OK, a little background: my car is so old, it does not have a CD player; it has a cassette tape deck, but hey, just try to find anything decent on cassette these days!
In the little backwater town I live in, there are lots of radio stations: you can choose Country, Christian (one of our radio stations is actually called “He’s Alive”; I gave it a listen hoping it would be music inspired by Frankenstein’s monster, or zombies, but no, it’s Jesus), or Christian Country. Or you can listen to Magic. Magic plays the older stuff I like, plus some newer stuff (some of which I like; I’m embarrassed to admit I hum along to the new Uncle Kracker song “You Make Me Smile”).
So I was driving home from Maryland yesterday, was within range of Magic, so I tuned in. And this. . .song. . .starts playing, all about “I walk alone, I walk alone. . .My shadow’s the only one who walks beside me”, on and on, like really bad angsty emo teenager poetry, set to what some might call “music”. Gah. It made me want to stab my eardrums out, but at the same time, I was so fascinated with it, on a macabre level, that I couldn’t turn it off! When the DJ came on to give info, she said it was “Green Day’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams”. Hey! Even the title is angsty and pretentious!
They followed Green Day with Harry Chapin’s Cat’s in the Cradle. At that point, I removed the straw from the soft drink I’d bought 25 miles back, and tried to gnaw the end into a sharp enough point to just gouge my heart out with it, but no success. 
I know after their first hit, Green Day fans were saying “They sold out”, but seriously, when did they go from “punk/pseudo-punk” to “I cut myself to see if I can still feel anything” emo? :rolleyes:
(And it looked good on them; I mean, Bowie was so punk that he could wear eyeliner, wingtip shoes and Zoot suits, and still be the epitome of old-school punk!)
