21st Century Breakdown

A Green Day member sporting a "Free Pussy Riot" T-shirt was about as political as the 2012 MTV VMAs were able to get. The band unveiled yet another new song, "Let Yourself Go," and the song, again, saw the band moving away from the political and social overtunes of "American Idiot" and "21st Century Breakdown. " Green Day, in fact, has been doing everything in its power to state that it should not be considered an important band. As evidence, the band has its own "Angry Birds" characters.

Green Day 21st Century Breakdown Reprise * * * 1/2 One of the many very sticky songs from Green Day's new opus, "21st Century Breakdown," got stuck in my head the other day. It was "The Static Age," a bouncy little number named after a rant by New Jersey punk elders the Misfits. Green Day's ditty doesn't sound at all like that other "Static Age." Instead of being sludgy and hard, it's peppy, with a big kick-drum beat, machine-gun guitars and a melody that . . . reminded me of something.

Over the course of its nearly 20-year career, Green Day has only grown more interested in the power and potential of its pop. During the punkish band's Thursday night performance at the Henry Fonda Theater, the trio repeatedly used rock's oldest tricks -- sock-hop melodies, British Invasion swagger, pep-rally shouts -- to make the counterculture seem more fun than the mainstream.

On the final night of the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, last year, a young folk-rock trio from Denver took the makeshift stage at a church a few blocks away from the main action down on 6th Street. The church was about half full, providing enough room for the band members to run the aisles, stand on benches and play music from a debut album they had yet to release. Attending that show meant missing out on more well-known entities such as Sleigh Bells, Norah Jones and Nas, but that baby band -- the Lumineers -- would go on to become one of the biggest acts in the U.S. As sprawling as SXSW has become - last year boasted more than 2,200 acts across 104 stages - the festival continues to reward those who favor the unknown rather than those who chase the big names.

"Tonight my heart's on the loose," Billie Joe Armstrong sings in the lead single from Green Day's upcoming "¡Uno!," due out Sept. 25. His heart's not the only thing running wild. The Berkeley punk band's highly anticipated follow-up to 2009's Grammy-winning "21 st Century Breakdown," "¡Uno!" is actually the first of three Green Day full-lengths set for release over the next six months; "¡Dos!" arrives Nov.  13, while "¡Tré!" will round out the trilogy on Jan. 15. Clearly, the man who once begged someone to "peel me off this Velcro seat and get me moving" (on 1994's smash "Dookie")

RECORD OF THE YEAR "Halo" Beyoncé Knowles & Ryan Tedder, producers; Jim Caruana, Mark "Spike" Stent & Ryan Tedder, engineers/mixers "I Gotta Feeling" David Guetta & Frederick Riesterer, producers; will.i.am, Dylan "3-D" Dresdow & Padraic "Padlock" Kerin, engineers/mixers "Use Somebody" Jacquire King & Angelo Petraglia, producers; Jacquire King, engineer/mixer "Poker Face" RedOne, producer; Robert Orton, RedOne & Dave Russell, engineers/mixers "You Belong With Me" Nathan Chapman & Taylor Swift, producers; Chad Carlson & Justin Niebank, engineers/mixers SONG OF THE YEAR "Poker Face" Lady Gaga & RedOne, songwriters (Lady Gaga)

POP MUSIC Green Day The Grammy-winning pop punk trio from Oakland swings through the Southland on its 21st Century Breakdown Tour, which features multi-platinum hits from its most recent album of the same name, including "Know Your Enemy" and "21 Guns. " Ukiah's glammy emo-rockers AFI will open with material from its eighth studio album, "Crash Love. " Verizon Wireless Amphitheater , 8808 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine. 7 p.m. $20-$85. www.livenation.com . Melissa Etheridge Celebrating the release of her 10th studio album, "Fearless Love," the celebrated Academy and Grammy award-winning singer-songwriter (and all-around fierce rocker)

Leave it to brash punk-pop icon Green Day to inject some much-needed life into the U.S. pop charts. The band's latest concept-driven collection for Reprise/Warner Bros., "21st Century Breakdown," which was released off-cycle on a Friday rather than the typical Tuesday, sold 214,000 copies through Sunday, according to Nielsen SoundScan.