Hi, my name is Jack Stein, and I love music. The only thing I love more than music is sharing music I love with the world. Though these reviews, I’m going to share my favorite albums with the world, and hopefully introduce somebody to their new favorite band!
Album Name: Kerplunk!
Release Date: January 7th, 1992
Artist: Green Day
Label: Lookout! Records
Rating: 12+
Verdict: The first album with the band’s full lineup, Kerplunk! is generally enjoyable (if a bit repetitive at times) with a few tracks that truly stand out as great. As a whole, the album is a great intro to punk for casual listeners, and a way for die hard fans to really get to look back on Green Day’s foundations to see how far they’ve come!
Have you ever felt bored, lost, disillusioned, or just plain confused? The world is a crazy place, and, luckily for you, three of the biggest maestros of the pop punk genre have whipped up a handy travel guide to being a high schooler. With songs covering topics like love, loss, insanity, the petrifying fear of becoming the very adult that you rebel against, and so much more, Kerplunk! is where Green Day first really demonstrates what would become their trademark: tapping into the hearts of the American kid, and really telling them what they need to hear. This record, from before all of their fame and fortune, is rough, raw, and, above all, fun! The great things about the songs is that they convey real messages while still keeping the mood as light as can be.
While most of the songs are very good, a few have truly withstood the test of time. One of them, which also happens to be my favorite, is a song called “One of My Lies.” It tells a story, like all great songs do, of a kid who believes that the world revolves around him, and believes that he can slack off and do whatever he wants, and life will go perfectly. “When I was younger/ I thought that the world/ circled around me/ but now I realize I was so wrong,” Billie-Joe Armstrong, the band’s guitarist and lead singer, sobs into the mic. As it turns out, that kind of thinking can only lead to misery, as he figures out as his life slowly falls apart around him. Another great song that the band still plays today is “Welcome to Paradise,” which tells about finally leaving home, and how much life changes when you do. I like that Billie Joe keeps a positive tone, if a little melancholy: “Dear mother, can you hear me laughing/It’s been three whole months since that I have left your home… And suddenly I am out here on my own/And I’m feeling so alone!” “Welcome to Paradise was so well received that they rerecorded it for their following album, the smash hit Dookie.
During a live performance, Billie Joe stated that “Who Wrote Holden Caulfield” was his “favorite song from Kerplunk!”, with good reason, too. It hit many of the traditional Green Day landmarks: a snappy melody, frenetic power chords, and a whole lot of punk energy. It is a song about commitment: “He makes a plan/to take a stand/but always ends up sitting.” It is a song about disillusionment: “There’s a boy/who fogs his world/and now he’s getting lazy.” And it is a song about when “you get frustrated and you think that you should do something but you end up doing nothing. But then you enjoy it,” In the words of Billie Joe himself. It is in the three chord punk style that Green Day has slowly transitioned out of over the years, but, if you listen to modern Green Day such as “Baby Eyes” or “Let Yourself Go,” you can hear how it is reminiscent of their original cuts from back in the late eighties leading into the early nineties.
Some other standouts are a punk cover of the Who’s “My Generation,” complete with an interlude of Billie Joe screaming swear words, “Christie Road,” a song about a real road in Oakland that the members of Green Day and their friends used to go to to hang out, and was a place that Billie Joe liked to go by himself to think, and “Words I Might Have Ate,” which is about looking back at your failures and thinking about what you could’ve done differently. A great thing about “Christie Road” was that it was an early demonstration of the mid song transitions in tempo and chords that Green Day would later prove to be a strong suit of theirs.
Green Day does try some things in Kerplunk!, some of which works, and some of which… doesn’t. For example, the band’s drummer, Tré Cool, wrote and preformed a song called “Dominated Love Slave.” Between his nasal, comedic voice, the fact that it’s preformed as a bluegrass song, and the incredibly fake southern accent that he sings in, it makes it really hard to take the song seriously. But that’s one of my favorite things about Green Day: they don’t need you to take them seriously. Regardless of what the mainstream says, they love to make music, and they do so whenever they want. Amidst their punk cuts is another song that really sticks out, called “No One Knows.” Unlike the majority of the other songs on the album, it is slow, sad, and there’s not a power chord in sight.
But Kerplunk! is not without its faults. While Green Day has since proved themselves to be very talented in delivering a huge variety of different types of songs, many of the tracks on the album sounded repetitive, and I still have trouble keeping them apart. Despite the fact that I have listened to Kerplunk at least twenty times in the past year or two, “80”, “Android”, “Private Ale”, and “Strangeland” still tend to blur together in my head. They tend to be a frenzied mishmash of yelling, crazy drumming, and the same old formula: three chords, and lyrics laden with complaint and regret. Alone, they aren’t bad songs, not at all, but, together, they tend to get a bit boring.
This album really goes to show that even back then, Green Day could deliver. They managed to be, if not great, pretty consistently good, with a few little touches of magic sprinkled in that made the record memorable. I can almost imagine being among a throng of disillusioned punk rockers in the early 1990’s, growing up in the Bay Area, desperate for a voice, and finding Billie Joe’s. They’re a great band, and their music really manages to hold up, even nearly twenty-four years later. If you’re in the mood to listen to the lighter side of punk, and to hear a group of superstars before they found fame, Kerplunk might just be the record for you!
