Music
Green Day's 'Dookie' turns 20
by Tyler Munro
January 31, 2014
Old as it makes us feel, today marks the 20th anniversary of Dookie, Green Day’s third album and major label debut.
The context surrounding the album is hard to summarize so long after its release, but suffice to say, they were a different band at a different time. Long before the political pandering of American Idiot and the incredibly forgettable triple-release of ¡Uno!, ¡Dos! & ¡Tré!, Green Day were a platinum selling pop-punk band firmly ingrained in the now-nonexistent middle ground between critical and commercial darlings. Dookie, for its part, showed that the major label crossover need not be so dire.
Featuring a re-recording of Kerplunk!‘s “Welcome to Paradise,” Dookie quickly took its diarrhea-referencing title to the top of the charts, ushering the phrase “pop-punk” into pop music’s lexicon for the first time since the Ramones. At a crisp 39 minutes, there’s nary a dull moment on the album, and while we’ve joked about writing a “most underrated songs on Dookie” list that’s every song but “Longview,” that song’s iconic opening bassline remains one of the most iconic ever.
In the twilight of their career, it’s easy to think of Green Day as little more than the band who wrote “Good Riddance,” but to ignore just how good Dookie was—is—is to do yourself a disservice. On this day in 1991, a band that featured a grown man named Tré Cool released an album that went on to sell more than 20 million copies worldwide. More than that, one that’s endured every face-palming follow up the band’s turned out post-Nimrod.
