Every Green Day Album Closing Song Ranked From Worst To Best
11. Walking Contradiction - Insomniac
In their review of Green Day's fourth album, Insomniac, Rolling Stone magazine called Walking Contradiction a song for "anyone who has chafed against the bounds of the demographically correct, computer-coded, image-conscious mid-'90s."
Not a bad description, but not enough to get it above third from bottom.
There's lot to like about Walking Contradiction; it blends the band's fondness for classic punk with more modern sensibilities, which would have gone over well with the disenfranchised '90s crowd, and the chorus is produced to sound loud and unifying.
Unfortunately, there isn't much else to take away from this song. By its very nature, it gets repetitive after a while, and runs out of new things to say quite quickly.
It's a style of song that Green Day would tackle much more inventively in the future, leaving Walking Contradiction as little more than a basic watermark to compare future great tracks against.
At least Rolling Stone liked it.