By Ryan Sexton, Assistant Entertainment Editor
ays “something inside your heart has died.” I couldn’t agree more. This week, Tom Kitt and conductor Carmel Dean’s musical interpretation of Green Day’s rock opera “American Idiot” is a slick, compressed, kidz bop turgid block of sound. Now that punk rock has been officially Reader’s Digested, your smelly aunt can safely bump along in her Camry, tissues in back window, to the tracks of “American Idiot.”
One of the biggest issues with “American Idiot,” and with the Broadway incarnation of it is that the music, and the story, is trying to be so many things at once. A mélange can work plenty fine, but it can also get muddy. The story of the production centers around Johnny and Tunny, two boys bored in Jingletown, USA, who venture into the city. But the story gets crudely simple in parts. “Dookie,” Green Day’s 1994 magnus opus, is lighter fair as far as punk is concerned, but was tight, focused, and had a flavor that was needed at the time- in it’s music and story. It resonated with punk rock devotees. By contrast, the release of “American Idiot,” and the subsequent release of the musical, were not winning over any Black Flag fans. The people it did win over seemed to be easily pleased with the top 40 buzz. It would be an interesting exercise to search through the record collections of the critics who actually gave the initial album favorable reviews.
A band can be whoever they want. People can enjoy their music. That does not qualify a band, nor a Broadway production, as possessing greatness. A critic’s blessing doesn’t necessarily do this either. What “American Idiot” has on Broadway is tightness. Tom Kitt, musical supervisor, got the sounds right. The mix is generally faithful to the original album. Some of the vocals sound a bit contrived, as they should: the singers are not people who wrote the songs or have any personal investment in them. The pitch and tone are good, but there’s something missing from those words. It’s like asking Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth to play Nirvana covers: when you have something as passionate as rock music can be, it is a mistake to put it in the hands of another musician-even competent ones. While American Idiot was not an object of my affection in it’s album format, it was a solid release.
This production might or might or might not be tenuous. But as far as the music goes, one quality can be ascribed. At an early age, you probably noticed that Kraft singles don’t quite taste the same- likewise, the score here is well done but a stuffy, stale, and slightly artificial. In other mediums, you might be able to get away with insincerity, but not with music. Billie Joe should have thought that over before handing the reigns over to Tom Kitt and Carmel Dean, two men who know music, but don’t know what was going on in Joe’s head when he wrote those tunes.
Billie Joe, Green Day’s Frontman, performing live ( Creative Commons)
