SOUNDTRACK: GREEN DAY-¡Tre! (2012).
The third and final album of the trilogy is called ¡Tre! (and yes I enjoyed that they named this one ¡Tre! as opposed to ¡Tre! and put Tre Cool on the cover—not exactly the most clever thing around, but it made me smile and makes me think that they only did three albums so they could have this title/cover combo). And, yes, this is my least favorite of the three discs. It feels like a bonus disc—songs that don’t really belong anywhere else. It’s kind of an album full of ballads (but that would suck) so they made it mostly ballads with other things too.
Like “Brutal Love” a slow ballad (complete with horns) that builds into a standard rocker (it’s got a very “rock and roll” vibe). Many punk songs are really just rock and roll played fast and this is certainly one of those songs. (I don’t care for that kind of punk so much). “Missing You” is a another mid-tempo rocker–the kind they do very well.
“8th Avenue Serenade” has another cool sound (as in different from the rest of the album). “Drama Queen” is an acoustic guitar ballad with creepy creepy lyrics. It’s probably my least favorite Green Day song ever. “X-Kid”seems even more simple than other Green Day songs (does Billie Joe throw anything away?) It sounds like a classic rock song form the mid 80s. “Sex, Drugs & Violence” brings the disc back some with a fun poppy rocker. “A Little Boy Named Train” sounds a lot like “Carpe Diem” from ¡UnoI (same chords, just played slower—although the verses do change it a bit.
“Amanda” a mid tempo rocker and “Walk Away” is another slow song that sounds like classic rock. “Dirty Rotten Bastards” clocks in at over 6 minutes! It’s got several short sections in it though (which makes it more fun). The first part is the melody of The Marines Song. “99 Revolutions” is so catchy it even has a chorus with only drums (that lowest common denominator of songs that is guaranteed to get the crowd to sing along).
So yes, there are a few good songs in this collection, but they could have easily scraped out the good ones and dumped them on the first two discs and just put Tre’s picture on the back of both of them.
[READ: September 6, 2013] “Neighbors”
Unferth, like Julavits, writes a kind of narrative piece about sleeplessness. It’s hard to imagine her living the way she does, but if you’ve read her memoir, she has certainly slept in worse places than a Chicago slum. It turns out that her downstairs neighbor, Maximilian, would turn on his TV late at night and leave it on all night. The odd thing was that he had no electricity in his apartment—he ran an extension cord to the light in the foyer. When Unferth would get fed up with the noise, she would go downstairs and unplug the cord.
But then Maximilian’s girlfriend Dorothy moved back in. The two of them fought nightly—loud screaming fights that were worse than the TV noise (when Unferth unplugged the TV, Dorothy found an electricity source elsewhere, although Unferth couldn’t figure out where).
She makes a very interesting distinction about the type of noise that might wake you up as compared to visceral fighting of your neighbors. From things like jets and trains (or a fire engine, like at my house): “You may lose sleep over them, but you won’t lose sleep over them.” Whereas hearing your neighbors screaming at each other is far more disturbing.
Eventually she had to call the landlord and then the police. But it happened so regularly that the landlord stopped taking her calls and the police simply stopped showing up.
Unferth compares it to when she taught class at Cheshire Correctional Institution. She asked the students to write about their night—the quality of light, the noise etc. She learned that guards came in and turned the lights in the cells to “dim” in the middle of the night to do a bed check. And how this would always disturb your sleep. Worse yet, one student’s light was stuck o dim all night long, not dark enough or light enough to fully sleep through.
Perhaps that explains why I wake up when my daughter leaves the bathroom light on at night.
Unferth has been through some pretty rough things. Sleep deprivation may not be the worst, but it ranks up there.
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