SONG OF THE DAY

“21 Guns” by Green­day (21st Cen­tury Break­down, Reprise Records, 2009). Writ­ten by Bil­lie Joe Armstrong.

INTERESTING FACTS (a la wikipedia)

- It is the 2nd sin­gle from their eighth stu­dio album, 21st Cen­tury Break­down. The sin­gle was released through Reprise Records on May 25, 2009 as a dig­i­tal down­load and July 14, 2009 as a CD single.

- In the radio edit, the song is over forty sec­onds shorter than the album ver­sion because the gui­tar solo is short­ened and the begin­ning is cut out.

- The song is fea­tured on the sound­track to Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen,which was released on June 23, 2009, and it is fea­tured four times in the film itself. It became avail­able for down­load on the music video game series Rock Band on July 7, 2009, along with the songs “East Jesus Nowhere” and “Know Your Enemy”.

- The song was per­formed live on the 34th sea­son of Sat­ur­day Night Live. A live ver­sion was also released on 21 Guns Live EP in Sep­tem­ber 2009.

- Green Day has announced that they will be record­ing a ver­sion of “21 Guns” with the cast of Amer­i­can Idiot. The record­ing will be pro­duced by Bil­lie Joe Arm­strong and will be made avail­able some­time in Novem­ber 2009.

- The song debuted at #55 on the Bill­board Hot 100, peak­ing at #22 (becom­ing their high­est peak­ing song since the 2005 hit “Wake Me Up When Sep­tem­ber Ends”), and #81 on the Cana­dian Hot 100, reach­ing #15. It reached #3 on the Alter­na­tive Songs chart and #17 on the Hot Main­stream Rock Tracks chart. Also, on the Bill­board Pop Songs it reached #37. On the Aus­tralian ARIA Sin­gles Chart, the song peaked at #14. On the UK Sin­gles Chart, it debuted at #100 and rose to #36. It was cer­ti­fied Gold after 13 weeks on the chart, sell­ing over 7,500 copies.

MY TAKE

It’s pretty amaz­ing to see that Green Day still has the incred­i­ble chops and abil­ity to do a live per­for­mance on the Amer­i­can Music Awards (which hap­pened last night), con­sid­er­ing that the band is over twenty years old, its mem­bers are prac­ti­cally middle-aged, and almost every­thing else on awards shows these days is lip-synced with­out ques­tion or remorse [see J-Lo’s bizarre boxing-themed per­for­mance last night, in which she most def­i­nitely bruised her behind dur­ing]

Bil­lie Joe Arm­strong didn’t exactly do the falsetto that I really love in the stu­dio record­ing of this song, but the live per­for­mance was strong and ener­getic and admirable. It’s a great song: very catchy, obvi­ously polit­i­cal, and with a seri­ous heart­beat to it because of both lyrics and melody. I like the back­ground vocal har­monies especially—and what a weird and diverse band that they do stuff like that when once they rocked so hard in “Wel­come To Paradise”.

I, how­ever, am not dis­grun­tled by their evo­lu­tion, though I do wish the 1990’s had never ended musi­cally. Though I’m dis­mayed that songs of the same vein and feel as “Bas­ket­case”, “Wait­ing” and “When I Come Around” aren’t being writ­ten any­more (by Green Day or any­one), I am happy that “Amer­i­can Idiot”, “Wake Me Up When Sep­tem­ber Ends” and “21 Guns” exist, obvi­ous prod­ucts of evolution.

VIDEOS OF THE DAY

Here’s a playlist of my favorite Green Day songs: