The new single by Green Day, “Know Your Enemy,” pushes all the right buttons of commercial appeal to set the stage for the band’s new album, 21st Century Breakdown, which is slated for release on May 15. The song is a radio-friendly pop-punk track, and the chorus activates the last-song-syndrome, with its easy-title-recall chanting. The point of the song, lyrically speaking, suggests continuity with their critically and commercially acclaimed American Idiot album, specifically via an oblique but nevertheless political reference to the “enemy.” The lyrics go this way:
Violence is an energy
Against the enemy
Violence is an energy
Bringing on the fury
The choir infantry
Revolt against the honor to obey
Overthrow the effigy
The vast majority
Burning down the foreman of control
Silence is the enemy
Against your urgency
So rally up the demons of your soul
Do you know the enemy?
Do you know your enemy?
Well, gotta know the enemy
There is a pent-up energy brewing, whose outworking is quite the reverse (but parallel?) to U2’s No Line on the Horizon, with a line (in “Cedars of Lebanon”) that goes:
Choose your enemies carefully ‘cause they will define you
Make them interesting ‘cause in some ways they will mind you
They’re not there in the beginning but when your story ends
Gonna last with you longer than your friends.
Whereas the old timers have come storming with good ol’ rock with All That You Can’t Leave Behind and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, culminating before Horizon with the cover of The Skids’ “The Saints Are Coming” (with Green Day) and singing only practically of Love (listen to “Magnificent” and “Stand Up Comedy), finally coming ‘round to some musically “spiritual” modes with Horizon, the young ‘uns are apparently tired of the slowburn and calling on all punks to unite, until they themselves give the signal to light some flame with butane.
The album titles as well have uncanny continuity, with the former Grammy Winner’s blunt phrasing referring to one-and-all (or one-and-everything) finally giving way to a kind of a general assessment of the state of the nation. Timely and spine-tingling, given the economic crises which Uncle Sam is facing.
So, come May 15, ten days from now, will the irony hold – a new, commercially successful album like the outing five years ago, out of the ruins of a failing Old Man today?
