Rock Is Dead, They Say

I suppose it's fitting that I'm currently re-reading The Time Traveler's Wife. Last night at the Verizon Center, I performed a spontaneous time stunt of my own, in which I traveled back at least 20 years and stood with my teenage daughter of today, bobbing up and down to the furiously accelerated beat of a nuevo-punk band.

Translation? I took my 14-year-old daughter and her craziest, liveliest friend to see Green Day. I expected to be the oldest person there. To ward off evil spirits, I made sure I was wearing a t-shirt (Piggly Wiggly), jeans (not capris), and John Lennon signature Chuck Taylor hightops. A neutral ensemble that would help me to blend in but not necessarily mark me as a downtown office rat who just got off work (which I was).

I was swept up in the atmosphere as soon as I got there, although arena rock had never been my thing. In my day, if a band got too big for the Fox Theatre in Atlanta or the 9:30 in DC, I had no use for them. But I stood in line patiently with the girls to buy my daughter a Green Day t-shirt, then was so impressed by the styles that I bought my own, which bore a cartoon of a cheerleader with a banadana tied around her face, cheerfully setting fire to her school with a molotov cocktail. Awesome.

The opening act for Green Day, the Kaiser Chiefs, were a lovely surprise. They were a little punkier than Green Day, with a driving drumline that's absolutely essential to me, but they were no strangers to a guitar tuner or to spot-on harmonies. They gave me a little hope that perhaps punk is still alive somewhere, although by definition it can't be found at the Verizon Center.

As for the headliners, I find Green Day unwilling to be pigeonholed. They're socially conscious, they're metallic and powerful, yet they're capable of pulling off acoustic ballads without sounding like an 80s hair band trying to appear sensitive. They feel genuine, and if you want to question their punk street cred, that seems to be okay with them. They're questioning your punk listening cred. For example, I wonder if the irony of Billy Joe Armstrong singing to his devotees that they are controlled by the media, and their gleeful acceptance of that fact, is lost on his fans. The band offered pyrotechnics, arty-farty but very high-tech video images behind them, and sports arena cliches such as super-soakers and t-shirt guns. Hard to do that with a straight face, unless what you're really saying is "Is this what you want? Here it is. That'll be $75, thank you." That's the true spirit of punk itself.

Don't get me wrong. I would have preferred the stripped-down, raw punk of my earlier days, with no glitzy spectacle and even limited lighting tricks. But Green Day are fabulous showmen, and there's a place for that in nuevo punk. Billy Joe certainly knows how to please a crowd, and while he doesn't come out and mock them in so many words, the message is implicit. He stands on his monitor, and like a tiny punk puppetmaster raises his arms above his head, knowing that his audience will ape him exactly. Last night he even brought up fans from the floor to show them how to do it. And in another stroke of proletariat marketing genius, he repeatedly allowed fans to join him onstage to sing for him. In the case of one lucky, extremely dorky guy, he let him play his guitar onstage for quite some time. This was a dedicated fan who knew the songs and could definitely keep up, and Billy Joe gave him the gift of a lifetime: the certainty of finally getting laid. On behalf of my young daughter, who will soon be the target of oversexed but sexually inexperienced guitar-playing boys, I crow triumphantly, "One less!" Thank you, Billy Joe.