When I first moved to Boston in 1993 for grad school, I searched for a radio station that could replace the college radio of my undergrad days, KTRU. Boston, it turns out, didn’t have anything as far-out as Houston did (surprisingly, yet not surprisingly—I could go on about the homogeneity of Boston here, about how culture was more left-oriented but less diverse, with less of either interesting extreme).
But Boston did have a mainstream radio station that was far and above more off-the-beaten-path than anything I’d heard before from a mass market station—WFNX. They played alternative rock and pop that was catchy but not insubstantial. I did discover a trend, though—when I bought an album based on a great song I’d heard on FNX, I frequently found the rest of the album disappointing. So in the end, I decided FNX was a less reliable source of good albums as word of mouth and my good-old SPIN magazine, which I’d turned to so often before.
So when Green Day first came out, I think I dismissed them as another one of those bands that had a few great songs that I could easily hear on FNX, and I never bothered with them past that. I did see them in a free live performance that was cut short after only a few minutes (for reasons unclear—some security thing, we thought, but we were too far back to see clearly). That clipped-short concert prompted a flood of disgruntled teens and twenty-somethings from Boston’s Hatch Shell to overflow onto a local throughfare, stopping traffic completely, and proceed to loot the nearby convenience stores. I recall entering one corner store to buy something to drink, past dudes smuggling sodas out beneath their shirts, to find the only beverages left were two solitary rows of TAB. We left still thirsty.
It was only a few years later, toward the decade’s end, that I actually bothered to pick up any Green Day albums. I was glad I bothered to go back and check them out.
Wearing their self-deprecating, alt-rock hearts prominently on their charming, witty sleeves, Green Day were masters of rapid-fire tunefulness. Unlike with many of my WFNX purchases, the big hits “Longview” and “When I Come Around” were not among the best songs of their albums, in my opinion. The deeper album cuts proved to be an unrelenting sequence of infectious punk-pop gems.
Both the breakout Dookie (1994) and the follow-up Insomniac (1995) are, I find, almost impossible not to love. The only way for a punk fan not to love Green Day, I think, is to let negativity—the thought that they might be posers or sell-outs or somehow not genuine enough—stopper your ears and prevent you from actually listening. They’re just that good, the best punk albums since the Descendents’ Milo Goes to College (1982), a clear influence.
Playlist 1
Playlist One presents a blend of Dookie– and Insomniac-era Green Day, when they were just dumb bratty punks cranking out short blasts of self-doubting snarl. I can’t recall offhand a band better at crafting catchy, tuneful pop-punk. I love this stuff.
Playlist 2
Subsequent albums saw them trying out new styles, and their now-classic American Idiot (2004) was a highly acclaimed concept album (or punk rock opera) about, well, an American idiot. Its social and political commentary was a huge break from their previous themes. In other words, they got serious. I was glad they did, in fact—it probably gave them more grown-up mainstream cred, which they deserved. There are some who feel certain global themes need to be tackled in order to be considered “important.”
However, I still like the older stuff better. It plays to their strengths, which were very strong, indeed. So I prefer Playlist One, in fact. But Playlist Two is pretty damned good, too.
Cover Art:
- American Idiot (cover) and Nimrod. (inner sleeve): Source, Discogs.com, Fair use.
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