I'm sure plenty of people stopped "recognizing" the band when they pivoted to Warning after Nimrod. Is anyone really surprised they went from Warning to American Idiot? The band obviously does whatever they want, musically.
American Idiot has so many of the hallmarks of their earlier music. They are extraordinarily recognizably them on that album.
Warning sounds great as it is, but when they play those songs live, they RIP. I love that Minority is a staple and they pick up the tempo just a bit and give the guitars a little more teeth. When I’ve heard other cuts from that record live, it breaks my heart just a little that they weren’t recorded with that bite.
American Idiot is great and has incredible songs and moments, but it changed the sound and the way they presented themselves to the world, how they looked… it felt like a different band, a band I still love, but not the same one. Of course they can do whatever they want, and it was the right decision seeing how they became much bigger, I’m just talking about my experience.
I feel like these two images summarize the difference between Warning-era Green Day and AI-era Green Day better than any words can.
Never really thought about that much even though AI was the last album they released that I would listen to much. I definitely see your point. First time they presented themselves as rock stars/a huge rock band with more of a "themed" image. But the personality of the band didn't seem to change much.
I definitely think Warning is closer to AI in many ways than to anything before it. I just happen to think AI is way better than Warning. Warning to me feels like a sort of shaky transition.
Warning is a very good record that I’d rank like, fifth because of how many strong releases they’ve put out
There are really people 19 years later who think AI was a misstep/selling out and feel the need to say so? That’s incredible lmao
Warning is awesome. Has some of the catchiest songs the band has ever put out (and that’s saying something), top 3 GD record many days for me. Still not really close to AI at all. I understand not everyone sees it this way but if you marooned me on a desert island and the only music I got forever was a stereo with an old six disc cd changer, AI is getting one of the six spots.
Same. It's kind of incredible to listen to the passionate storytelling of AI or the creative themes and ideas of Warning (the Tim remaster reminded me of how Billie pays homage to Waitress In The Sky during Warning). Especially compared with the majority of what has come after 21CBD which seems so lyrically uninspired.
Green Day looked mostly like other pop punk/punk bands in the 90s looked, then when they released an album in 2004, they looked like what most pop punk/emo/whatever bands looked like. They were able to image themselves like (or close enough to)the emo craze that was blowing up at the time without actually being emo music. It worked! Also, I don’t really think they looked all that different from what I expected them to look like tbh. I mean… granted I was a casual fan but when I saw this video and Billie Joe doing stuff like this in it I was like oh yeah that’s definitely Green Day lol. Of course the shirt/tie combo was different from what I remembered them looking like before but, again, that was how bands like that were dressing then. Shit by then Alkaline Trio was playing in full 3 piece suits at their shows and in every promo picture haha