The first single from Green Day's second punk-rock concept album, 21st Century Breakdown, is available now on iTunes, and streams have popped up all over YouTube. Think you've heard a song called "Know Your Enemy" before? You have, it was on the first Rage Against the Machine record.

While I can't argue with the fact that Green Day have somehow become the torch bearers for politickrock in the 21st century, too much of their political material is navel-gazing and hopelessly simple, like the only thing holding back poor Americans is too much TV, a shitty former president, and not "knowing our enemy." It's a nice idea, but it's as reductive as writing poems about the economy and Bush and posting them on your dorm door hoping to teach the four republicans on your floor what's what. Anger over the state of the world is a common feeling, but songs aren't going to change anything other than the Billboard 200.   

That said, "Know Your Enemy" is a fist-pumping slice of pop-rock that I can already envision being pumped out of radio speakers this summer. I'm betting this one will be as hard to avoid as "American Idiot."

21st Century Breakdown is due out on May 15. [Stereogum]