![]() Finally the song breaks open with the release of the sing-along chorus: “Everything has changed I like it this way…. ![]() Built atop the double-eighth-note-and-pause riff of Jett’s “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll,” “Everything Has Changed” uses that stop-and-go rhythm to build tension around memories of living on whiskey and tears. You can hear that on “Everything Has Changed,” the story of her new-found sobriety. In any case, getting sober has enabled her to focus on her best assets, and now those hooks are locked, Jett-like, into the rhythm of each song. Perhaps those same ambitions led to the insecurities and drug-and-alcohol problems she discussed in Lizzie Manno’s interview in Paste earlier this year. Too often her ambitions to be a Laurel Canyon poet like Joni Mitchell or a rebel rocker like Chrissie Hynde detached her distilled hooks from the song’s groove and thus diluted their impact. Too often she has allowed what she’d like to be interfere with what she is. Like Jett and Armstrong, Cosentino has a rare instinct for contagious melodies, but she hasn’t always appreciated her own strengths. Bethany Cosentino’s soprano has often resembled her role models, and the guitar riffs cooked up by her and bandmate Bobb Bruno often had a Blackhearts quality. On the duo’s new album, Always Tomorrow, Best Coast sounds more like Jett than ever. ![]() Green Day is not the only California band channeling Jett in 2020. “Stab You in the Heart” borrows its intro from the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” and its bass line from the Beatles’ “Dizzy Miss Lizzy.” The handclaps from Jett’s “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” are all over Green Day’s “Graffitia.” So much for punk purity. That comes from “Meet Me on the Roof,” a song so giddily happy sounding that it justifies to its similarity to “Up on the Roof,” the song that Carole King and Gerry Goffin wrote for the Drifters. Much of the album is compellingly danceable, even if Armstrong describes himself as “crawling across the dance floor I think I lost my phone.” ![]() The second single, “Ready, Aim, Fire,” begins with the line, “Kick the dog when the whistle blows,” but the chorus is so galvanizing that the National Hockey League adopted it for a national broadcast. On the title track and first single, for example, he invites a would-be lover to join him “in a bed of blood and money.” The words are purposefully off-putting, but the rave-up music is powerfully seductive. Former glam-rocker Butch Walker was the co-producer, and he nudged the sound in Jett’s direction.Īrmstrong’s lyrics are still those of a mallrat cynic (“I am a kid of a bad education,” he sings on “Oh Yeah!” “The shooting star of a lowered expectation”), but the verbal pessimism is countered by the musical optimism of the choruses. Most of the record bolsters a Blackhearts’ stomp with high-pitched vocals, handclaps and sparkles of electronica enhancing the hooks. It’s a knack they’ve recovered on The Father of All Motherfuckers.įor the new record, the trio of Armstrong, drummer Tre Cool and bassist Mike Dirnt (together since 1991) slow the tempos a bit to put them more in Jett’s ballpark and thus reveal her influence as never before. It’s a skill they foolishly laid aside for their overblown and overrated rock opera American Idiot and its hapless sequel, 21st Century Breakdown. This was a talent that Green Day demonstrated on their brilliant first three albums for Reprise (1994’s Dookie, 1995’s Insomniac and 1997’s Nimrod). This is distilling all the tuneful pleasure in a song into a few lines that can be pounded home without ever losing their appeal. This is a different gift than that of, say, Paul McCartney or Taylor Swift, who can spin out a melody that stays interesting over 32 bars. Otherwise you’re going to sound merely mechanical, even if you get as loud as Jett’s hard-rock peers in the ’80s or as fast as Green Day’s punk peers in the ’90s.įortunately, both Armstrong and Jett have a rare gift for inventing-or borrowing-four-bar phrases that are familiar enough to feel comfortable, new enough to feel memorable and rhythmic enough to be heard in the hips as well as the ears. She understood better than anyone that if you’re going to strip rock ’n’ roll down to its 4/4 basics, you’d better add a catchy sweetener. ![]() If they wanted to climb out of their 21st-century slump of straining-for-meaning concept albums, Green Day couldn’t have adopted a better role model than Jett. Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong wrote new verses to vent his disdain for social-media narcissism, but the chorus’s shotgun marriage of melodic hook and slam-bang beat remains irresistible. One of the highlights on Green Day’s recent career-reviving album, Father of All Motherfuckers, is the song “Oh Yeah!” which takes its title, its earworm chorus and its sizzling guitar riff from the 1980 track “Do You Wanna Touch Me? (Oh Yeah)” by Joan Jett & the Blackhearts. ![]()
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