We're not trying to start any lawsuits here, but let's face it; some songs just sound too much like other songs to be a coincidences. Or do they? Music doesn't usually come with footnotes or bibliographies, so on Friday nights we engage in wild speculation about where our favorite songwriters might have owed someone a hat tip. Welcome to Friday Night Ripoffs (?) at the LNMC.

"Warning" (the title track from your DJ's favorite Green Day album) sure sounds a helluva lot like The Kinks' "Picture Book". Green Day are clearly no stranger to the creative lift (See: "Boulevard of Broken Dreams/Summer of 69 or Brain Stew/25 or 6 to 4) and to me, this sounds too close for chance. What do you think? Coincidence or theft? What other songs pose that same question to you?

(h/t to Dylan for the heads up on this one.)

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Green Day performing Working Class Hero:

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Congratulations to C&Ler Adam for his winning Dylan album entry and C&Ler Paul for his winning Springsteen album entry.  Thanks for being part of the LNMC community!

This is the third post in a series called Friday Night Ripoffs(?). Here's the deal: every Friday, two songs, where one of them might very well be a gigantic ripoff of the other.

Commenter Uncle Joe McCarthy and C+L blogger Logan Murphy both piped up about this one. Did Green Day lift the riff for "Brain Stew" from Chicago, or is 5th fret, 3rd fret, 2nd fret, 1st fret, open something that just exists in the air? And what about Papa Roach?

Tell us what you think, and leave some suggestions for next week's plagiarism investigation in the comments.

Green Day's new album 21st Century Breakdown is a three part concept album supposedly even more haughty than the last one. This means it's either going to be really fantastic or grandiose rock and roll gasbaggery. The first single, 'Know Your Enemy', thankfully pushes the odds toward the former.

The album follows a young couple through their trials in the modern world through three parts: "Heroes and Cons," "Charlatans and Saints," and "Horseshoes and Handgrenades." Like Zen Arcade if the protagonist had a girlfriend? And cost more that $3200 to record? Maybe.

It's Green Day's first with producer Butch Vig, who helmed little albums like Nirvana's Nevermind and Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream, as well as lesser known gems like Freedy Johnston's This Perfect World and L7's Bricks are Heavy. There's no discernable grunge stamp on 'Know Your Enemy' that I can hear, but Breakdown will most certainly go beyond Green Day's traditional format on display here.

21st Century Breakdown comes out May 15th.

Note: Sorry about the ad. WB kills all YouTubes.

American Idiot Tapped for Theatrical Presentation

Green Day was always pretty theatrical-- mugging for the fans, lots of eye makeup on stage, exaggerated antics... But now-- just when every Green Day fan in the world is waiting with baited breath for news about 21st Century Breakdown (the new album coming out May 15)-- we hear that Green Day's previous album, American Idiot has been adapted for theatrical presentation.

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Photo: Jacob Whitaker, obtained via a Creative Commons License

The decrease in CD sales, thanks to iTunes, BitTorrent, Napster (remember?!), XM, and seemingly every other means of audible content delivery, has resulted in quite a stunning byproduct: vinyl sales are up.

Neilsen Soundscan reported that sales of LPs increased 89% in 2008 over the year before, and more and more artists are releasing material on wax again.

Green Day, one of the bestselling acts of the past twenty years, will be releasing their entire back catalog of seven full-length albums, plus rarities and greatest hits collections, on vinyl. Their new record 21st Century Breakdown, expected in May, will be available on vinyl as well.

According to Neilsen, 990,000 LPs were sold in '07, 1.88 million in '08. What's the over-under for '09?

Pitchfork is a fine site with thoughtful rock commentary and thoughtful reviews, and their snarky in-advance diss on Green Day's next record, 21st Century Breakdown certainly doesn't miss the point entirely:

The next Grammy Awards ceremony won't be for another year, but we already know who's going home with a bunch of trophies, and we know it without actually hearing a note of the album. Ambitious years-in-the-making follow-up to ambitious years-in-the-making album? Check. Veteran act who did their best work about fifteen years ago but who still inexplicably carry a vague aura of hipness? Check. Screwed by Grammy voters in the past? Check. Still sell records, but not so many records that it'll look like the Grammy voters are just glomming onto whatever's popular? Check. Big-name producer? Check. Ass-ugly cover art? Check. Ladies and gentlemen, your 2010 Album of the Year: Green Day's 21st Century Breakdown.

In 2005, the Berkeley trio released American Idiot, their big statement about Bush America, and in the process morphed from a remarkably great and consistent major-label pop-punk machine to a bloated, portentous stadium band, a move that worked out pretty much exactly how they must've hoped it would. And by all accounts, Green Day have responded to weighty expectations with something equally weighty... And according to Rolling Stone, the album's 16 tracks will come divided into three "acts": Heroes and Cons, Charlatans and Saints, and Horseshoes and Handgrenades.

Yeah, I give you that, sort of. American Idiot is one of the better bloated, portentious, stadium records to come out in years -- maybe my favorite since Hysteria (and that's saying a lot) but like the folks at Pitchfork, I prefer the perfect chili dog to a very good filet mignon and find the real gold in Green Day's low-stakes efforts. And that's why it's a smidge dishonest for anyone to talk about Green Day's self-consciously epic turn without mentioning that they've made two of their best low-stakes records in their high-minded era, just under alter-egos. Since 2004, Green Day has made a power-pop record that could make all the Kinks ripoffs in Hollywood run back to rehearsal under the name Foxboro Hot Tubs, and made a record as good as Interpol, only with a sense of humor as The Network; doubters check out the song at the top of this post.

So yes, 21st Century Breakdown will probably be everything Pitchfork thinks it will be. Fortunately Green Day has never stopped giving us less.

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I've always wondered how Green Day would fare in a long concert. Their music is so relentlessly anthemic, I always wondered if they'd be able to sustain the electricity necessary for those kinds of songs -- especially for the audience.

So I caught their kickoff concert for its world tour last night at Key Arena in Seattle. And you know what? They somehow pull it off.

Now, Billie Joe Armstrong was quoted in the Seattle Times as vowing to put on five-hour shows on this tour, and last night was only three and a half hours, including the warmup act, The Bravery. But no one really cared, because it was probably the most sustained high-energy performance most of us have seen in years.

How did they manage to keep it electric? By connecting with the audience.

The band opened with a number of selections from 21st Century Breakdown, but quickly began sprinkling in hits from American Idiot (including "Holiday," which I managed to catch on rather grainy vid). If you were coming for the Green Day hits alone, you went away sated, because they were all there. ("Basket Case" in particular was awfully good.)

But Billie Joe made it work by working hard to connect to the audience. In this video, you can see him calling a 10-year-old up onstage to help with the dancing. At other times, he invited audience members up to sing, too, with varying degrees of success, but it was cool. And in what looked like it could have been a classic prearranged stunt, he even had one young audience member climb up onstage and play the rhythm guitar part for "Jesus of Suburbia." Rather well, I might add.

It might have been schtick, but it worked. The audience was electrified, and the music made it even more so. It was a great, great show. If the rest of the dates on the tour are up to this level of play, it should be a very good tour indeed.

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I'm with Howie: Green Day's new album, 21st Century Breakdown, is yet another great piece of songwriting. I'm astonished that at the very least it equals American Idiot, which I thought would be an impossible album to top.

They're kicking off their national tour Friday night in Seattle at Key Arena. I still haven't wrangled a pass yet, but I'm hoping to figure out a way to get in and report back. In the meantime, I wanted to run this live version of "Viva La Gloria" as a kind of warmup.

The world first heard about Marianne Faithfull as part of the Rolling Stones soap opera in the 60s. She was a great looking singer with an uncontrollable drug habit. She had a series of pretty decent singles over the course of a decade-- and some less praiseworthy albums-- before she released the LP that brought her back to the public's attention after a long and spectacular descent into drug hell: Broken English (1979). One of the most acclaimed songs on the album was a cover of John Lennon's now classic "Working Class Hero," first released by Lennon on his debut post-Beatles project in 1970. More recently-- last year-- Green Day did a great version of it on a charity compilation. Here's Marianne Faithfull's version: