Green Day's rock opera for '21st Century' generation

What American Idiot first suggested, 21st Century Breakdown confirms: Billie Joe Armstrong is the Pete Townshend of the first decade of the new millennium.

Does that mean that the Green Day leader will soon be quoted as saying, "I know what it feels like to be a woman, because I am a woman," and selling his songs for car commercials and CSI spin-offs?

Let's hope not. But it does mean that Green Day's 21st Century Breakdown (Reprise ***½) is to 2004's American Idiot as 1969's Tommy, The Who's first full-length rock opera, is to the band's nine-minute suite, "A Quick One, While He's Away." In other words, a more developed narrative song cycle.

Where else do the parallels lie? Well, just as Tommy was adapted into a Broadway musical in 1993, American Idiot, which has sold 12 million albums, is set to debut in September as a musical at the Berkeley Repertory Theater, hard by the band's home in Oakland, Calif.

21st Century broadens the musical palette of the band - whose members include bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tre Cool, and whose 15 million-selling commercial breakthrough, Dookie, came out in 1994 - to draw heavily on classic-rock sources.

Like Who? Exactly. Just give a listen to 21st Century's power-chord-happy title cut - in which the 37-year-old Armstrong acts his age by admitting that he was "born into Nixon" - while trying to keep visions of a windmilling Townshend from dancing in your head.

Not that the British hard-rock conceptualists are the only discernible musical influence on 21st Century, a three-part rock opera. Many other 20th-century sources abound, from the Doors to Queen to Aerosmith. "¡Viva La Gloria!," for instance, sports a tinkling piano intro reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen's "Jungleland," then bursts into a high-speed rampage that sounds like a sunnier twist on the band that remains Green Day's benchmark even as it moves further from punk-rock orthodoxy: the Ramones.

American Idiot was a raging anti-George W. Bush protest album. It was also an unlikely success story that repositioned - as mega-selling serious artistes - a band of sneering ne'er-do-wells that seemed to be on a slide back toward cult status. (Armstrong's skill as a balladeer and expert melodist is an often-overlooked part of the Green Day arsenal; the prom-theme perennial "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)," off 1997's Nimrod, is Exhibit A.)

On its face, 21st Century seems like an even more hare-brained scheme for commercial success. Its 18 tracks - many of which are divided into multiple parts, "Bohemian Rhapsody"-style - follow the exploits of a pair of characters named Gloria and Christian, each of whom is meant to reflect a side of Armstrong's personality, in post-Bush America.

In that way, the Townshend rock opera that 21st Century most resembles is not Tommy but Quadrophenia, the 1973 double LP that tracks a teenage Brit's fragmented, four-way identity. For all that album's majesty, though, it was nearly impossible to keep the quartet straight.

Armstrong wisely halves the equation. He focuses on the yin and yang of Gloria, the hopeful idealist, "the saint of all the sinners," and "Last of the American Girls" who dreams of constructively making the world a better place, and Christian, the destroyer who declares that "violence is an energy against the enemy," and is ready to toss a Molotov cocktail in the album's bracing first single, "Know Your Enemy."

Green Day worked four years on 21st Century Breakdown, which was produced by Butch Vig, who was also behind Nirvana's Nevermind and is a member of Garbage. Along the way, the band released a more lighthearted album last year under the alias Foxboro Hot Tubs.

The new album, which has fleeting mawkish moments like the power ballad "21 Guns," is up-to-date enough to include "Murder City," inspired by the riots in Oakland in January. That song's first line encapsulates the attitude of the entire album: "Desperate, not hopeless."

The topicality and rage that course through 21st Century might seem to make it unlikely that it can approximate American Idiot's success. To be sure, in these days of shrinking sales, it won't match that album's numbers. A rant against religious fundamentalism like "East Jesus Nowhere" isn't made of the stuff that often tops the charts, and the album's story line is hard to follow.

Plus, the band's antiestablishment default position is better suited to its feelings about the last administration than this one, which all three members support.

But never mind the lyrics, which sometimes suffer from a lack of specificity: What Green Day's eighth album has going for it is Armstrong, a songwriter who has learned from his classic- and punk-rock forebears, and can seemingly roll out of bed 365 days a year and knock out a catchy tune.

For all its ambition, 21st Century Breakdown is a tightly disciplined work that stretches itself - see the near-falsetto that Armstrong unveils in the shimmering love song "Last Night on Earth" - while keeping each song sharp and punchy.

Plus, the album rocks out with relentless momentum, and is chock-full of grabby, radio-ready pop songs universal enough to stand on their own when pulled out of the high-concept song cycle.

I've been trying to think of American rock bands who command a massive audience, have something to say, and continue to top themselves a decade and a half after making themselves known to the mainstream, and can only come up with one: Green Day.