Review Summary: "I'm not growing up, I'm just burning out and I stepped in line to walk amongst the dead"
I remember the day I bought this album. I was thirteen years of age and It was the fifth CD I've ever bought. It totally spun my musical tastes into high gear, driving me to discover a world that I had never been exposed to. Along with Offspring "Smash," this was the first album I've ever bought that I felt I could identify with on a personal level. This album was the cure for boredom in the lifeless suburb I grew up in. My buddies and I would just sit around listening to this album for hours on end; everybody had it, no wonder it sold over 15 million copies. Reviving punk rock isn't the easiest task, but Green Day made it seem like child's play. At their core, the California based punk rock trio were masters at reviving the fast and catchy three-chord punk tunes that everyone's grown to love. Like Nevermind, this was accidental success, the sound of a promising underground group suddenly hitting its stride just as they got their first professional, big-budget, big-label production. Really, that's where the similarities end, since if Nirvana were indebted to the weirdness of indie rock, Green Day were straight-ahead punk revivalists through and through.
Released in 1994 as their first album on a major label, Dookie arrived at the end of the Nirvana-era, and blasted a hole in the moody grunge enveloping the music world. Spikey, pop-y, arrogant as hell, Dookie is full of attitude and tunes. From opener "Burnout", the album rarely lets up pace, with manic tempos, loud guitars, funky bass and pissed-off lyrics lacing every track. "Burnout" itself, while making singer Billie Joe sound oddly nasal, is an almost perfect paean to apathy in society, and follow up, "Having a Blast" is just about every misfit's fantasy. Or it could also be about a car bomber. With lyrics like "explosives duct taped to my spine" and "I won't listen to anyone's last words", well, this one was destined to be a classic. "Longview", with its somehow mesmerizing base line startles with its quiet-loud-quiet-loud format, and a chorus designed to be screamed from a thousand teenage throats: 'I got no motivation/Where is my motivation?/No time for the motivation/Smoking my inspiration', sums it up quite nicely, thank you."Welcome to Paradise", which catalogues the delights of a dubious neighborhood, and "Basket Case", a tale of a young man who consults both a shrink (female) and a whore (male) about his neuroses, are both high points of the album. Both were singles, and signaled the arrival of Green Day as a mouthpiece for disaffected youth. In the song "Pulling Teeth" you hear about husbands beating and holding their wives captive, but you never hear it told the other way around. Lead singer and guitarist Billie Joe spoke of just that in this kinky two and a half minute ditty.
Green Day are deliberately adolescent here, treating nearly everything as joke and having as much fun as snotty punkers should. They demonstrate a bit of depth with "When I Come Around," but that just varies the pace slightly, since the key to this is their flippant, infectious attitude -- something they maintain throughout the record, making Dookie a stellar piece of modern punk that many tried to emulate but nobody bettered. Songs like "Chump," "Sassafras Roots," and "Emenius Sleeping" point the finger randomly, including back at themselves. It got me every time the way "F.O.D." exploded from my speakers into electric awesomeness after a couple acoustic verses. Billie Joe Armstrong's adenoidal singing is ideally suited to these songs. With his faux British accent, he comes off as justifiably petulant. Tre's drumming blows my mind every time I hear it. Check out the spasmodic transition between CHUMP and Longview. It's a minute an a half of breakdown solo like "Panic Song" off Insomniac. Tre's work there is one of his finest, and who among us drummers hasn't sat down and played along to Longview or Basket Case? And what can be said about Mike's bass work? A whole lot. Of course there's Longview, which is the catchiest bass riff, quite possibly of all time, but so much more gets lost in that. The solo on Welcome to Paradise is genius, along with the transition between Chump and Longview. There are magnificent fills scattered throughout the album, like in She. During the solo he absolutely goes crazy.
Although the songs are straight-forward and simple, they are extremely infectious. These songs have an intense vitality, but are also highly melodic. Virtually every song on "Dookie" could have been released as a single. Although the songs sound similar, the album never gets redundant, because the album is well-paced with a good mix of fast and mid-tempo compositions. Drummer Tre Cool and Bassist Mike Dirnt provide an ample and stellar rhythm section. This album has stood the test of time and has aged well. Whether it is 1994 or 2014, if you're in your late teens or 20s, just out of high school or college, and don't know what to do with your life, you can really relate to these songs. Compared to "Nevermind" or "The Downward Spiral, "Dookie" may not be as complex or brilliant, but it's still a classic album that conveys many of the same themes. Although imitated by lesser bands (Good Charlotte, Sum 41), Green Day is the definitive pop-punk band of the 1990s and beyond. "Dookie" is an essential album to own for any modern rock collection.
