33 rebellions per minute
"Do you have the time to listen to me whine?"
1994
Green Day, DOOKIE
It had been a few years since I'd listened to DOOKIE, which belongs to my Mom (much to her embarrassment), and I just put it on, right before leaving for Massachusetts, to enjoy a bright jolt of energy. DOOKIE was the album that brought bubblegum into Alternative Rock, after all, liberating the world stage for such tuneful Offspring as Blink 182. It's not the most significant music in the world, four major chords and clean guitars, but I think it's fun, and as attitudes go, "underachiever and proud of it" beats "underachiever and hand me the carbon monoxide pump" anyday. If the album sounded like I remembered it, that jolt is all that would have happened, and I wouldn't have had cause -- I promise! -- to inflict on you a brief treatise on extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds.
DOOKIE, as may shock you too if you've let your copy molder for a few years (or never bought it), is a midtempo record, sometimes even ponderous. The sound spectrum is filled with pointless, poorly enunciated guitar feedback. You can tell it's not supposed to be. "Burnout", the fastest song here, is clearly supposed to blister past almost too fast to recognize, like the first Ramones album. "When I Come Around", "Welcome To Paradise", "Basket Case", the 2nd through 4th singles, those collected in my head playing slow enough to sing along without running out of breath, but not one whit slower; they're not like that. "Pulling Teeth", with cowpunk accents, is lyrically frantic, the narrator desperately trying to peek inside the mind of his physically abusive girlfriend, but Billie Joe Armstrong doesn't have any strain to articulate the polysyllables in "is she ultraviolent/ is she disturbed?". Sentiment after frightened sentiment -- from half-wishing he'd never left his parents' house, to resenting his ex's new boyfriend, to being rejected as hopeless by a psychiatrist, to running completely out of all motivation needed to face the world -- is delivered with evident patience and care, to light, singalong melodies that don't have the depth to move slowly, and shouldn't have ever been asked to try.
What happened? What happened was, 1993 and 1994. This was the era of Pearl Jam fallout. Major hit singles included Alice In Chains's "Would?", Live's "I Alone", Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box", Stone Temple Pilots' "Interstate Love Song", Tool's "Sober" and "Prison Sex", Bush's "Everything Zen", Soundgarden's "Fell On Black Days", Silverchair's "Tomorrow", Smashing Pumpkins's "Cherub Rock" and "Rocket", the Toadies' "Possum Kingdom". Every alternate song had heavy, fuzzed-out early-Sabbath basslines. Every alternate song went from tense verses to howled choruses. Every alternate song was slow enough that you could still keep the rhythm with heroin coursing through your veins.
Don't get me wrong, please. As radio eras go, you're well entitled to hate it, but I think this was an okay one. I like every song I just named except the Silverchair one, many of them quite a bit; once you accept the primacy of dynamics and agonized drama, these were bands that brought intelligence to the production thereof. Creed and Lit and Oleander are what the airwaves play _after_ a sound has been explored by the talented people, who then left. The fascination with loud/slow/heavy, while it was new, brought in some fascinating hybrids from people who had nothing to do with the genre. R.E.M. imported fey, glammy vocals and tremolo pedals for the semi-grunge "Crush With Eyeliner". Radiohead's "My Iron Lung" dared to make the quiet verses more beautiful and angelic than tense, and made the choruses too scary to howl to. Poe, a jazzy hypnotic trip-hop artist for the most part, mixed Nutcracker Suite delicacy, a darkly riffed growl of "you can't talk to a psycho like a normal human being!", and a distorted but light-stepping bridge on "Trigger Happy Jack". And Weezer, who you'd assume would have as little use for grunge as Green Day for the same reasons, _wrote_ "Say It Ain't So" as a grunge song, and _wrote_ "Come Undone (the Sweater Song)" as a joke contrasting goofy lyrics with stylish agony; those are my two favorite songs of theirs. New genres are fun to play with; that's why they come, lose their novelty, and fade, and frankly, it's a pretty good reason.
The problem comes when a sound becomes so dominant that bands forget there were other sounds before. Constructing cathedrals of echoing riffs and feedback, that's cool. Constructing shitty public housing units of riffs and feedback that wouldn't pass fire-code inspection in a million years, just because it's what's "in", that's bad. Green Day's "When I Come Around", an arrogant relationship song, shouldn't rush by in a blur, of course not; it has every business strutting a bit. But it shouldn't struggle to lift each leg every step. It strikes me as a very very good song, using a very very good 4-chord riff for the three billionth time, and in 1994 I was so attuned to grunge that I didn't notice the problem. I doubt DOOKIE's 9 million buyers did either. And in the year 2000? Sure, I think it overcomes the problem, just like "Basket..." and "Welcome..." and "Pulling..." and "She". But the production is a bug, not a feature.
The first single, by the way, "Longview", sounds exactly like I remembered. The melodically rumbling bass line is single and enunciated, and sways like a hammock or (in Green Day's stated intent) like leisurely sex. Bille Joe's trademark whine slips in behind the beat to narrate the accumulation of summertime boredom of bad TV, bad weather, and noplace to go: "my mother says to get a job/ but she don't like the one she's got", so there goes the future. "Peel me off this Velcro seat and get me moving", he begs in nonstandard teen eloquence. Guitar triplets hammer their way into the roaring punk-pop chorus, a "bite my lips and close my eyes/ take me away to paradise" program for happiness through masturbation that, a later verse admits, has pretty much lost even its steam. My summers were never nearly so bland, but that's okay: vivid writing is vivid writing, and for one song Green Day articulated teenpunk's central bleak vision better than I recall it ever having been done before. For that one song, thankfully, they let the song, not the times, dictate the sound. But yeah, even all the songs they tried to ruin survive in at least decent shape. Sure.
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