Uno, Dos, Tre: Green Day’s Flawed Album Trilogy at 10

Here’s a mad proposition for you; if Green Day ever decide to go down the obviously lucrative jukebox musical route again, they shouldn’t look to their classic hits or even another rock opera like 21st Century Breakdown for their source material, they should revisit their mostly forgotten 2012 trilogy of albums, Uno, Dos and Tre. It’s not because these three discs are particularly narratively cohesive or even, for Green Day, especially ground-breaking. Much of the music is forgettable and it’s not unfair to think that the trilogy was ultimately one decent album’s worth of material padded out with flimsy B-sides. But none of that detracts from the fact that out of everything Green Day has done post the stratospheric success of American Idiot, the trilogy is easily the most interesting and, potentially, the most personal.

Let’s just back in time for some context, as nobody would blame you for not remembering the specifics of the three albums and their release. In the wake of their big but not exactly zeitgeist seizing follow up to American Idiot, 21st Century Breakdown, the announcement that Green Day would be releasing three albums in quick succession was surrounded by suggestions that the new music would be characterised by a return to relative simplicity, eschewing politics in favour of the kind of raucous pop-punk that Green Day made their names with. It was an understandable move. 21st Century Breakdown was a massively ambitious record, but released in the halcyon first months of the Obama administration, its attempt at American Idiot-evoking rage seemed out of touch.

But there was a bigger issue at play here too. While American Idiot at the time seemed to signify a new era for the band, in retrospect it looks more like the last hurrah of an old one. With Billie Joe Armstrong being 32 at the time of American Idiot’s release, it really was the last time he could convincingly sing about disaffected youth with anything like authenticity. As such, the idea of a back-to-basics approach for a punk band entering their 40s wasn’t an entirely convincing one, especially when it would represent for the band their largest amount of new music in the smallest amount of time. As such, the trilogy was a weird and contradictory proposition, a return to simplicity wrapped up in the most ambitious release in Green Day’s history.

Of course, the most memorable aspect of Uno’s debut is Armstrong’s very public onstage meltdown at the 2012 iHeart Radio Music Festival. Armstrong’s rant “I’m not Justin Bieber you motherfuckers!” upon seeing that his set was about to end precipitated a stint in rehab and ended any chances of a big promotional tour for the trilogy of albums, which were released with decreasing fanfare over the remaining months of 2012. What’s interesting, however, is the degree to which the iHeartRadio debacle confirmed something that was evident to anyone who listened to the trilogy, that in 2012, Billie Joe Armstrong was not okay.

Of course this is hardly news, but to listen through the trilogy with an idea of what Armstrong was going through at the time is to discover one of the most interesting and personal collections of music in Green Day’s history. For all that the music across the three albums did return to relatively straightforward hooks and melodies, the lyrics waded into uncharted new territory for Green Day, territory not as sexy as the Jesus of Suburbia’s youthful angst, but arguably more powerful and real, the terror of getting older and no longer knowing your place in the world.

There was some minimal coverage at the time talking about how the new music subtextually underscored Armstrong’s problems, but I would argue it was more text than subtext. The most powerful songs across the trilogy are the ones suffused with weariness and melancholy, which is, to be honest, a lot of them, no matter how much thematic weight is hidden by the catchy tunes. Stay The Night laments running out of time. Carpe Diem directly muses on whether the singer is still too young to die. Sweet 16 makes a not altogether convincing case for things being better now than they were, but is shot through with a yearning for the old days that lyrically Armstrong writes off as just ‘fine’. Rusty James talks explicitly about being the last party animal when everyone else has grown up and moved on, all the while hoping that ‘one day we will fight again’. And those are only the songs on Uno.

Look then at Lazy Bones on Dos, an aching cry for respite from gnawing exhaustion and a plagued mindset. Or, in my opinion the song that best captures the melancholic, self-flagellating spirit of the trilogy; X-Kid. “Hey little kid, did you wake up late one day and you’re not so young, but you’re still dumb and you’re numb to your old glory even now it’s gone?” Armstrong sings with a combination of self-loathing and pity but ultimately awareness. The song is about a friend of his who took their own life, but it’s not a stretch to see it equally as the lament of a former party animal holding themselves to account.

Even the ostensibly happier songs on the albums take on new meaning when viewed in context of the whole. Songs like Oh Love or Fell For You feel almost desperate in their striving for joy or exuberance. And it’s that very desperation that makes them more than just the forgettable late era bops that most fans seem to write them off as. There’s a dark ambivalence throughout all three of these albums, the sense of an emotional tug of war between the person you think you should be and the person you wish you still were, a keen sense of being stuck between past and future with no clue of who to be in the present. It’s something that, if we’re being charitable, maybe accounts for some of the more scattered attributes of the trilogy. For all that I urge fans to revisit the songs if they haven’t in a while (especially if they’re now a little more world weary than they were in 2012), I’m not suggesting that Uno, Dos and Tre are collectively some kind of forgotten masterpiece. The albums progressively lose focus. Uno is largely an enjoyable blast of pop-punk infused with melancholy, but Dos is weighed down by experiments that don’t work and Tre, with a couple of notable exceptions, feels like a tired collection of leftovers, including the soulless The Forgotten, fittingly written for a Twilight movie.

It should be stressed that it’s impossible to know with any real insight what Billie Joe Armstrong’s life was like at the time he wrote these songs. There’s pain in the lyrics and obviously the iHeart thing wasn’t indicative of a particularly healthy mind. But I would argue that good songwriters expose the rough and raw parts of themselves and through this tend to discover the tunes that resonate. It’s one of the things that made American Idiot so powerful, while it captured a very particular time, there’s passion and pain and personality that makes it land more than pure political commentary ever could. The trilogy stripped back the political to focus on the personal and perhaps in doing so lost any chance to hit big, but captured a truthfulness that I hope Green Day return to again.

Looking at the trilogy, it’s easy to wonder whether Armstrong had entirely let go of the narrative structure he employed for American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown. In the lead up to release he described the albums respectively as ‘getting ready for the party, the party, and the clean-up’; a summation that doesn’t exactly cry intricate rock opera. But insofar as these three records have any narrative, it’s not a stretch to see Uno as being about an almost middle-aged man seeing time pass him by and breaking away from his family, potentially through infidelity, then trying to recapture his lost youth. Dos, then, ‘the party’, is the uncomfortable reality of trying to live out those half-baked fantasies despite the wild life feeling nothing like it used to, with Stray Heart (the midpoint of the trilogy) being the moment where he realises just how much he’s screwed up and how his own impulses are separating him from the people he loves. And Tre is the final reckoning, the reconciliations and breakthroughs, although Green Day’s next album, Revolution Radio, ultimately argues a more cohesive and compelling case for learning to accept that where you are now is not where you were.

At a certain point nothing an aging rock band can do will please those who just want more of the same. Green Day are no longer the band who produced Dookie and honestly, nor could or should they be. Personally I would find it far more interesting to hear his explorations of reaching his fifties than any attempts to produce American Idiot 3.0. In much the way that Bruce Springsteen’s music has aged with him, creating a kind of thematic autobiography, Uno, Dos and Tre suggest a potential future for Green Day as a punk equivalent.

And sure, songs about the malaise of middle age won’t lead to another American Idiot level hit, but it’s also next to impossible for any band or musician to produce one generation defining album, let alone two for two different generations. If recent albums like Father of All Motherfuckers suggest a kind of identity crisis for Green Day, then it’s worth wondering if their general snubbing of the trilogy is the wrong move. Maybe there are lessons to be learned from it other than what not to do. The combination of ambition and honesty isn’t always a perfect formula, but it’s better than trying to recapture the past. Something the songs on Uno, Dos and Tre know all too well.