10 Classic Rock Bands That Ripped Off Themselves
4. Sugar Youth - Green Day
Everything about Green Day's album Father of All felt like it was meant as a rush job. From the talks about Green Day being free from their label and the fact that the album is a little less than a half hour long, this feels more like an excuse to get out of a record deal than an actual artistic statement. Even when the song is less than a minute though, Green Day still found a way to steal from the past.
Out of all the lackluster tunes on other parts of the record, Sugar Youth is where we get to see that punk band that Green Day always knew how to be, with a little bit more edge in the guitars throughout most of the verses. When that chorus hits you though, you start to get some big flashbacks to the better times, and not necessarily in the best way.
As Billie Joe lets loose with his vocals and comes down with the line 'and it's dangerous,' the entire melody is lifted note for note from the song She's a Rebel off of American Idiot. The lyrics aren't really that different either, since all Billie had to do was replace 'she's' with 'it's' to make it slightly different. Given the fact that this entire album art work was about recontextualizing the American Idiot album cover, this is definitely the discount version of what we got during the rock opera years.