My favorite Green Day album is not Dookie. I’m much more fond of American Idiot. Even so, this is their first really big record, and there are a few major hits here. It’s definitely skater music, and it seems like Green Day is a sort of anachronism today, although they were huge as I was growing up.

“Basket Case,” the most popular song on the album, may as well be my own personal theme song. There’s so much here that I find relatable, and they do a great job of discussing how boring and anxiety-inducing the 1990s were. It’s unusual, because it’s so often viewed as the decade where everything was on the right track (if we ignore the global context, like the Yugoslav Wars, the genocide in Darfur, the outbreak of the Algerian Civil War, and Rwanda’s genocide/the total collapse of central Africa into conflict).

Mark Fisher writes somewhere about how the 1990s were such a boring age: we see it in The Matrix and Office Space (both 1999), and we see it just as strongly in Green Day’s music here.

The album itself diverges hugely from its forerunners. After all, Nirvana was the icon of the early 1990s. To see how great the divergence is, it might be worth comparing Dookie with Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Both albums are similarly angsty, but they take fundamentally different approaches to the topic.

It’s interesting to listen to this now, and the album has a serious “cool” factor, but it doesn’t hold up to time quite as well as contemporary albums.