I’m not a big fan of Green Day. I count them and Blink-182 as the two most overrated bands in pop punk. Both, however, affected the growth of the genre by bringing it into the mainstream. Green Day did so with their album Dookie, which just turned 20 on February 1st. Fuse recently released a great article in which leaders in pop punk recollected the record’s influence on their careers. Though I’m nowhere close to such a leader, here’s my experiences with Green Day, Dookie, and Basket Case.

On February 1st, 1994 I was eleven years old and in fifth grade. I didn’t listen to music beyond what my parents played while driving, so I had no idea who Green Day was. Blink-182’s mainstream breakthrough Dude Ranch was released 3 years and 4 months later, at the end of my Middle School years. I likewise had no idea who Blink-182 was, until the winter of my freshman year when the senior wrestling captain took a detour to the mall while driving me to a Saturday practice to buy their first two albums. In short, pop punk wasn’t on my radar beyond The President of the United States of America’s genre-flirting song Peaches.

Throughout high school I was a hip hop and rap kid. Wyclef Jean’s The Carnival was released a few weeks after Dude Ranch and I fell in love with that instead. I still have all the lyrics memorized. When I got my licence my sophomore year, I listened to JAM’N 94.5 on the way to school. Eminem’s The Slim Shady LP blew up around that same time, captivating my attention for years. Still, despite this intense focus on music that a white suburban kid who went to a private school probably shouldn’t have been listening to, it was impossible to escape the riffs, tracks, and lyrics off of Dookie.

Basket Case encompasses everything that makes pop punk great. The lyrics are straightforward, honest, observational, and critical. The music is driving, memorable, and catchy. Despite my ignorance of the band back then, I still remember walking around singing:

Do you have the time
To listen to me whine
About nothing and everything
All at once

Is there a better encapsulation of pop punk, and arguably American culture, than those four lines? Since Dookie ,Green Day has gone way too far in the latter direction, but the groundwork this one song laid for the genre is undeniable. I only wish I had realized it at the time. Instead, I went from not knowing anything about them to dismissing them when they released the anti-American American Idiot when I was in college. It’s hard to get behind a band that sings, “Don’t want to be an American idiot/one nation controlled by the media” when they’d become media darlings at that point and music is a part of the media.

As I’ve grown and my musical taste has become more balanced between pop punk and rap, I’ve come to appreciate Green Day’s contribution to my life with Dookie. It’s nearly impossible to argue against it as the greatest pop punk album of all time. Every song is catchy and hits hard. More remarkably, the string of radio hits that everyone acknowledged as quality songs gained credibility for the genre. You could say that the album was the tipping point when punk went from bitter excluded kids in their garage to another legitimate choice of musical direction. Warped Tour started a year after Dookie’s release and exploded soon after, still going strong to this day.

Long after Dookie, Green Day now seems like a band of bitter excluded kids in their garage who somehow became famous, disconnected from the genre they helped build that has become a much different beast. This characterization is surely a bit controversial, as the media’s pushing of Green Day represents what I dislike about their tactics and the changes in pop punk offend many people who think the genre has become too “watered-down” and involved with record labels. Still, I have to tip my hat in thanks to the first mainstream pop punk band. When Dookie came around, music changed.

Who cares if it led to a future winner of a network singing competition doing a pop cover of one of its songs 17 years later?

(For the record, I love that cover.)