Source: Faroutmagazine.co.uk.
UK – For any creative musician, the recording studio is essentially a playground. Even though it’s easy to let loose when on the live stage, the studio always provides an open canvas to create something that might be able to come across when playing live in front of people. It’s easy to experiment, but Green Day also saw it as an opportunity to have some fun.
As the band reached the early 2000s, they started to wane in popularity for the first time. After Dookie set everything on fire and pushed the band on to a new level in 1994, Billie Joe Armstrong began experimenting with the kind of songs he wanted to write for the band, including material not necessarily confined to pop-punk. Though Nimrod got the ball rolling with different material, Warning was where the gloves came off, ready for musical experimentation.
Across each song, Green Day began experimenting with what they could do in the confines of rock, embracing acoustic instruments on the title track and ‘Minority’. There were also some lyrical departures like ‘Blood Sex and Booze’, where Armstrong sings about wanting to be sexually satisfied through S&M. This wasn’t the first time that Green Day sang about something like bondage (look to Tre Cool’s ‘Dominated Love Slave’ for that distinction), but it was the first time that the band got an actual sex worker in the studio with them.
To get the strange opening of the song finalised, Armstrong remembers a dominatrix showing up at the studio to lay down some whip sounds, recalling to Alan Di Perna, “Tre called up this dominatrix. I think it was probably someone he knew. And these two women came in and beat the shit out of our second engineer. We just got a little tidbit at the beginning and a couple of whip cracks, and we put that in the song”.
The song was also a stylistic departure, as Green Day take on a swing rhythm in the verses, as Armstrong begs to be whipped. Armstrong blew it off when asked whether he liked to engage in said activities, saying, “People still think that I masturbate five times a day because of what I said in ‘Longview’”.
Although this might have been a change of pace, it was only a drop in the bucket for what the rest of the album had to offer. Outside of the group’s typical punk rock sound, songs like ‘Hold On’ boast a folk rock influence, and something like ‘Misery’ is practically without genre, sounding like some strange detour into a Tim Burton movie soundtrack. Though none of these translated to big record sales, the standout track ‘Minority’ was the first overtly political song Armstrong would write, taking a jab at the Moral Majority.
Despite the lacklustre reception, the political angle would grow even stronger once the Iraq War began, as Armstrong wrote American Idiot based on what it’s like trying to grow up in the ‘00s. Their bold new reinvention would give their career a second wind, making them pop-punk kings all over again. Even though something like ‘Blood, Sex and Booze’ might not have gotten them on the radio any time soon, it taught Green Day what they could do. Angsty pop-punk could have lasted them for a few more years, but it’s sometimes better to take a risk.
