I was in the midst of a very brief and unoffending argument with five star theory’s bass player Tim Lockridge a few days before Warning came out. Tim knew what he was talking about. He’d at one point ran greenday.net, the official fansite for the band. And he made this declaration: “No band has done more for punk in the ’90s than Green Day.” I refuted it, kinda quietly, but mostly ineffectively. And after I left, I had a small case of l’esprit d’escalier, which is French for “The Spirit of the Stairways.” It’s a cute little phrase for the clever thing you think of 20 minutes after a conversation and wish you had said. My phrase?: “No band has hurt punk more in the ’90s than Green Day.” Because they have—no band has further perpetuated the idea that all punk rock consists of fast, but redundant rehashings of the Hank Williams Sr. three-chord archetypes. No band has brought more Op-Ivy-t-shirt-wearing, safety-pin-piercing, leather-clad “punk rockers” to the malls of America. If Green Day represents the veracity of punk, any ready-made-iconoclast can say, “Punk isn’t dead; it lives on in corporate-made t-shirts with witty slogans declaring Punk Not Dead.”

But that’s not Green Day’s fault. They’ve never fully espoused punk rock ethics, they just went along whenever people dumped the superficial punk image on them, and shrugged their shoulder. They’ve always been making sweet, slapsticky songs with strong melodies, with an occasional forceful or speedy number. And they used that sweetness as the idiosyncracy that makes them punk. Most importantly, as bad as this sounds, they never thought more of themselves than they were. But when they fill their songs with pretentious Clash-isms of “artistic growth”—not good. When they become so drunk with how good “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” from Nimrod was and further their experimentation of acoustic balladry—eh, still, no. When they fully embrace folk music, but only manage to have dissected all its stagnant elements and combine them with the minimalism of punk—I’m just not digging it. And when Green Day start saying “We’ve been listening to a lot of Bob Dylan lately”—sorry Billie, but it’s really dull, sluggish  and boring. Makes you think what the “Warning” is for.

Oh, there are some new things that are good, like a saxophone that manages to give “Jackass” some life (despite making you realize for the thousandth time, Oh, they must like The Clash), or the Bangles beat on “Castaway.” But then, taking into account the numerous cliché instances where a Hammond organ’s used (“Church on Sunday”), or harmonica jumps in (“Hold On”), half of these instruments are either mixed too low to have an effect (but enough to obtrusively brag), or they’re done unimaginatively. Even if you can ignore that, and still dig your way through the snail-like songs and find the melodies that make Green Day worth it, then you still have to ask yourself: On a record where one of the chief themes is individuality, is this punk? Because if it is, Warning’s punk that wants to be “respectable” and “appreciated.” And I personally can’t think of a bigger atrocity towards punk.