Green Day - Viva la Cliche

Green Day just came out with a new album.  Yay.  I remember listening to them in middle school.  Lots and lots of distortion, fast drum beats, people that looked my age but were actually in their late twenties-early thirties.  Y'know - cool stuff.  Their last album was mildly preachy, which is an interesting break from their earlier stuff, which interpreted punk rock to mean youthful rebellion.  Now it means leftish political movements.  Noam Chomsky is SO punk, apparently.  Most of what they said on American Idiot was old hat.  Like, forty-odd years old: Americans are naive, Christianity culture is the enemy of freedom, evangelical children become self-professedly messed-up anarchists, blah blah.  One song that got my attention was Jesus of Suburbia, simply because they mention Jesus by name and identify him with an American subculture.  They refer to "make believe" and a "hurricane" of lies, the loss of faith - things that represent a new sort of atheism whose demographic seems to be students, internet users, and Englishmen.  It didn't really bother me because I did see that there is definitely an American evangelicalism that doesn't understand its own faith very well, and whose sincerity, due to its cultural prevalence, is at times questionable even on its own terms.

But this new album is a different.  Frankly, it's just boring and kinda hard on the ears.  Practically every song is railing against Christian faith, the most explicit is probably East Jesus Nowhere, which has its own website.  It does not appear to reflect any actual experience.  It's just a very loud, obnoxious, straw-man opinion, assuming a skeptical outlook, calling Christians stupid, gullible, etc.  My favorite line is "I want to know who learned to breed all the dogs who never learned to read."  Coming from Billy Joe Armstrong, that's pretty funny.  The strangest thing about the new atheism is that highly illiterate people begin to fold their arms and roll their eyes at people who are pretty well connected with the history of western thought. There are, of course, ignorant and educated people on all sides, but I'm referring to the actual tenet of the new atheism that "religious" people are ignorant.  That's called bigotry.  Only the most deep-seated knee-jerk ideologies begin to posit ad hominem reasons for dissent.  "You'd have to be crazy to think..."  "Those x people who think y are so z."  Of course, in this demographic, it's usually something more like, "You Christian *&^%s are so full of bull$41T.  God is ded!!one1!  Get over yourself!!!?!?/!1?!"  I'm aware that Green Day is trying to shock people, to be contrary, to be authentically other than the culture.  They simply fail to do so.

Boring.  Repetitive.  Old.  Ironic.