GREEN DAY – Dookie

Power chords! 2 minute songs! 1994! Punk RAWK! 15 million copies sold! Green Day’s Dookie will go down as one of the most important albums of the 90’s. But it’s been 17 years since its release. 17 years since every middle-schooler you knew was singing along to “Basket Case.” Rolling Stone put it in the top 200 albums of all time. Now my friend Dave and I are going to go back and try to figure out what the big deal was.

Brandon: I’ve long said that I consider 1994 to be the greatest year of all time. I say this because where would we be without hyperbole? I do think, in all honesty, that 1994 was the greatest year of my lifetime. Part of it is personal – I was a fifth grader in my K-5 elementary school – top of the pecking order, my friends. I also starred as the lead in my first play, which was an ego boost only slightly less than the fact that all of the girls in my class had colluded in their love for me (I’m not even making this up), which included hand signals that meant, as I learned at the end of the school year, “I love Brandon.” (Seriously. This actually happened. I peaked as an 11 year old in 1994. It’s all been downhill since then.)

But 1994 also gave us, in a seemingly never ending stream, like a pop culture big bang, Blue Album, Ready to Die, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, Tupac getting shot in an elevator inciting the Tupac/Biggie war, OJ Simpson, Pulp Fiction, Shawshank Redemption, Forest Gump, Illmatic, Kurt Cobain’s suicide, Grace, The Fugees, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain; Ill Communication, “Regulate,” Aaliyah, Bee Thousand, Cracked Rear View, Marilyn Manson, II, Usher, Four, Under the Table and Dreaming, Dummy, Mariah Carey’s Christmas album, Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged, CrazySexyCool, My Life, “I Swear,” Philadelphia, The Lion King, Speed, “Closer,” Dumb and Dumber, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Mudstock, Interview with the Vampire, Ed Wood, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Quiz Show – I can actually go on. This year was insane!

But the album from this year that has maybe proved more seminal, more influential, more important than any other from that year could arguably be Green Day’s third album and major label debut, Dookie, which peaked at 2 on the US Billboard top 200, charted in 7 other countries, and sold, worldwide, over 15 million copies.

And, remarkably, this is actually my first time listening to the whole album. When it came out, all the kids that were listening to it were kind of jerks. They were slackers, soon to be stoners, who thought nerds like me needed a good tripping or punch in the ribs or perhaps just a solid shove. I met these people and first learned of the album in the second half of 1994, in sixth grade, in middle school. Middle school < elementary school. By, like, miles. In fact, middle school < everything else in life beyond those three years. Fuck middle school.

Ironically, though, I think I could have used this album at the time. It has all the irreverent punkish angst of a 14 year-old boy. I grew up listening almost exclusively to hip hop and R&B. My personal landmark album that year was TLC’s CrazySexyCool, and in no way did “Creep” help me navigate the gauntlet that was middle school. Though to be fair, I was never the type of kid Billy Joe Armstrong was singing about. Going into this dialectic, I figured, now that I listen almost exclusively to indie rock, that hearing the album in full would be this grand new discovery that I was finally ready for. What I discovered is that I’m now too old for the album. There’s a reason it appealed to all those middle schoolers. The album, written by young twenty-somethings, focuses on and is marketed to teenagers and their teenage drama. I had a small window of time when I could have picked up the album and enjoyed it, that being my emo phase of 2000. Now it just feels immature and slight. The apathy and whatever-ness of the songs don’t feel so much fun and whimsical as dumb and useless.

Labeled then as “punk revivalists,” their sound has been imitated to such an extent that, if it was new and fresh in 1994, it now sounds about as tired and formulaic as every pop-punk band getting played on Clear Channel-owned radio stations, following in Green Day’s footsteps to stardom. Dave, you knew this album as a young man. How does it sound to you, now?

Dave: While I may not have reached the pinnacle of coolness that you did, ’94 ended up being a pretty big year for me too, especially musically. It was the year I branched out on my own from the influence of my older sisters. Leading the charge was Weezer’s Blue Album, The Offspring’s SMASH and, most importantly, Green Day’s Dookie.

This past week I gave Dookie a good listen for the first time in ten years and two things became quickly apparent. First, it was very clear why I loved this album in 6^th grade; the kick-ass, 2-minute, pop-punk songs, the angsty lyrics about parents and boredom, the snarling vocals full of swear words…everything a kid wants in his music (more on all this later).  Second, it was obvious why I hadn’t listened to it in ten years, and after this review, it will probably go back on the shelf for another ten. I don’t think any of the lyrics resonate with the twenty-seven year old version of myself, the 2-minute songs on the whole come off as a bit uninteresting and the album as a whole feels dated. All that being said, it still has a few kick-ass tunes and some moments of great musical talent that make it not surprising that this band is still together making relevant, good music.

I tried to pin down exactly what about the album made me love it when I was younger. It didn’t take too long to figure out why and my list became long enough that, well, it turned into a list.

1. The lyrics – growing up in the suburbs with everything I could ever need provided for me, it is only natural I felt like my life was hard. Dookie hit on a number of issues that resonated with kids like me: parents (“Welcome to Paradise” – “dear mother can you hear me whining”), boredom (all of “Longview” – “I sit around and watch the tube but nothing’s on”), suburban existential concerns (“She” – “are you locked in a world that’s been planned out for you”) and general ‘I hate everything’-ness (“Chump” – “I don’t know you, but I think I hate you”). All this delivered with the curse laden snarling that was exactly what I (and other kids like me) needed.

2. The Music itself – Two-minute songs with driving base and ripping, distortion heavy guitar. Not to mention the Keith moon-esque, knock-the-shit-out-of-my-set approach to drumming. A few measures of calm, just to make the kick into gear that much more pronounced (F.O.D. is a good example of this).

3. Hits – This album had them. “Longview,” “Welcome to Paradise,” “She.” These weren’t songs; they were anthems. I still know all the worlds to “Basket Case;” it took only a few seconds of listening before I was singing along wanting to pump my fists and jump around.

4. A hidden track – if all that wasn’t enough, the album finished out with an unlisted secret track performed by the drummer Tre Cool, making you feel like you were in the know – a very important thing to an 11 year-old.

All the things that I loved about Dookie as a kid are the things that I want to critique about it now. In reflecting on this brief trip down musical memory lane, my one hope is that I can somehow leave intact the memory of this album formed by my eleven-year-old self, that puts this album right up there with the greats, not the old-man, turn-down-that-rawk-music opinion I now have of it.

On that note, I yield the floor. I’m curious to hear how you think they’ve affected music at large. Also how do you think they have managed to stay relevant for so long?

Brandon: Ha! OK. So, cool. You feel a bit the same way I do. This is music for fourteen year-olds. But I wonder, as adults, how we’re supposed to listen to it objectively. In 2003, Rolling Stone listed it as the 193rd greatest album of all time. I don’t put much stock in Rolling Stone or their opinion in music, but that’s only one of the many accolades bestowed upon the album years after it was released. Did the adults that gave it a Grammy think it sounded young and immature? Did 20 somethings like us buy this album? It couldn’t be 15 million teenagers, could it?

When you say it sounds dated, what do you mean? I think it actually sounds incredibly contemporary and current, which is maybe why I never like listening to the radio, because the music feels as though it hasn’t changed in 17 years. And maybe the reason Green Day and this album were so popular at the time of its release was because music didn’t sound like this. It actually was new and refreshing. If by dated, you mean that the new-car-scent has worn off, I’m with you.

As for their influence and lasting popularity. I don’t think Green Day could have broken through to the mainstream without Nirvana. But Nirvana’s popularity never really translated into influence. To this day, they’re weirdo indie rockers who don’t really sound like anyone else. They never even fit into the grunge rock aesthetic music critics and writers tried to force them into. They remain total outliers. Green Day, on the other hand, spawned hundreds, maybe even thousands, of imitators. A short list just off the top of my head would be My Chemical Romance, Simple Plan, Against Me, Plain White Ts. I would even say the emo kids of Jimmy Eat World, Taking Back Sunday, Saves the Day, Brand New, Our Lady Peace, etc. went on to carry the torch. Even contemporaries Blink-182, The Offspring, and Weezer owe much of their success to the popularity of Green Day, and adjusted their sound accordingly. And while Green Day didn’t invent anything new, instead just appropriating the older, temporarily forgotten punk aesthetic of Buzzcocks and The Ramones, they did make that sound cool again, and it very clearly has yet to fall back into obscurity.

And you hit on the “why” of their success pretty accurately. Regardless of what the songs are about, they are some pretty damn catchy tracks. The bass line of “Longview,” the groove of “When I Come Around,” the energy and visceral thrill of “Basket Case” — these were huge singles for a reason. And writing a truly catchy song is fucking hard. All they needed were three chords and they crafted anthems that are still fun to listen to. Though I can’t relate to the album, I’m never upset to hear a good Dookie track while shopping for jeans at the Gap. (Totally punk rock, yo.)

Take us home, Dave. Final thoughts?

Dave: Yeah – so I said the album felt dated and I’m trying to figure out why. I went back and listened to some of Green Day’s more recent hits like “American Idiot” and “Know Your Enemy” trying to figure out if there was something that really separated the two musically so that I could stand behind this claim of Dookie being dated. The only thing I could come up with was lyrics, where they were once singing about masturbation and parents they are now signing about, well, American idiots. So where does that leave me in defending my dated claim? I feel like I have listened to too narrow a slice of the music spectrum for too long to be able to defend that claim as a universal fact, so I think what I meant is that it is subjectively dated. Meaning, I haven’t listened to anything that sounded like that for fifteen years, and when I listen to it now, it is clear it is was not written for me – so therefore it is dated (to me).

So having listened to 1994 Green Day, thought about it a bit then listened to 2004 Green Day (American Idiot) and some of their more recent stuff, my lingering impression is that they kick ass. While it will probably be another 10 years before I come back to Dookie again, the fact that the band has managed to stay true to their sound while growing as individuals and musicians is very impressive and I think a rare feat these days.

One more thing that I’ve always liked and respected about Green Day: I think it was the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards when the band had just won Video of the Year for “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” During his acceptance speech Billie Joe said something along the lines of ‘this award is the result of years of hard work, playing 200+ shows a year often to empty bars, that’s what made us the band we are today’ – or something along those lines. The reason I thought that was so kick-ass was because it came right after Kelly Clarkson (an American Idol winner) had just performed. I’m not sure if the band meant it like this, but to someone who was always resentful of the over night musical success that American Idol (and now The Voice and a half-dozen other fast-track-to-stardom shows) enabled, I saw this as Green Day flipping off that whole branch of the corporate music industry – and I was right there with them, middle fingers extended.

Brandon: Oh, man! If only this conversation could go on! I would argue that the people on American Idol and The Voice are rarely overnight successes. I’ve actually gotten kind of into The Voice, a bit to my chagrin, and most of these people have been toiling in the trenches of the music industry for years, many of them well past their prime. Sometimes an artist just needs a break, and, few breaks as there are, it’s a little unfair to judge whence they come.

Two final thoughts:
One: I wish I had paid attention to, or admitted I liked, “Longview” when I was shamefully starting to masturbate. Knowing I had a brother in arms might have mitigated some embarrassment.

Two: There is at least one song I can very much relate to at this moment, and that’s “Pulling Teeth.” The other day, I went on a blind date and the girl ended up being so mean that by the end, I was actually crying. I literally walked her home in tears. She feels so bad that she wants to try again, and I, in spite of my abject embarrassment, have, psychotically, acquiesced. Now, when I hear “Is she ultra-violent? / Is she disturbed? / I better tell her that I love her / Before she does it all over again / Oh god, she’s killing me,” I’m like, “yeah.”