I know I'm a year behind the curve on this, but gimme a break, I'm 41 years old. I've been hearing it in bits and pieces on the radio for months, but Green Day's American Idiot is, in the download it a song at a time era, a real anachronism: an ALBUM. A suite of songs that hangs together, the whole greater than the sum of its parts. We haven't heard one of those in a long time and may never hear one again.
Mt other musical acquisition of the day is even more anachronistic, a VHS tape. But in its day it was way ahead of the curve: a visualized conception of a suite of songs that hangs together, one of the great albums of its day. I refer, of course, to Rust Never Sleeps. One more excuse to trot out my line that Neil Young was one of only two members of the 1960s generation of musicians who really got punk rock; the other was Pete Townshend. Pete went on to sell his greatest songs as ads and tour as "the Who" a week after John Entwistle's death; Neil proudly proclaimed he was "sponsored by nobody," co-founded Farm Aid, Pearl Jammed, and felt genuine remorse when Cobain quoted him in his suicide note.
In this synthpopped era, Green Day is giving me a little hope that Neil Young was right in `79 and rock and roll WILL never die. At least not before I get old.
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