I remember it vividly: On a long bus ride for an elementary school field trip, one of my oldest friends handed me a cassette that would be the very first turning point on the musical journey that my life has become.<\/p>\n
The year was 1993, and I was very much into rap at the tender age of 8. Caleb, who had a serious disdain for my musical choices at the time, took my Walkman and inserted a recently released tape of Kerplunk<\/em>, Green Day’s second album. I’d never heard of the band, and was not sure what to expect.<\/p>\n The snarling growl that accompanied Billie Joe Armstrong’s guitar slapped my eardrums around on the opening track, “2,000 Light Years Away,” and I didn’t know what to do. It was odd, at first, but as I made my way through the tracks, I became quickly hooked on the pop-punk that would soon propel Green Day into super-stardom.<\/p>\n And this was only the beginning of what became my first, and biggest, band obsession. I made my parents get me their debut album,\u00a01,039 Smoothed Out Slappy Hours,<\/em> which was a compilation of all their earliest material. I loved Green Day before anyone knew who they were.<\/p>\n Later that year, a friend and I devised a plan to get our parents to take us to see them at Union College<\/a> in Schenectady<\/a>. To make a very long and boring story short, the two of us ended up by ourselves at the concert, swinging and swaying in a rowdy group of maybe 1,000 people, and I will never forget the awe I felt seeing a trio of early 20s kids playing the fastest and catchiest rock and roll on the planet. It started a live music obsession that, to this day, comes first in my life after my family and work.<\/p>\n I can talk about how\u00a0Dookie<\/em> is my all-time favorite album ever released by anyone, or about how\u00a0Insomniac<\/em> spoke to my pre-pubescent self better than anyone, or how\u00a0Nimrod<\/em>, while not universally liked, showed how Green Day can shake things up. What about\u00a0Warning<\/em>, which featured a bevy of instruments which helped the band veer away from three-chord pop-punk? Or how\u00a0American Idiot<\/em> vaulted the band back to super popularity and brought music and politics together again? I don’t think we need to talk much about\u00a021st Century Breakdown<\/em>, or their quickly released trio of albums,\u00a0Uno, Dos\u00a0<\/em>and Tres<\/em>, which were not Green Day’s best efforts.<\/p>\n Now, 23 years later, Green Day just dropped its 12th studio album,\u00a0Revolution Radio,\u00a0<\/em>and I have to say that for a band I idolized growing up, then grew to despise a bit in the mid-2000s, they have reeled me right back in. Gone are the days of songs about masturbation, moving out of mom’s house and staying up all night snorting meth.<\/p>\n