NOT YOUR PARENTS' PUNK

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

THE BEST WAY TO STRIKE BACK AT one's parents isn't to do something they hate but to do something they love and do it better. Jealousy can be hard for moms and dads to deal with; imagine spending a lifetime striving to outdo one's peers only to be shown up by one's progeny. Such humiliations can be writ small--a six-year-old who keeps beating Dad in Ping-Pong--or large--a generation that, enviably, manages to look more rebellious than one's own.

Take punk rock. In the '70s, when it was born, it seemed to be the ultimate in musical rebellion. Punk was fast, aggressive rock performed by people who, through their raw sound and outrageous attire, were bent on making adults feel like out-of-touch geeks. The seminal British punk band the Sex Pistols mocked the monarchy and led fans in nihilistic chants of "No future," while their countrymen and contemporaries the Clash paid tribute in their music to the Sandinista rebels.

Now a younger generation is reviving punk, and it may be a particularly devilish form of revenge: Thanks for making me a child of divorce, Dad, now here's punk rock right back at you. This week the Berkeley, California-based punk trio Green Day, whose 1994 album, Dookie, sold 8 million copies, will release Insomniac, a short, sharp album of pop punk songs about turning tricks, picking scabs and hating one's parents, which is expected to be one of the biggest-selling CDs of the year. Two other new punk albums,...And Out Come the Wolves by the Berkeley band Rancid, and Paranoid & Sunburnt, from the British group Skunk Anansie, are already in stores. The Seattle punk band Hole--whose leader, Courtney Love, is one of the best lyricists in rock (and the widow of Kurt Cobain of Nirvana)--has just come out with a CD titled Ask for It, featuring live material from the band's early days. The primal sound of punk, moreover, can be heard in the music of a growing number of pop acts, including the neofeminist caterwauling of Canadian diva Alanis Morissette and the unapologetically sloppy guitar riffs of the teenage Australian rock band Silverchair.

Green Day is indisputably the most popular punk band since the demise of Nirvana; yet while Nirvana was relentlessly serious--perhaps too serious, as it turned out--Green Day is playfully antisocial. The band's last album comprised punk songs with tuneful hooks, and its new one features more or less the same thing, although its music has grown more belligerent and less melodic. Truth be told, Green Day's songs are so cartoonishly simple they tend to sound alike, yet they are performed with such urgency that they seem fresh.

The band's lyrics, however, have changed. While its last album dealt with specific manifestations of alienation--masturbation, pyromania--Insomniac is an indeterminate blur of bleakness. The CD's opening song, Armatage Shanks (the name of a toilet manufacturer), isn't about anything, really, and that may be its point. In the song, lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong wails about confusion: "Stranded/ lost inside myself...Self loathing freak and introverted." On the album's anthemic final number, Armstrong blurts out a series of snotty lyrics that sound like an amalgam of parental advice and fortune-cookie sentiments, concluding with the declaration: "I have no belief/ but I believe/ I'm a walking contradiction."

If Green Day comes across as a cartoon, Rancid is more like a gritty documentary. The group's singer-guitarists Tim Armstrong (no relation to Green Day's lead singer) and Lars Frederiksen both have abrasive voices that provide a counterpoint to their surprisingly catchy songs. Ever since the Clash, punks have looked to Caribbean music, like reggae, for musical and spiritual inspiration, and Rancid follows in that tradition. Hard-driving songs such as Time Bomb are flavored with ska, a skittish, insistent form of Caribbean dance music. One song, Avenues and Alleyways, is about improving race relations.

The new punk could use more such social commentary. Skunk Anansie--one of the few hard-rock bands led by a black woman--takes up the challenge on its refreshing new album. Lead singer Skin (who, along with her band, has a cameo in the new sci-fi film Strange Days) has a high, scalding voice and uses it to great effect as she attacks manipulative liberals on Intellectualize My Blackness. Later she displays impressive versatility on 100 Ways to Be a Good Girl, a comparatively tender meditation on emotional abuse. No future? Hardly. With bands like Skunk Anansie keeping the rebellious tradition alive, punk's prospects have never looked better.