Know when to move on.
To supplement some of my other advice pages, such as the guide to song difficulty, this page uses the Green Day album 21st Century Breakdown as an example of an album ill-suited for parodying.
In a typical popular album, every song is self-contained with its own short, ambiguous story, which probably does not name anything or anyone and so could take place in all kinds of countries and time periods. That typical song tells its story in the smallest words possible, too.
21st Century Breakdown is not one of those albums. Rather, it is a concept album, meaning the songs are tied together and build on one another. Some concept albums, such as Kilroy Was Here and American Idiot, are fairly clear-cut stories that have a beginning, middle, and end, in which almost every song has a clear place. Others, such as Paradise Theatre and 21st Century Breakdown are loose concept albums that do not have an obvious plot progression so much as a single canon that all the songs are part of.
The less murky kind of concept album, I find to be better parody fodder because it gives you depth, complexity, and meaning. A loose concept album mostly just invites unconventional content that can be problematic, such as 1 minute bookend songs that present some theme of the album but are not much of anything on their own, and the same hard-to-rhyme words appearing in multiple songs.
I have certainly proved I am not light about parodying, but I have my limits. Now I will give some details on why I feel even I cannot put up with this.
1 fodder. Just a 50 second introduction to the album. I never listen to it, so I cannot speak for its vocabulary, but it is certainly the equivalent of A.D. 1928, and I can only assume it is also crushingly difficult to tell a story within the confines of.
2 fodder. A bit more conventional than its compatriots, having a chorus and instrumental stretches, but there are still a fair amount of lyrics, and the number of very specific things and polysyllabic words is less than ideal.
2 fodder. Not a lot of lyrics to learn, but some challenges to coming up with rhymes certainly ensue.
1 fodder. Almost every song in the album is full of a disproportionate amount of lyrics for its length (American Eulogy in particular, as I will discuss in detail after running through the track listing) and uses many impossible-to-rhyme words. In fact, the titles alone tend to give away you will not be getting anywhere. These things can be said for this song, and describe much of the remaining ones.
1 fodder. Do not even try it. Seriously.
1 fodder. What part of impossible
do you not understand?
1 fodder. The title is not actually in the lyrics, but it does reflect a very specific topic. The general problem with the album is indeed how specific it is. It is dealing with an exact decade - the 2000s - and dealing with some very specific things in the context of that decade - American politics, the Christian religion, class wars, named characters - all of which it uses difficult-to-rhyme words with very specific meanings to describe. It all adds up to one loose story line, and will not bend into the shape of any other.
Main article: Song:Peacemaker
1 fodder. This album puts a lot at the top - er, bottom - of the list of worst songs to try to parody. It gets made all the worse by times where it makes no sense - like with this song, does this imply that America no longer exists or something?
2 fodder. It is one of the simpler songs on the album, but that is not saying much.
3 fodder. This is the song with the most special moments for the Crew: why are you crying? Inside your restless soul your heart is dying?
and there is blood and a lifeboat of deception. But then that has to be balanced against words and phrases like salvation,
junkie preaching to the choir,
mascara,
and Gloria.
1 fodder. The what age? That is not even a thing! What am I supposed to do here? Who am I kidding?
1 fodder. I give up.
3 fodder. The song that finishes the album is, as its title consisting of monosyllabic words suggests, probably the most conventional of them, and therefore probably the easiest. It has a chorus that appears three times, preceded by an eight-line verse each time. It still uses a handful of three-syllable words, however. I conclude, if you want truly great fodder, I expect you to look elsewhere.
I probably do not need to tell you much more about American Eulogy, but knowing some details can help you understand. It is quite possibly the least conventional song on its album, which is really saying something. It starts out with a Song of the Century
verse, then gets into a main body divided into a Mass Hysteria
half and a Modern World
half. It can certainly be described as two songs crammed into the length of one. Hardly a moment of the song is instrumental, and few lyrics are repeated. As a result, even though it is no longer than the breezy REO Speedwagon song I Wish You Were There, it has easily twice as many words as most of the songs I have ever done, even ones that were significantly longer.
Now a brief sample of the words themselves: Red alert is the color of panic/Elevated to the point of static/Beating into the hearts of the fanatics/And the neighborhood is a loaded gun/Idle thought lead to full-throttle screaming/And the welfare is asphyxiating-
I have told you everything you needed to know and then some, have I not? Have the words Oh forget it
or This is impossible
or whatever you choose to say you are not going to try to parody this entered your head yet? They certainly have mine.