Here is a description of a performance of Green Day's "rock opera" from NME:
A sold out crowd of several thousand fans packed the city’s Henry Fonda Music Box Theatre as the group introduced their concept record with the help of additional instrumentalists and costumed women.
Dressed in short senorita outfits and cropped black wigs, two women provided a card reading ‘Act 1,’ shortly before 8.30PM local time. Green Day then came out launching straight into the album opening cut, ’American Idiot’.
During 'American Idiot’s 60-minute, 21-song airing, the Northern California outfit were joined at times by two additional guitarists, a backing vocalist, a piano player, saxophonist, trumpeter and a percussionist, although some of the artists doubled up. The performance also featured flashing lights, dropping banners, and confetti explosions.
‘American Idiot’ is the band’s most ambitious collection to date, a ‘Tommy’-style rock opera and barbed attack on post-war on terror America. Billie Joe Armstrong told MTV: "The record has a storyline throughout it that follows a character by the name of Jesus Of Suburbia. It’s about him coming of age and the growing pains that are involved in it and seeing if he makes the right choices or the wrong choices or whatever choices that come to him.
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As I mentioned in an earlier post ("Making the Band"), if you want to have an Advanced band, you need female backup singers, a saxophonist, a keyboard player and someone playing "percussion." I applaud Green Day for trying their best, but they just will never be able to be advanced.
1 comment:
I kind of like Green Day, but always thought they sounded like The Dickies without the humor. I don't have "American Idiot," but have enjoyed all the songs I've happened to hear from it. The "storyline," though, sounds like a politicsed-up retelling of the story that supposedly exists on Hüsker Dü's "Zen Arcade," but which I've never been able to discern.
And... I'm sorry, but "Jesus of Suburbia?" Is that more or less cool so many years after Bowie's "Buddha of Suburbia," a phrase Bowie cannot and does not even pretend he came up with?
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