By Erik Casarez
There is an iconic moment from season one of Mad Men when straight-laced ad exec Don Draper smokes a jazz cigarette for the first time. When asked how he likes it, he smirks and says “I feel like Dorothy; everything just turned to color. [1]” In many ways, this is what it felt like hearing Green Day’s 1994 major label debut Dookie for the first time.
The state of popular music videos of the early 90s can largely be described as a dystopia of sepia tones and creepy old guys doing creepy old things. The short but memorable reign of grunge left its mark on MTV, commercializing Generation X nihilism. Between February and August of 1994, Green Day released two music videos for their first two singles from Dookie. The first, “Longview,” fit snugly in this era of diminishing color even as the band dipped its toe into a brighter color palette. With the second music video, “Basket Case,” Green Day said “hold my beer” and did a cannonball into the deep end of the color spectrum. Filmed in monochrome, the music video was colorized in post to get a much more saturated look. The result is one of the most iconic music videos of the 90s.
For many youth of the 90s, Dookie was a gateway to a world of music that was edgy, yet approachable. The album juggles brattiness with emotional maturity and punk rock cynicism with pop rock optimism, all the while addressing themes of restlessness, alienation, and an overwhelming desire to find oneself. Green Day combines elements of melodic punk bands before them like Ramones and Descendants with the songwriting eagerness of artists like Bob Dylan and Tom Petty. Dookie, of course, isn’t the first album to do this [2], but it was the first album to really breakthrough to the masses the way it did.
At its core, Dookie is a millennial album. This isn’t to say that it wasn’t made for Gen Xers so much as it serves as a beacon for young millennials navigating through the 90s [3]. While Nirvana’s Nevermind felt reactionary to the gloss of 80s hair metal, Dookie on the other hand felt like an evolutionary step in what a pop album could be. This sums up the duality of the album and a turning point for the band from their time as up-and-coming punk scene darlings to stadium-filling pop-punk superstars.
To say Dookie was polarizing to a large amount of their punk scene fans is an understatement. They were banned from playing Gilman, the venue they grew up in, and were accused of being sellouts for signing with a major label. While the band ended up gaining exponentially more fans than they lost with the record signing, there remains a stigma on the band’s legacy, even if it feels somewhat inconsistent within the confines of punk rock ethos.
San Antonio cartoonist Mitch Clem debuted his punk rock comic strip Nothing Nice to Say with a satirical send-up of punk rock ideology entitled “Evolution of a 90s Punk” wherein an unnamed character is getting mocked for wearing a Green Day shirt. The character then starts writing zines, performs with a band, and gets piercings before the final panel wherein the original character is mocking another character for wearing a Blink 182 shirt. The vicious cycle of punk rock virtue is funny like that in hindsight. As F*cked Up vocalist and punk rock scholar Damian Abraham puts it: “Everyone is someone else’s poser,” and this is none more evident than asking a roomful of former Green Day fans when they think Green Day “sold out.” Some may say it was when American Idiot [4] came out. Others would say when they toned things down with Warning (or when the hit single “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” off previous album Nimrod was everywhere from the Seinfeld series finale to graduations) [5]. Twenty-five years ago, it would have been narrowed down to when Dookie came out. It’s a testament to what Dookie means to fans of a certain era that the goal posts fluctuate so much.
As someone who has evolved from responding to this question with “Green Day sold out with ‘Warning’” to “Green Day sold out with ‘American Idiot’” to “What does ‘sellout’ really even mean now?” I have grown an appreciation for the majority of their discography, but nothing hits the way Dookie hit the first time I listened to it all the way through. As a preteen whose only exposure to Green Day at the time consisted of overhearing radio singles on car rides, it wasn’t until an older friend, who as far as I knew only listened to rap, started telling me about how much he loved Dookie. He let me borrow his copy and I was obsessed. I took some money I had been saving up and bought a copy for myself at a used CD store – it was the first album I ever bought with my own money. It was the first album that I could get lost in on a regular basis. Above everything else, it was the first album that felt like it was made for me.
I went through phases where I thought I was too punk rock for it and then phases where it was on the backburner as I explored different spectrums of genre. I reconnected with Dookie when I met my Green Day-loving wife. I was able to see the album from the perspective of what it meant to her and I fell in love with it all over again. At 30 years old, Dookie remains an important album to me and has been a staple through every phase of my life. For an album that once felt like a portal to somewhere over the rainbow, it now just feels like no place but home.
This references “The Wizard of Oz” when Dorothy enters the land of Oz and the movie goes from black and white to color.
[1] This references “The Wizard of Oz” when Dorothy enters the land of Oz and the movie goes from black and white to color.
[2] The first two Green Day albums 39/Smooth and Kerplunk harbored this sound; not to mention bands like NOFX were ankle deep in their discography at this time.
[3] Even if inadvertently.
[4] Funnily enough, American Idiot is the other millennial bookend album Green Day put out a decade after Dookie that reached even more people and opened the floodgates for even more inspiration to younger members of the same generation.
[5] These two kind of go hand-in-hand.