Green Day remains trapped inside punk cage

Green Day
Shenanigans
Reprise Punk can be a very limited music form. Very few punk bands are able to expand their sound and style very far. Those punk groups that do manage to transcend the genre end up creating a whole now identity for themselves. The Clash, for example, evolved from a straight-ahead, angry-Brit punk combo into a funky, cutting-edge dance band. And like other punks, the guys of Green Day are really trapped inside a musical straitjacket. Ever since exploding on the American pop scene in the mid '90s, singer/guitarist Billie Joe, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tré Cool have bounced around the sturdy confines of media-hyped punk like grasshoppers inside an eight-year-old's mayonnaise jar. Every once in a while, the band has attempted to squeeze out of the jar's air holes by trying something different. Some of these experiences, like "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)," off 1997's nimrod., have been well-received by the public. But in the end, Green Day has been unable to break out of their little corner of the music world. And, with the release of Shenanigans, maybe they have just stopped trying. The CD's 14 cuts (clocking in at a paltry 33 minutes) show very little in the way of musical ingenuity. Most of the tracks sound like they could have been outtakes from their 1994 breakthrough, Dookie. With a few non-descript exemptions (for example, the horns on the "Espionage," an attempted parody of classic spy theme songs), the album is composed of standard, cut-and-dry, 21st-century punk fare, albeit punk fare of better-than-average quality. It is perhaps telling that the album's best track is a cover of the Kinks' classic, "Tired of Waiting for You." Green Day does an admirable job of evoking the spirit of the original romantic and sexual frustration mixed with dour resignation. That the group could not come up with a standout track of its own might be a sign that Green Day has done all they're going to do in their career. Of course, that's not a bad thing. Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis are living legends because they did the same thing over and over, and they did it better than anyone else. The same can be said about Green Day. Whether they themselves will eventually be dubbed "punk legends" remains to be seen.