I’ve always loved how Dookie gets straight to the point – with a ‘rat-a-tat rat-a-tat’ of the drums, the group goes into overdrive on opener “Burnout”, giving a mission statement in the chorus: “I’m not growing up / I’m just burning out / And I stepped in line / To walk amongst the dead”. It feels as relevant now as it ever did.
Dookie is one of the few albums that I owned on cassette then re-bought on CD, one of my favourites of the early nineties. The singles – “Longview”, “Welcome To Paradise”, “Basket Case” and megahit “When I Come Around” – are among the highlights, but this is an album that delivers from start to finish, from that opening ‘rat-a-tat’ through the closing acoustic guitar of “All By Myself”.
There are so many highlights here: the driving bassline on “Chump”, the iconic delivery on “Basket Case” (“I think I’m cracking up / Am I just paranoid / Or am I just stoned?”), the sheer melodic brilliance of “In The End”, and I’m a sucker for “When I Come Around”, one of the finest rock songs of the nineties.
I don’t think its Green Day’s best album (that would be the phenomenal American Idiot), and the group sounds a little less mature, a little more raucous here, but Dookie is still a brilliant album.
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