6: basket case-- green day

i am not going to sit here and write about how this song reinvented rockmusic or how i can close my eyes when i hear this song and see magnificent colors. listening to this song as i write is honestly the first time i have heard it a long while. and i dont have a problem with that. but i must give credit where credit is due. this song has played a pretty important role in my life, even if it was a long time ago. now, i mean, i think it's still hyper and fun and funny and all that, not earth-shattering or anything. but once upon a time, this song meant something very different.

first of all, i must take you back to 1994. i am still young, innocent, and beginning to look outside mom and dad for self-validation. in the world that was my neighborhood, there was no better way to gain validation than to be accepted and well-liked by the older kids. for the first time, i was interested in being cool- doing what the older kids did, said, etc. (not that i knew exactly what coolness was, but i knew who possessed this quality). around this time, the album 'dookie' was as cool as cool could get on my block, at least in that it was being listening to by kids three or four years my senior. so the times i was around them (i am sure they appreciated my presence) i would rock out to this song, soaking in what they said about it, how they reacted. i learned the words to this song and remember singing it while playing basketball with the other kids. and i felt like a badass. it was my gateway to the other side. this song was an adolescent apple just beyond my grasp. but i called it mine and had to let everyone know about it.

so, maybe this song didn't make me any cooler. but, for the time being, i felt that it did. and it remained for a while as a standard bearer for what was cool. it represents the time when i started to turn to music to feel cool. for better or worse, this set the precedent for a large portion of my musical life. while this song is confined to that time period i have listened to it a good number of times through the years, and i guess i could have listened to worse songs to feel cool. the good part about my fascination with the song was that i continued to seek out stuff that seemed just out of my reach, stuff that seemed edgy (to me), stuff that seemed cool. what if dr. dre had been popular on chad drive at the time? would i now be a fifty cent fan? i don't know, but if my musical track were in doubt before, latching on to this song assured that poppypunkyrocky ridiculousness would be the mode of operation for most of my days. so, as much as it pains me to say, without this song's place in my life, it's doubtful that my musical taste would have developed the way that it did.

ah yes, they did exist before american idiot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8Y3qDDODT0