(Credits: Far Out / Alice Baxley)
For an album named after literal shit, with an album cover seemingly plucked straight out of Viz and several songs about jerking off, Dookie by Green Day is a shockingly dark album. It takes barely a listen to cotton on to the fact that the purile humour is there to cover up what actually inspired the album, which was a near-total mental breakdown on the part of Green Day’s singer and songwriter, Billie Joe Armstrong.
Which is strange on the surface. Everything seemed to be going Green Day’s way in the early 1990s. The band had released two albums on local punk label Lookout! to critical acclaim and solid sales. At least solid enough for an independent punk band and enough for major labels to start circling the band as their shows got bigger and bigger.
1991 was, after all, the year punk broke. Major labels saw in these cherubic-looking boys and their melodic, absurdly catchy pop-punk exactly the kind of band that could take this alt-rock boom into the mainstream. Nirvana would get their first a year later, but it was only a matter of time before Armstrong’s band of pop-punk tykes would get there, too.
Yet, despite everything seeming hunky-dory within Camp Green Day, nobody seemed to tell Billie Joe Armstrong. The anxiety, depression and debilitating panic attacks he’d had since childhood were starting to get much, much worse. He may not have realised it at the time, but it was due to his band’s rising success starting to get noticed by the punk scene he’d called home for so long. He could feel the backlash coming long before it happened and was terrified by it.
How did this affect Green Day and their songwriting?
With all this having a pretty dire effect on his mental health, Armstrong expressed this in the only way he knew how. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he said, “I had no idea what was going on — I thought I was losing my mind. The only way I could know what was going on was to write a song about it.” This was the state of mind he found himself in when putting the songs together that would eventually make up Dookie.
Once you get past the teenage humour and still-radiant melodies that perforate the album, this is clear to see. I mean, the first words on the album are “I declare I don’t care no more”. When you realise that’s not a declaration of teenage rebellion but rather a nihilistic statement of utter ennui, the album truly opens itself up to you.
‘Having A Blast’ is a genuinely disturbing suicide fantasy. ‘Pulling Teeth’ is about domestic abuse. ‘Coming Clean’ is about Armstrong trying to find the strength to come out to his parents. Above all is the album’s biggest hit. Those aforementioned panic attacks, combined with his paranoia and crippling fear about his mental state lead to Armstrong writing the album’s signature song ‘Basket Case’.
That song, over all others, is a cry for help. One that its audience could relate to deeply. In the same interview with Rolling Stone, Armstrong elaborated on this. He said, “It’s an anthem for the weirdos and freaks. The song is about losing your mind, and I think the majority of people have had that experience in some way, shape or form in their life.”
Perhaps the album isn’t so secretly dark in that case after all. It wears its scars on its sleeve proudly and in doing so, lets a generation of kids know that they weren’t alone, which is what we need now more than ever.
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