🎶 Listening to Saviors by Green Day.

I’m constantly amazed that bands that were big when I was young are still in one piece all these years later when some of us normies barely seem to have made it. How this bunch preserved enough energy to keep expressing their distaste for modern day America in what sounds like such physically demanding ways I’m not sure, but they did.

Their distaste is indeed real. Harking back non-too-subtly to their outstanding 2004 album “American Idiot” - remember that was the time of George Bush, 9/11, the Iraq war and so on - they seem no more enamoured with the American lifestyle now, with first track on this album being “The American Dream is Killing Me”. The earlier song’s critique of mass-media brain-numbing television culture with Bush-era “redneck” vibes and a kind of paranoid alienation has been updated to reflect today’s landscape, with shoutouts to today’s conspiracy culture, virulent homelessness, obsolescence and the continuing privatisation of everything all embedded within track 1.

Later on in the album we learn that “Strange days are here to stay”; days that include fentanyl addicted grandmothers, ubiquitous racism and a late-running Uber.

A real product of its time.