Green Day
Uno... Dos... Tré!

2.5
average

Review

by ZackSh33 USER (61 Reviews)
April 4th, 2014 | 46 replies

Release Date: 2012 | Tracklist

Review Summary: The Long Road

“You know, you don’t have to do this to yourself. You could just let it go.”

My mind races. I think to myself as I drive down a long road from my apartment in the big city to my Mom’s house in the suburbs. It’s only a twenty mile journey, but the trip takes nearly two hours to complete.

“Don’t you have anything better to do with your time? Why do you have to focus on something so ridiculous and unnecessary? You could be doing something productive for the world – trying to fight world hunger, or poverty, or hell, you could just sit in a room and read. When was the last time you read an actual book for god sakes? Nobody cares about Green Day anymore.”

I stare out the driver’s side window at one of the many glaring red lights that litter my journey home.

“So they messed up. So what? Who cares? Do you know anyone who bought a copy of Uno!, Dos!, or Tre!? Bands make mistakes all the time – Oasis released Be Here Now, Weezer kept making music after 1997. What makes Green Day that much different from those guys?”

The car lurches forward as I inch along in traffic. The speakers blare, and the sun begins to go down across the hilly horizon in the distance. Maybe I’ll never get home. Maybe I’ll just sit in traffic the rest of my life. Maybe I never have to confront the demons that await me on either end of the road.

“People actually scoff when you mention Green Day now. Like actually, physically scoff. They don’t just give you a weird look anymore; they actually make that scoffing noise out-loud along with all of their looks. Oh, those guys? They were better twenty years ago when they were singing about masturbating, smoking weed and small children dressing in drag. What were they thinking? Times used to be simpler. These guys just used to be a bunch of weird guys wearing tee shirts and jeans, making simple, infectious music that people in the nineties actually liked listening to because it was catchy and made them want to throw mud at each other.”

The rows of houses and businesses that dot the long road begin to slowly pass by as the pace of traffic quickens for a moment, only to stop a few hundred feet later.

“Then American Idiot came along and suddenly they were relevant again. It was a miracle that the album worked – but from memory, can you talk about the plot of the album American Idiot? Not the play, but the album. Can you describe in detail what that album was actually about? How about 21st Century Breakdown? What the hell was that about? Why did it take them five years to make that? What were they doing, twiddling their thumbs? No one really wants to hear them be political or write rock operas. They’re not the Who. They’re not the Clash. They thought that wearing eyeliner made them true punk-rockers, I guess, but it just made them come off as being above all of us, aloof, almost like they were taking it upon themselves to speak for the rest of us, even though no one really wanted them to do that.”

I stare silently into the hazy, dimly setting sun as I pull up to one last red light.

“Look at yourself. Look at your choices. Here you are, 22 years old, sitting in a small, light blue coupe, listening to music made by relative has-beens, thinking about where they went wrong, how they painted themselves into a corner by finding success portraying themselves as the next coming of the Who, and then trying to take it all back by releasing nearly three full albums of stuff that they probably could have come up with in their sleep. What was the marketing plan with this? Who approved of this? Why didn't they just release one album of decent stuff and go back to the drawing board on all the three chord songs that sound vaguely similar to their other songs? Have you listened to this stuff? There are songs on here that, at best, sound like covers of rewrites of songs that were already done better by their alter-egos five years ago. Is every song in this trilogy written in the same exact tempo with vaguely similar guitar lines?”

The sun finally sets on my nightmare, just as “X-Kid” begins to play on the car stereo. Suddenly, I feel almost immortal and rejuvenated by the new darkness that surrounds all the stopped cars on the road. The air turns colder, not quite belonging to winter, but still remains too chilled to resemble the long, hot, humid nights of spring and summer that I have been yearning for. Silence washes over all the cars, with only the slow rumbling of the idle engines residing. I reach the top of the last hill – the largest on my journey home, and the car quickly picks up speed.

I imagine a long ramp at the bottom of the hill – sending all the unsuspecting motorists suddenly shooting off into the night sky. Everything hangs in the air for a few key moments, almost suspended in the moment, never to be replicated. As the car accelerates, suddenly, the traffic clears, and with not one other car in sight, my small coupe begins to race down the hill, faster and faster.

With everything going so wrong at either end of the road, for some reason, in that one moment, everything just seems right. My mind finally begins to clear.

“Hey…this song isn’t so bad. Maybe there’s some hope left for these guys after all.”

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