Green Day
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As the 20th anniversary of the birth of punk, the Summer of Hate, looms, this problem circles in on itself one more time. What do you call punks who look nostalgically back at an era that looked nostalgically back at yet another? Can you take them seriously? Or are latter-day punkers merely the 90s version of, say, rockabilly boys (and girls), wearing the costume and walking the walk as banners of allegiance to a lost and simpler time? I don’t mean to sound dismissive. Punk, almost through sheer wishfulness, really did create something: a small but potent idealistic infrastructure of labels, bands, and distributors that percolated through the 80s and eventually produced a quintuple-platinum Nirvana, Soul Asylum on the cover of Rolling Stone, and Agamemnon dead.
But while all sorts of variants of this music–what came to be called alternative music–flourished in this shadow industry, the musical nostalgists remain. The neo-neo-punks have been surviving happily in several protected areas around the country, including a venerable scene in Berkeley, California, home of Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll and a club called the Gilman Street Exit. Green Day, a barely postadolescent trio playing an irresistible pop punk, is that scene’s current standard bearer. A major-label bidding war for the group has resulted in a Warner Bros. album, the ineffably named Dookie. (Dookie is the band’s word for doo-doo; the cover of the album is a cartoon of a massive shit bomb triumphantly exploding over Berkeley.)
