The wave of post-punk is surfed best by Green Day.

What I really enjoy about Green Day is how they have survived in the music industry. When they burst onto the scene in 1994-95 I got that inevitable feeling of this being a one-hit-album band, that Dookie was as good as it ever was gonna get for these guys. I mean, even how great the album was, it was such a cartoonish approach to the whole album that you didn’t believe this could go any further. And when I saw them playing at the Oslo Spektrum in 1995 it was 45 minutes of playing and then “We’re out”. There we stood wondering why this gig was over so fast. OK, until now this seems like a poor review, but we are on the turn here.

This trio are by all means a force to be reckoned with. They have earned their place on the highest level in music by delivering a hell of a lot of great songs, songs that are funny, that make you feel happy and so often have a message squeezed in between the lines. They have that seriousness underneath the layer of nineties fun-punk, punk that brought the sun into the adolescent bedrooms when Rock N Roll and Metal was banging it’s heads out with the post-Guns N Roses and Metallica period, after Kurt blew his brains out and Grunge crawled back into its cave and died like a pre-historic creature.

Green Day is the band I turn to when the clouds gather in my head with that feeling of longing for guitars mixed up with melancholia. Green Day tend to turn the smile back on and send messages of more than fun into my brain. It’s “don’t give a F**k” combined with a social conscience. Instead of being over pretentious and trying to be too smart the lyrics of Billie Joe seems more like paintings of everyday life of a white lower middleclass kid. Hanging around with nothing to do, no future, no plans, just a job with a nametag on the chest and carrying the upper class on his back. You are the legs of the table, kid, you are the carpet under my feet, the doormat and the bell calling the servants. What can you do about that? Go into unemployment. That’s a career worth waiting for.

But we have some great tunes for ya, kid. When punk broke out a bit of aggression was what the trashy kids of the UK needed to bang their heads in. Fun was what the post-punk wave of the early nineties needed with songs like “Welcome to paradise” and “When I come around”, overlapped by “Warning”, turning into “Know your enemy”, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and “American Idiot”. You can clearly see how Green Day are maturing along with their audience. It’s like they are walking hand in hand with the people the music was designed for. The big punk wave on the other hand died out or got weeded out with the trash bin when the garbage truck rolled by.

The first wave of punk started the movement, the main wave brought the tsunami wiping out the crowd but the post-wave was something you could surf on into the late nineties and all the way to the new millennium. Green Day is one of the bands that has surfed this wave of post-punk like a Kelly Slater, Laird Hamilton or Taj Burrow in the most outstanding way, people that make it all seem so easy.