Green Day’s latest is a rock opera triumph

By Greg Kot

‘21st Century Breakdown’

Green Day (Reprise)

Grade: A

Perhaps the only thing more unlikely than releasing a rock opera in 2009 is that it’s a rock opera written and recorded by Green Day. But such is the case with “21st Century Breakdown,” which arrives in stores Friday.

Green Day is that rare beast: a band that still sells lots of albums in an MP3-obsessed, iPod era. And rarer still, the band makes albums that demand to be heard as a whole: a collection of conceptually linked songs that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The northern California trio’s previous album, the 2004 release “American Idiot,” was a song cycle about life during wartime. In the grand punk tradition of Reagan-era stalwarts the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets and Husker Du, Green Day succeeded in making an album that spoke to and about its generation at a time of political anxiety, fear and anger. Unlike those bands, Green Day was an unmitigated hit. During a decade when CD sales plummeted, “American Idiot” sold nearly 6 million copies domestically and 12 million worldwide.

Now comes the even more ambitious “21st Century Breakdown,” nothing less than a three-part rock opera that traces the story of two characters, Christian and Gloria, the yin and yang of singer-guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong’s personality.

Christian is a rabble-rouser with his finger hovering on the self-destruct button. Gloria is an idealist with hopes of remaking the world.

The album would be a manifesto for a generation trying to make a sense of overseas wars and a hometown recession. Thankfully, Armstrong avoids sermonizing. But he does have a few things to get off his chest, and he and his band express themselves with do-or-die boldness. In Green Day’s early days, Armstrong saw many of the same problems and rolled his eyes. He’s a product of the early ’90s pop-punk brigade, a generation of disenfranchised suburbanites who broadcast their discontent in pithy three-chord anthems. They were bored and stoned; they reacted to the world around them with a shrug of the shoulders, a smirk and a series of one-fingered salutes. Green Day harnessed that disenchantment on the 1994 landmark “Dookie,” a 15-million-selling juggernaut of bratty black humor.

As the band aged, it started to recycle itself, and sales dropped. No great sin; plenty of bands struggle to maintain relevance. But a funny thing happened on the way to the nostalgia circuit with “American Idiot.” As the band members turned past 30 and began settling down, they got not just older but better. Armstrong raised his aim as a songwriter, and bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tre Cool kept pace. The trio are omnivorous music fans, and as their range and interests broadened, their music did, too.

Green Day reinvented itself with “American Idiot”; the album’s seriousness and ambition would’ve been unimaginable coming from the band that made “Dookie.” “21st Century Breakdown” aims higher, a state-of-the-disunion address delivered by two kids wandering through a landscape where war rages, jobs are scarce and cities slowly disintegrate. At times, Armstrong’s earnestness sounds like a Springsteen parody (“She puts her makeup on/ Like graffiti on the walls of the heartland”); he hasn’t quite mastered the art of the telling detail the way someone like the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn has. And the humor of the “Dookie” era is missed. In its place is a far richer and more varied brand of musical expression.

One thing hasn’t changed: The music rocks, only now the snotty, faux-British accent has been replaced by a full-throated cry that owes as much to classic rock as it does to basement punk.

The exuberant pop-punk of old has morphed into epic Who-style stadium rock, with thundering drums underpinning windmill chords and shout-from-the-rooftops choruses. Rock operas demand nothing less, and Green Day delivers.