The Revenge Against Bloat Rock
The last post on this blog displayed a decided preference for the easy, the breezy and the casual in rock music over the making of Big Statements. Rock musicians just ain’t philosophers.
That got me thinking about the most simple, catchy two-chord pop punk issued over the last year. And it was put out by a guy — along with his family — with a natural penchant for navel-gazing and the issuance of important proclamations about life.
That would be “I Want Revenge” by The Boo, a side-project of the occasionally self-important Billie Joe Armstrong. While Green Day certainly has put out a lot of catchy two minute pieces of pop punk goodness, it occasionally shows bloat rock tendencies. However, the band’s earlier side project, The Foxboro Hot Tubs, put out a terrific — and quite fun — record a couple of years ago steeped in the British Invasion and Garage Rock. It made no Big Statements.
The Boo, though, is even more simple, consisting of Armstrong, his wife and their two sons. It sounds positively 1979. Its fast. Its kind of repetitive. Its kind of obnoxious. It conveys a single theme over three buzz-saw minutes — “you broke my heart, I’m gonna get you back.” It thus has all of the elements to have been featured prominently on Rodney on the Roq way back in the day. Here it is:
Heck, the packaging even looks like a 45 sold at Rhino Records back in 1979:
Channeling 1979
You can call “I Want Revenge” nostalgia. You can call it backward-looking. Or you can just call it fun. It makes no Big Statements. It doesn’t even try. And that’s a really good thing.
Pop That Goes Crunch! 