When Green Day made a Devo-style new wave record
The early 2000s wasn’t the best time to be a member of Green Day. Although they had made one of their most intriguing records during this period with Warning, the reception to the album was ice-cold, as a large section of their fanbase wanted to move on to more interesting pop-punk acts that sprang up in their wake, like Sum 41 and Blink-182. Green Day needed something bold to put them back on top, so they naturally followed synth-pop.
Granted, the idea of making some of the most beautiful songs ever made didn’t happen overnight. After hearing feedback from their label, the pop-punk trio thought it best to go back to the drawing board and make something more in line with what they were doing in their prime on Dookie. Although they had an album ready to go in Cigarettes and Valentines, they walked into the studio one day to find all the masters stolen.
Before going back to the drawing board for American Idiot, the band decided to have some fun by making an alias band known as The Network. Donning strange masks to “conceal their identity”, their debut album, Money Money 2020, feels more at home in the early days of new wave when acts like Devo were ruling the underground scene. Although certain lines jump out as something that Green Day might write, like on ‘X-ray Hamburger’ or ‘Roshambo’, most of the heavy guitars have been replaced with keyboards while every single member took turns behind the mic.
Billie Joe Armstrong shines on his respective songs like ‘Spike’ and ‘Supermodel Robots’, but the vocal tone of bassist Mike Dirnt feels the most at home in this style, almost adopting a cadence like he’s some robot that has been asked to front a rock band for a few minutes. That old punk itch never goes away, though, with the band offering up a killer version of The Misfits’s ‘Teenagers From Mars’ towards the end of the record.
Although the vocal tone is Green Day, the band had always denied that they were The Network, always playing into the tongue-in-cheek humour of the side project by claiming the band was one of their rivals. While the project served as a nice palette cleanser, Green Day was ready to move onto something bigger, reinventing the modern version of the concept album with American Idiot, which detailed what it was like living in post-9/11 America.
Even after becoming one of the biggest rock bands in the world all over again, Green Day didn’t stop with the gimmicks in the leadup to their follow-up, 21st Century Breakdown. Before setting up shop in the studio, the band created Foxboro Hottubs, another side project that played ’60s-style garage rock. The Network also had a second life, making a sequel to their debut during the pandemic with Money Money 2020 Part 2: We Told You So.
Green Day was never going to be in this mould for very long, always chalking up the band to just a side project to put some of their half-baked ideas while they worked on newer material. Still, the band’s winning streak must have been unbelievable when even their gimmick bands sounded this good.
