Amateur Recommendation Hour: 21st Century Breakdown

Today’s recommendation is that other Green Day rock opera you may have heard of but possibly never listened to. Hopefully I’ll be able to convince you to change that if you belong to that category.

21st Century Breakdown (2009) usually gets overlooked by it’s far more critically and commercially successful big brother American Idiot. In my objective opinion (since music is a really subjective medium take this with a grain of salt) I find it to be a more honest, reflective, less reactive and more measured approach.

The narrative of the album is as follows: A young couple named Christian and Gloria navigate through the challenges present in the U.S. following the presidency of George W. Bush. It’s themes are not as tightly interwoven as a concept album but that’s not to say there’s no connectivity.

I personally think it’s really rad that Billie Joe Armstrong originally wrote all of the songs in this album for the piano and transposed them as the album began to take form.

If I were to sum up this album into a cohesive message, it would be that it is proclaiming the beginning of a dark era. Companies get larger, governments begin to clamp down on our livelihoods more, the media’s influence on us becomes even stronger, and the sensationalism will become even louder. Living becomes that much harder for the ordinary person. As expected, Billie Joe Armstrong is one forward thinking individual.

If you are in the market for a deeply personal and eerily relevant exploration of what America has come to be conceived before it’s time, then look no further.