FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
Green Day - Dookie
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IF one considers the classic albums…
of the 1990s, then they have to think of Green Day’s Dookie. I celebrated the album’s twenty-fifth anniversary last year, and it is an album I would encourage people to get it on vinyl . There is a lot of debate as to which Green Day album is best but, when it comes to the critics, I think Dookie wins – though Nimrod, and American Idiot are pretty brilliant. Released on 1st February, 1994 – a year that is practically synonymous with legendary albums! – Dookie was the biggest release from the Californian band. Apologies if I repeat some of the things I said in my article from last year, but Dookie was a massive leap from the band’s second studio album, Kerplunk. Working with producer Rob Cavallo – who produced their albums up until 2009 -, I feel Dookie is one of the defining albums of the 1990s, as it arrived in a year when Grunge was undergoing a lot of change; it was definitely not as vibrant as it was in the first couple of years of the 1990s. I think the Pop-Punk/Punk-Rock of the album sort of bridges the sound of Grunge with the more accessible sounds of the mainstream, though Dookie is never watered-down or too commercial. A lot of labels were trying to snap up Green Day following Kerplunk, but it was Reprise representative Rob Cavallo who connected with the band. One can imagine the scores of labels trying to get Green Day to sign, and the sort of offers they would have been presented with. Green Day felt Cavallo understood them as a band and would serve them well, and it is no surprise the band stuck with him for so long. With frontman Billie Joe Armstrong writing most of the track by himself, one feels a lot of soul-searching and nakedness on songs such as Basket Case, Longview, and When I Come Around.
The band embarked on international touring following Dookie’s release, and the critical acclaim that met (the album) was humongous! Though Green Day had their detractors back then, I remember the album coming out in 1994 and so many people talking about it. I am not sure whether I bought the album, but many people I knew did, and I feel Dookie sound just as incredible today as it did in 1994. The mix of the well-known singles and album tracks that are almost single-worthy – including Burnout, and Coming Clean -, there is nothing but brilliance to be found. Whilst 1995’s Insomniac was a success and garnered positive reviews, it did not make the same splash as Dookie. Since its release, Dookie has been included in many lists compiling the best albums of all-time/the 1990s. It is no wonder, because I think Dookie reached behind cliques and certain camps. I do feel that, in 1994, there were those who liked Britpop, those who were into Grunge; there were acts that could unite and appeal to those who rarely strayed from their comfort zone. I knew people in school who were mad about mainstream Pop that connected with Dookie; those who refuted everything but Grunge and Alternative music that were taken by Green Day’s third album. It was a big moment, and Dookie definitely had an impact on the scene and musicians who were around at the time – in ways, one can hear shades of the album in artists of today.
In their review, AllMusic had this to say about Dookie:
“Green Day couldn't have had a blockbuster without Nirvana, but Dookie wound up being nearly as revolutionary as Nevermind, sending a wave of imitators up the charts and setting the tone for the mainstream rock of the mid-'90s. 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. They were products of the underground pop scene kept alive by such protagonists as All, yet what they really loved was the original punk, particularly such British punkers as the Jam and Buzzcocks. On their first couple records, they showed promise, but with Dookie, they delivered a record that found Billie Joe Armstrong bursting into full flower as a songwriter, spitting out melodic ravers that could have comfortably sat alongside Singles Going Steady, but infused with an ironic self-loathing popularized by Nirvana, whose clean sound on Nevermind is also emulated here. Where Nirvana had weight, 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”.
I didn’t want to quote from scores of reviews, but I think it is useful to bring in a couple from different sites and gauge their opinions. This is what Pitchfork remarked in 2017:
“What set Dookie apart from the grunge rock bellowers of its day was Armstrong’s voice, foggy and vaguely unplaceable. “I’m an American guy faking an English accent faking an American accent,” he teased at the time. Though Armstrong’s tone was bratty, his phrasing had that lackadaisical quality that left room for listeners to fill in their own interpretations. On Dookie, Armstrong channeled a lifetime of songcraft obsession into buzzing, hook-crammed tracks that acted like they didn’t give a shit—fashionably then, but also appealingly for the 12-year-old spirit within us all. Maybe they worked so well because, on a compositional and emotional level, they were actually gravely serious. Sometimes singing about the serious stuff in your life—desire, anxiety, identity—feels a lot more weightless done against the backdrop of a dogshit-bombarded illustration of your hometown by East Bay punk fixture Richie Bucher”.
I have very fond memories of Dookie, and it is an album I myself need to grab on vinyl when I am in a record shop next. It is a fantastic work from a band who are still going strong today. If you have not heard the album before, I think now is a pretty good time to become acquainted. It is a record that most certainly…
BLOWS the cobwebs away.