POP-PUNK WEEK: Green Day - Kerplunk

Artist: Green Day
Album: Kerplunk
Release: 1992
Label: Lookout!

Tracklist:

1. 2000 Light Years Away
2. One For The Razorbacks
3. Welcome To Paradise
4. Christie Road
5. Private Ale
6. Dominated Love Slave
7. One Of My Lies
8. 80
9. Andriod
10. No One Knows
11. Who Wrote Holden Caulfied?
12. Words I Might Have Ate
13. Sweet Children
14. Best Thing In Town
15. Strangeland
16. My Generation

When I was 12 years old, I first heard Green Day in the same way as many other kids: on the radio or MTV (but who can really remember through the haze of bong smoke-filled years, summer nights huffing RustOlium and trading blowjobs with male schoolmates). Anyway, when I was 12 years old, I rode my bike to the local record mart with the intention of purchasing the recently released Dookie album.

I got there to discover that Dookie was $12.99!!! $12.99 for a fucking record! I was distraught as I only had a crisp ten dollar bill lifted from my distracted mother’s purse. Then I found Kerplunk. The cover wasn’t nearly as exciting as that of the overpriced Dookie, but the price tag of $6.99 made up for that. I bought the record and as always rode home as fast as I could to listen to it. I studied the liner notes, memorizing the lyrics to every song and convincing myself that the story of the girl cutting up her parents and putting them down the garbage disposal so that she could go see Green Day in concert was in fact truth.

Over the next decade, I probably spun that LP 1,039 times while dryhumping my high school girlfriend before selling it on eBay for $160 to some asshole from Texas. I have not even heard this album in years, and I don’t really want to, but in the spirit of “Pop-Punk Week,” I thought I could share my story.

-Evander Holywar