This is the best thing I've seen in a long time.
When an album hits a big milestone like its 30th anniversary
Oof, so this is what getting old feels like. Yikes.
Crank it as long as you want with “All By Myself,” arranged for the first time on a hand-cranked music box.
chef's kiss.
> this toothbrush plays Green Day’s “Pulling Teeth” while you brush. Finally, you can put Dookie in your mouth (not recommended).
The mere mention by the title had the classic phrase "Do you have the time..." blaring in my head as if it were thirty years ago, even if the last time I listened to that was at least a decade a ago. The nostalgia, right in the feels.
I hadn’t listened in Dookie in a very long time. Then my kid and I were talking about music and she wanted to know what kinds of music I streamed back in high school. :)
That turned into a talk about CDs and led into listening to Dookie with my eight year old. The album has aged very well. As an adult, I find that different songs are more appealing now than they were as a teen and in other cases, age has warped the meaning of the songs.
But as an album, it stands up really well. There are some other well known albums from the nineties that really haven’t stood up as well. I’d recommend another listen!
Though, “I declare I don’t care no more.” :)
As someone who was a teen about ten years ago I can confess it was still very relevant and I even got its CD (though honestly I listened to it mostly on my iPod Touch)
When “Out Come The Wolves” by Rancid hit 20 years I was starting to feel my age.
"Energy" is 35. Feeling old yet? If so, go to the Punk Rock Museum in Vegas. They did us right.
I love this album. So many catchy songs. I prefer it to dookie too.
Easily top 5 punk album of all time.
we definitely gonna rediscover what de-mastering means, when AI finally gets to master everything instead of us. can't wait for a wave of punk-pixel-human-in-the-wrong-loop-nostalgy much stronger than vaporwave.
They really went all out on these...
"A preloved Teddy comes with a cassette tape featuring an eight-channel recording of “Chump” including synchronized eye and snout movements."
"This fully-playable version of “Welcome To Paradise” will immerse you in the world of a small apartment in Oakland, California. Search out the record to play the full 8-bit rendition of your favorite song."
Totally impressed and amazed.
Absolutely incredible product. I don't have the $99 to splurge on this but it was very enticing :)
You enter a lottery to buy the 1 Ruxpin that was built. You can probably get more than your money back if you don't want to keep it.
Oh, that makes it slightly less cool, although still very cool.
It would have been nice if they made it a limited run (say, 100 copies) instead of singular pieces.
There's multiple copies of a number of the items.
Yes, this is officially endorsed[1] by Green Day. Very cool.
These Brain guys giving MSCHF vibes (i.e. https://deadstartuptoys.com/)
This was my first thought when checking out their website and other projects. Just more digital than physical.
> answering machine
Tried and true distribution channel for hit music - see dial-a-song ((844) 387-6962) or the lovely "callin' oates" ((719) 266-2837)
I love that... 13 years on that Callin' Oates is still alive.
"The hotline dates back to December 2011 and was created by Michael Selvidge and Reid Butler. Selvidge, who at the time worked for Twilio, told The Verge that he was required to build an app for the company and “Callin' Oates” was the result"
The Teddy Ruxpin with the sync'd movements is crazy impressive.
Having to provide an address and a credit card before the drawing is obnoxious, but it's led me to realize that if I really wanted things that played Green Day, I could make most of these things myself.
…yes, well, it’s quite common for people to pay others to do things that they could do themselves but would rather just do something else. That is kind of how the world works.
BTW - as you'd expect - the protocol for Ruxpin has been thoroughly reverse engineered.
IIRC - one audio channel is used for the speaker, and the other is a series of beeps which map to facial movements:
https://makezine.com/projects/chippy-ruxpin/
Back when I thought it might be a fun side hustle to make cool youtube videos (long ago put to bed), I thought about making videos of Ruxpin singing death metal and stuff.
It's been years since it seemed like it was worthwhile to make Youtube videos... And the situation is getting worse for creators year over year.
not 'beeps' so much as either Pulse-position modulation or FM to control the positions. I had a 'beta test' teddy before they were released, a friend of my father was a sculptor at WoW. I guess little me didn't want to give it back but had to, my Mom had to fight hard to find one at Christmas with a little inside info on delivery dates. You can still make cool stuff for your own sake, you don't have to monetize every hobby.
This site is unexpectedly AWESOME. The frontend is so nice! The audio perfectly syncs up to a video when you open up the accordion, and I love the giant fonts. The best part though is the bitcrushing image carousels omg. The images get higher res as they're scrolled into view! https://imgur.com/a/TIWA9FW
Kudos to the designers and devs on this.
I mean, when I first tried to open the website it just wouldn't load on my iPhone, so I tried on the laptop. It took ~10 seconds to load. I just assumed the bitcrushing was more issues with bandwidth and badly compressed images rather than a design choice. But your comment made me sit through everything to see if i could really get it. I guess I can recognize the work that went into this and the concept behind it... having said that, I am definitely not the target audience for this website and am struggling not to write an extremely negative comment about green day and 90s nostalgia
I thoroughly enjoyed it, this is as iconic of an album as I could imagine especially given my age at the time it was released, but all to say yes my iPhone feels like it’s going to catch fire after a couple minutes on the site lol
Always at least one every thread.
> Sorry but this site is trash because it took 10s to load on my One Laptop Per Child running LFS connected to my 3g hotspot. I literally cannot imagine why anyone could ever like this.
I physically chuckled
The struggle was in vain.
Literal old man yells at cloud.
This is one of the best things I have ever seen.
I'd take the whole album in 8-bit chiptunes in a heartbeat. Heck, I'd buy an old GameBoy if that was the only way to listen to it.
If you win the answering machine, just beware!
> Deletion:
> IrreversibleThe prices are insane to me but to be fair the people that remember this from 30 years ago will probably have some spare money to spend if they’re still interested
Edit: well to be fair I see now that they are very limited
There's a whole industry based on overpriced, "limited edition" nostalgic merch. Traditionally, "prints" (i.e. posters) for bands, movies, and even individual star trek episodes are huge. If you set the limit right, you're barely limiting sales at all while convincing people what they're buying is somehow more special and worth more money.
Art of the past is cheap and plentiful. Instead of doing multiple runs of an unlimited poster and bothering to keep it in stock, you do one run can call it "limited edition". Then you move on and mine the next anniversary.
This site is unusually slick for such a venture, but Dookie is a bigger deal than most albums, and the prices correspond to that.
What they're buying _is_ more special and thus worth more. Green Day doesn't need more money but I love limited edition art from small artists.
Why? I know the art up in my home isn't up in everyone's home. I want my space to be unique. I want to be reminded of the tour, the festival, the album release, years later. I'm paying extra to support the artist I love, to have something more unique, and I'm pre paying for nostalgia in a decade.
My walls are covered in art you can't get anymore. I love it. I'll never walk into someone else's home and see that I have the same mass produced dreck up, and every piece of art on my walls is tied to a memory.
And, doing the math, I can't imagine Green Day is making any money on this. sum(editions*price) = $3826 (though I'm not including the $20/item shipping). They probably spent more than that on the website. So they get publicity, some fans get some unique merch, and everybody else gets a fun joke
Apologies, a little slow here (probably because I was in high school when this album came out)...what are you actually buying for those listed prices?
You get exactly what it says. For example, if you put $99 down and win the draw, you can get an actual Teddy Ruxpin that sings Chump. Or for $79 you can win a Big Mouth Billie Bass that sings Basket Case. If you click through to the previews, there are videos.
I mean I thought that at first, then thought no way because that's just a one off product but yeah, that's incredible.
If anything the prices are far too low.
The price doesn't get you the item, it gets you an entry into the drawing. You're buying a lottery ticket for $19 - $99 with unknown odds.
It sounds like they aren't all one-off.
>QUANTITIES VARY BY TRACK.
The could probably produce as many floppies as they want, while the player piano... probably not so much.
>How do EQL launches work?
>Free to enter. You only pay if you’re selected to purchase.
https://brain.runfair.com/en-US/us/brain-green-day-having-a-...
I just spent a stupid amount of money for a chance at getting Teddy Ruxpin. I’m feeling remarkably dumb right now but your words make me feel better.
You only pay if you win
US only? Really should have put that front and center... before I spent 20 minutes deciding which drawing to enter :/
You could just proxy it through something like myus.com or the like
This is officially sanctioned by Green Day? interesting
Gotta stay relevant somehow!
For real. Ever since they sold out Petco Park ummm... last week... they've been super irrelevant.
A sold out Rolling Stones concert doesn't suddenly make them more relevant.. Green Day has the luxury of having a fan base that's not entirely dead of old age yet.
It doesn’t make them more relevant, but it does prove they’re not irrelevant, as GP suggested.
Idk, not many people can sell tens or hundreds of thousands of pricy tickets to see them do their thing for 90 minutes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hey, I still use my Mini-Disc deck! Sometimes!
Funnily enough, while I like the format and would be willing to get an official release of Dookie on it, it's not really worth the hassle for a single track, especially I could just as easily copy the album onto the format myself.
I remember seeing this album on MiniDisc in a store in Sweden circa 2000. If you do enough Googling you might be able to find a copy.
Hard to know if this was truly one of the best albums ever or if I just heard it at a super impressionable age, but the starting riff on When I Come Around gets me every time
It is both.
The story of Lookout Records being basically kept afloat by selling Kerplunk their first album after they left and blew up is also tragic/hilarious
It's very catchy, but not super-impressive musically IMO, however it had a huge impact on the scene and entire ecosystem at the time. Many other bands piggy-backed off their success, which I'm not sure happens as much in today's mega-single model. The band has gotten continually better while still staying relevant as well, which is really cool.
Green Day, especially the Dookie album, is kind of the epitome of "Yeah, you could have wrote it, but you didn't."
Not to mention, it's more than any single riff. It's the way the chorus ends then that little bass fill hits. And just the combination of the music with the lyrics. There's just that something that just gets everything right enough.
Take Basket Case, the song is pretty fucking simple musically. But it really serves as sort of click track to the vocals.
Taking simplicity and turning it into art takes skill.
Agree. Approximately rank 65 on best-selling albums of all time, but generally ranked in the 250-350 range on top 500 albums of all time. Such more subjective measures probably include sales/popularity as one of the ranking factors, so one could think that the album is of particularly below-expected "quality" to drag it down a few hundred positions.
Everyone already said that about punk. We know it’s not Bach, but it’s not meant to be. It’s punk music - it’s not meant to be impressive musically.
Having said that... :) ... GD are very much above average musically when it comes to the popular music of the last 30 years. With those songwriting/performing chops, it's almost surprising they are a punk rock band.
I personally prefer Insomniac. I used the opening riffs from Brain Stew as a ringtone during my on-call days, which ruined the track for a long time for me.
FWIW, when it came out I couldn't be bothered to listen to Green Day. 20 years later they became one of the favorites.
No HitClip?? They could fit 2/3 of Coming Clean on one.
Edit: I completely missed it. Everything is now perfect.
What's missing is the PXL-2000 tape with a video for one of the songs.
this is honestly the most impressive one here. i looked into doing hitclips with a friend and we basically tapped out once i found out how they work under the hood since there's no way they'd be cost effective.
Can you elaborate? I’ve always been fascinated by their existence.
Been discussed here before :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24599366
this is so freaking cool
Wow - what an amazing site!
Site does not load, but for that conclusion, it takes forever. What is supposed to happen? Firefox w/ ublock origin.
I'm on Firefox with ublock origin and it works just fine.
Either way... the site is a store.. of sorts... for Greenday's "Dookie" album, where the songs are mixed down into various bizarre formats. They said de-mastered, and I was hoping that they were actually releasing the individual tracks. Sad.
Here is a quick 30 second trailer of what's on the site, from Green Day's YouTube.
FF with ublock here, not seeing any difference between this and Chrome
Brilliant
amazing album. amazing concept.
This is green day?
I have no feelings.
90s? Ween of course.
Now this is hackin'
One of these tracks as an Opus file, 1.44MB long, shouldn't be that bad sound quality.
...but then, what would be the point? ;)
> The album that exploded punk rock 30 years ago, re-exploded onto obscure, obsolete, and inconvenient formats.
It's really strange. I probably don't get it.
I was there listening to punk rock and "grunge" rock in 1994. Back then nobody listened to music on his computer (the .mp3 format didn't even exist yet: at least not with that name) except if it was using the PC's CD drive, to play an audio CD.
1994 was kind "peak" quality: the loudness war on CDs just hadn't started yet and listening to music was often amazing for it was often played directly from CDs on actual stereos.
Crappy sound only arrived a few years when the first, lame, mp3 encoders arrived and became ubiquitous and everybody made lossy rip of CDs (because we didn't know how to rip losslessly yet from CDs) and then encoded them with poor encoders at shitty bitrates (like 128 kbps mp3 were really a thing in the late 90s, for Napster sharing).
So it's really strange to take music from 1994, which is precisely a year were nobody listened to "shitty format" music yet on his PC.
FWIW I had my first CD player in 1988 or so.
It's only in the late 90s that music quality for listening experience went seriously downhill, with people listening to shitty 128 kbps mp3 on their shitty, tiny, Logitech speakers.
Nowadays all is good and fine again: Tidal, Spotify, Qobuz... It's all good sounding again. And many acceptable soundbars and systems came out (like Sonos and whatnots).
So yup I don't get it: to me it's "fake retro" because 1994 music was enjoyed from CDs, on speakers hooked to a stereo (which were never as shitty as those tiny Logitech speakers and similar hooked to PCs).
I just don't understand what this is: I must be getting old... But then as I'm getting old, it means I was there in 1994 and it's definitely not the 1994 I remember. It's kinda fake retro for something that never existed.
I never really understood the 'punk' genre assignment for this band.
Surprising take.
Their sound and ethos is undeniably pop punk.
They played Gilman St, a punk mecca in Berkeley. See some of their shows in the 90s and 00s. If you don't think that's punk, I don't know what to tell you.
They didn't do much fast skate punk type stuff like NOFX and No Use did, but punk is a super wide genre anyway; to me, it's about what you are, not how you play (see also: second wave ska a la Reel Big Fish and No Doubt, or country cow-punk, like Hank Williams III)
They leaned harder on the "pop" aspect of pop punk (American Idiot is widely considered one of the first punk operas ever made and is one of the best-selling rock albums ever) and experimented with their sound over the years (check out their stuff from the 2010s) but they never lost their edge, IMO (They dropped Saviors this year; incredible album.)
Regardless, they inspired a zillion punk bands of all kinds. Hell, FOD, one of my favorite pop punk bands from The Netherlands, was inspired by FOD, which is on this record!
> See some of their shows in the 90s and 00s
I think this is part of the tension.
By the mid-90s, "punk" had evolved from something that was a small band of weirdos into something larger. For instance normal, run of the mill high school kids were shopping the aesthetic at Hot Topic. I'm not suggesting this was good nor bad. But there was a huge culture shift happening. At a minimum, the punk aesthetic had shifted into the mainstream and poppier acts like Green Day helped to make that happen.
So folks who had been used to getting made fun of and beat up for being punks in the 80s weren't always super happy to see this shift. Again, not suggesting they had the right to feel this way or not. But it happened.
In general countercultures built around nonconformity have these tensions. Participants preach the nonconformity, but then reject people who don't fit a certain aesthetic. Participants preach openness, but then get upset when too many people join. It's just how it goes.
Brett of Bad Religion said that Nirvana’s Bleach was the first punk album that lead the way of how Rancid and Green Day’s sound today. Or made punk rock mainstream back then.
Wow, the "is Green Day punk" argument also turned thirty. Probably older, I'm sure someone had it before Dookie.
No it is much older. I remember longstanding debates on alt.punk in USENET on this very topic before Dookie came out.
A lot of punk has always had an anti-success edge, which seems really unfair. It should be more about DIY and freedom outside what was (in the 90's) a very restrictive, fixed business model. NOFX are the best of example of the punk aesthetic, but Green Day (the pop-punk band, not the Celtic folk band^) didn't sell out while achieving stratospheric success.
^Community reference
> A lot of punk has always had an anti-success edge
I think you hit it on the nail. What makes some people uptight about Green Day being punk is not the music -- because objectively, punk's pretty much on point. It's the fact that they were wildly successful. Can't be punk any more when that happens.
Sort of. Even before their commercial success this issue was coming up. Granted the commercial success turned the knob to 11. There were already debates about their sound, that it was too poppy and mainstream sounding.
Whether or not an ethos espousing rejecting authority should be applying authority on what other people sound like is another matter altogether :)
> didn't sell out while achieving stratospheric success.
Their Keurig "partnership" might suggest otherwise. And it's not just because they've partnered with a huge corporation. But mainly because their coffee company - "Punk Bunny Coffee" - puts a huge emphasis on "sustainability". And while Keurig says sustainability is important, their actions suggest the exact opposite.
> while Keurig says sustainability is important, their actions suggest the exact opposite
The term is loose enough to possibly refer to making the business (not human life generally) be sustainable, though the green[day]washing angle is more likely.
> A lot of punk has always had an anti-success edge
Alternative take: punk, as enjoyed by the connoisseur, sounds terrible to people who don't like punk, which limits its success
There are few things more punk that spawning a 30+ year argument about them not being punk enough to be considered punk. They don't conform enough to the standards of the non-conformists?
It’s kinda punk pop. It has the intensity of punk. It definitely had the mosh pit element to it. I remember it being more intense than the grunge that was popular at the time.
It was on MTV alot. But then again so were Primus and Faith No More. It was a different time.
I was at the attempted free show in Boston in the 90s that ended after just a few songs.
https://youtu.be/O7cJUUZIvNk?si=Yr7ivWCICTC0MTi7
I thought I'd seen the end of the singing bass trophy, but if it has to come back this is a good way.
I haven’t participated in this conversation since Kerplunk was released!
San Francisco punk was always a little different but Green Day was part of the late 80s/early 90s punk scene in the Bay Area. It was all centered around 924 Gilman Street.
Which band do you consider as punk?
Misfits
Black Flag
Ramones
TSOL
SNFU
Dead Kennedy's
Bad Brains
Descendents
Minor Threat
I think Punk was in its heyday in the 80's. I think its evolved over time and many people don't believe "pop punk" is really considered "punk" even though a lot of the themes we saw in the 80's punk bands are very clear and present in Green Day's music.
Which then begs the question what really defines punk music? I'm honestly not sure because many of the hallmarks of the 80's punk was the poor production, guitars out of tune, singers who couldn't sing very well - all of which have been greatly improved when you consider Green Day's music.
Billy Joe Armstrong is a phenomenal singer. Even on Dookie, the producer said a majority of the songs he did in a single take - which is staggering to think about. Their musical abilities are unquestionably much better than any of the 80's punk bands. Tre Cool's drumming is just on another level and I'm not sure many 80's era punk band drummers could ever hang with his abilities. Even the production level of Dookie was light years ahead of many of the seminal punk albums that came out in the 80's.
Its easy to claim that Green Day isn't a "real" punk band, but when you start to compare them to the "prototypical" bands in the 80's, they sing about many of the same things, but have elevated the genre beyond what its really been known for. In the end, I have a harder time not calling them punk, there's just too many similarities to many of the most popular bands people know.
> Which then begs the question what really defines punk music?
Rebellion against the mass.
Sex Pistols, The Ramones, Joy Division are some of the leading pioneers of the movement.
The 80's I would say is more toward post-punk. This split off in to Goth with The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees then genres such as New Wave, Synth with the likes of Depeche Mode and Gary Numan.
The same as grunge did in the US with Nirvana and the likes. I would say that Grunge was America's post-punk phase.
90's then saw the age of pop, and pop-punk came from that. Media was more available.
While Green Day held strong lyrics it's wasn't it. It didn't have the true spirit of punk. It was more rebellious against your parents as a teenager type vibe rather than take down the nation like prior. But I stand to be corrected.
I've never really liked Blink, Offspring and Green Day. I was to busy being script kiddie, 13 listening to chiptunes and goth.
anything played on wmbr's "Late Riser's Club"
https://wmbr.org/cgi-bin/show?id=8533
"It's like sewing your ear to a vacuum cleaner. "
though they include metal now.
The Sex Pistols, The Ramones
This is getting downvoted, but I'd never even heard them referred to as punk before. And as a British former punk, I don't understand it either.
They were punk, just mainstream, pop punk. It was a common label for them in North America in the 90s.
I think "pop punk" is a good term, for me it's about the sound and delivery, it has nothing to do with commercial success, being "posers" etc. I think it's kind of evident from the music itself why someone who likes Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Big Black, or GG Allin may not appreciate Green Day, NOFX and the likes (and vice versa). It's in the sound itself, ignoring the lyrics and everything else. Many bands without any mainstream success still play pop punk.
I think of punk as being three completely separate variables, and for any individual or band they're independent of each other:
1) Ethos
2) Aesthetics/look & feel
3) Musical sound
So someone could be punk as fuck ethos-wise but love listening to Yanni. Meanwhile a band could have a straight up anarcho-punk sound, but otherwise be white collar wage slaves
But this is the root of so much disagreement. When Green Day started ascending in the 80s, people were pointing out the poppy music as not being "punk". But that's just one variable.
You missed the fourth. Rebellion
Punk is about rebellion, pop-punk is a good umbrella term as they had rebellious vibes but to call Green Day punk is a bit of a stretch.
I was including that as part of `Ethos`. DYI, anti-authority, etc.
> Many bands without any mainstream success still play pop punk.
The irony extends to the fact that while someone can play in the style of pop without being mainstream, they cannot literally be pop until they're popular. But if pop requires being popular and punk requires shunning the mainstream, pop punk couldn't exist. The fact that it does is therefore a bit of a paradox.
As a former North American Punk, they were posers, not punks.
Ha! The amount of gatekeeping on the definition of punk that I've lived through makes me feel so old, but it also tickles me a little to see it come up again today. The more things change ...
Saying I'm punk, and you are not punk, is about the least punk thing you can do.
what about working for an investment bank? How punk is that on the scale?
It could be very high on the scale. Like punks, bankers often don't ask for permission.
Given how often they break laws, ignore social norms, and thumb their noses at authorities... pretty damn punk.
The classic No True Punksman fallacy.
Anyone who releases an album for sale is a poser. Trying to make money from music is unpunk.
As a self-confessed "former punk", do you really deserve to make that assessment?
Gatekeeping isn't punk
Uh oh... Nintendo intellectual property?
RIP in peace
i liked the idea because it implies there could be an unlimited number of new art projects that can drive new streaming revenue of back catalog music.
then I saw the $0.003-0.005 per stream figure on spotify, and so your max upside for getting 1M plays is $50. At $50/M 10M plays might buy 1 dinner for the band.
they actually make more selling the teddy ruxpins. maybe someone had a warehouse full of them and this clears them?
That's $3,000 to $5,000 per million. Or did you mean the Roman M?
3 * 10^-3 * 10^6 == 3 * 10^3 == $3000 per million streams, not $30.
They are only offering one Teddy Ruxpin.
The cash grabs from this band is insane, they are basically KISS at this point.
Very limited editions, with sone items having just one edition. This won’t make much money.
Looks like a cool art project.
It's a middle finger at the bands that do a cashgrab with reissues at every anniversary. So, the opposite of KISS.