err..alright then. What would you consider to be genuine punk?
It's irrelevant - The Ramones or The Clash or The Sex Pistols I suppose, if I'm pushed. But The Clash only really got good when they brought reggae and other stuff into it, and the Sex Pistols and the Ramones never progressed beyond their single limited palette of sounds really. And if you look at the Ramones scene, all the contemporary bands who were less punk, are far more interesting - Talking Heads, Blondie, Television, Patti Smith Group etc.
The whole point of punk was to be able to express yourself without needing to be a master of your instrument like all the boring mid 70s prog rockers noodling away, it was a reaction against that. But once you realise that ultimately music must be about music and not ethos, style or aesthetics, then having musicians who can barely play is less of a good idea (hence the Clash going on to be perhaps the most lionised of the punk bands, as it turned out Jones and Headon were superb musically, and Simenon wasn't far behind once he got started.)
Green Day manage to employ all the pretentious bombast of the 70s rockers whom punk formed as a reaction against, with the irritable pretension of being punk. Worst of all, they're just rubbish - lame lyrics, ripping off Oasis chord sequences (third hand then...) and pretensions of operatic grandeur within a punk context (oxymoronic).
'Do you have the time to listen to me whine?'
No, and it's fucking fake anyway as you've had millions in the bank since about 1994.
I'm sure lots of people enjoy them and yadda yadda who am I to grudge them. Bah.
