid-nineties, I was disdainful of Green Day. But I softened as I got older (yes, I had to mature in order to better appreciate Green Day), and one Christmas my brother, who spent a fair amount of time as an actual hardcore punk, complete with spiked hair and studded leather jacket and confusion about how to treat skinheads, got me International Superhits! as a gesture towards what seemed to be, by comparison, my hopelessly pop-leaning sensibility. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it on this LJ before, but I am not so much of a greatest hits person, but the Green Day greatest hits album is absolutely fucking awesome. I've listened to it approximately a million times. Even the standard new songs added to the collection to entice hardcore fans are awesome. International Superhits! is pretty much the best singles collection ever. That said, I appreciate that American Idiot is based on their post-hits concept albums, because the last thing we need is another awkward jukebox musical.
Although I do like the American Idiot album quite a bit, the creators of the show have, admittedly, made a small mistake in thinking it provides a suitable story structure for a musical. It has recurring characters and thematic unity and song suites, yes, but American Idiot doesn't offer much in the way of coherent narrative. Even the most unified concept albums don't always offer as much detail as a single good story song, and Green Day, while talented songwriters in many respects, don't really deal in story songs. The idea that American Idiot can vividly reflect a specific time and place -- the Bush years in the United States -- ignores the fact that apart from some vague references to Bush II, the War on Terror, and the general ugliness and despair of the political climate circa 2004, the album doesn't actually offer a lot of details about where its characters are or what they're doing.
Rather than filling those details in, the show runs with the vagueness, sending one character off to an unnamed city with so few characteristics it might as well be called Unnamed City, and leaving another in an equally ill-defined dead-end hometown. This shortcutting lends the show a refreshing briskness: ninety minutes, no intermission, not even much dialogue. But it doesn't have the currency its creators (including probably Green Day) would probably like to imagine, and the characters essentially make an initial impression, sing their hearts out, suffer, and repeat those last two a few times.
Character development, an original story, political edge, a sense of time and place -- all of that is what the show more or less leaves out. What it leaves in, though, are a series of excellent stagings of Green Day songs: mostly the American Idiot record, of course, with some bits from 21st Century Breakdown slipped in. I especially like the way "Last of the American Girls" from the latter is woven into "She's a Rebel" from the former, and almost wish they had taken a few more similar liberties. Even when sticking closer to the Green Day originals, though, the arrangements and performances of these songs, on a single towering and visually overwhelming set, are often spectacular in a way that nonetheless feels gritty and impassioned -- not, in other words, like a punk rock theme park. It has the rock concert vibe that rock-tinged musicals have been edging toward for a bunch of years now, especially in shows about young people fighting to survive or whatever.
Other musicals that tackle essentially similar subject matter -- Rent, Spring Awakening, or the film Across the Universe, all of which I like to some degree -- tend to have a lot of breakneck, exciting, emotionally charged set-up and then a lot of vague scattering and incidents substituting for actual character or story progression. The difference, though, is that American Idiot makes less of an attempt to tell an engaging story, and so uses far fewer cliches simply by virtue of speeding past them.
Relationships in the aforementioned shows are often reduced to archetypes, so it doesn't actually matter too much that American Idiot makes this reduction immediately.
In a way, it's the stage version of Across the Universe (although I realize that description will scare some people off): a thin story with some truly exhilarating visualizations of familiar songs, without the haphazard hit-mongering of a true jukebox musical. Instead of a bunch of terrific music videos surrounded by some boilerplate storytelling, there are a bunch of terrific live performances strung together at a sometimes ferocious pace. As a story, it's kind of a dud, but then, so is American Idiot the album; if you want a concept album about disaffected, broken-down youth with literary-style detail, maybe you've heard a record called Separation Sunday (and even that isn't exactly plot-heavy; come to think of it, rock music isn't really about plot, which is probably why rock operas are interesting in theory and often kind of dodgy in practice). As an impressionistic performances of these interconnected Green Day songs, it's extremely entertaining, right down to the post-curtain "encore" with the entire cast armed with their own acoustic guitars, singing and playing along with "Good Riddance." It was not very punk rock. It was also wonderful.