25 Years Later, Green Day's Insomniac Deserves Its Due
it is the most definitive and vital statement of their career's first act
As I’m doing research for my books, I find myself revisiting a lot of touchstones as not just a music journalist but a writer. Zines like Jessica Hopper’s Hit It Or Quit It or Al Burian’s Burn Collector had just as huge an impact on my psyche and the way that I string sentences together as more traditional works of music journalism like the writings of, like, Lester Bangs or whatever. Then you have the cohort of music writers who ascended during my high school and college years who have also had an indelible influence on the way I think and write about music— people like Hanif Abdurraqib and Nina Corcoran, or my friends David Anthony and Ian Cohen.
But one of the most striking and inspiring works was one that Jason Heller mounted in mid-2013 and ended up being one of the things I looked forward to every month of my senior year: his Fear of a Punk Decade column for the AV Club, which in many ways is both blueprint and inspiration for the work I’m doing now. What Heller accomplished with this column was undeniably impressive (what other mainstream website was running monthly columns that discussed Spanakorzo in the same breath as Propagandhi?), and looking back on it, I only wished that it was longer. Structurally, it analyzed the explosion of pop-punk, hardcore, and emo throughout the 90s year by year, with digressions about zines and labels thrown in for good measure. When Heller pauses long enough to give a specific band or album his particular brand of breathless, painstakingly contextualized analysis, he hit home runs— during my most recent reread, I discovered several phrases he wrote in reference to certain bands that I realize in retrospect irrevocably shaped my understanding of them. But because he only had a certain amount of space, Fear of a Punk Decade could occasionally lapse as music criticism and took on the qualities of a listicle, with the intent to be as comprehensive as possible (in many ways, a fool’s errand when discussing a movement as explosive and wide-ranging as the 90s punk and punk-adjacent explosion).
Still, I find Heller’s best moments during this column to be just as evocative and historian-like as I did in high school. And one of the bands that served as a focal point for his best tangents and analysis was Green Day. His column on the year of 1994 took Green Day’s signing to a major label and the subsequent smash success of Dookie as its central theme, and although anyone who is a Green Day fan knows the details of their rejection from the punk scene that fostered them backwards and forwards, it’s still stunning to hear about how visceral and aggressive the reaction was to something like signing to a major label— which a lot of younger fans of underground rock would see as innocuous and inconsequential, if not an outright victory. There’s probably a larger conversation to be had about how DIY, the concept of artistic integrity, underground rock communities, and the music industry as a whole have evolved in extremely unforeseen and irreversible ways since the 90s, but coming from the point of view of someone who was born in 1996, going back and seeing how the idea of “selling out” was viewed back then seems almost quaint, if not downright troubling (in retrospect, a lot of those conversations seemed to lack any recognition of class dynamics and ignored the material realities of capitalism in favor of an idealism that was untenable in the face of an over-arching and ever-present superstructure, but then again, maybe today’s DIY scene could do with a little less cynicism).
With that in mind, let’s talk about Green Day themselves. When they were first achieving national fame, the standard-bearer for long-running punk bands was the Ramones— nowadays, their 22-year run pales in comparison to the seemingly-endless careers of bands like NOFX and Bad Religion, let alone Green Day themselves, who are coming up on 35 years of existence. It’s safe to say that if you are of the same generation as me, and you’re into music at all related to punk, that Green Day have been an almost-imperceptibly constant presence since you were born. If Dookie hadn’t been a hit in 1994 and there was no subsequent revival of public interest in punk, there would have a significantly higher barrier of entry for people getting into the scene in later years; remember, although Nirvana and their fellow Alt Nation brethren like R.E.M., etc. were widely acknowledged to have been informed by punk, it was still regarded as a dead concept by the mainstream, and its underground practitioners had been resigned to a future of overwhelming obscurity, only to have the dead horse of their influence flogged by commercial bands wishing to exploit their credibility. Whether all this is good or bad is up to the individual to decide, but it’s undeniable that Green Day is the band that brought the most people to punk— not grunge, not college rock, but punk and hardcore and emo and all that cool shit— possibly ever.
I’m absolutely one of those people— the sounds of “When I Come Around” and “Basket Case” were fed into my eardrums before I was even capable of conscious thought, making Green Day the first thing I ever heard that bore any resemblance to something like punk. If it wasn’t for my love of them and blink-182 when I was in elementary school, my cousin Christian might have never given me the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag CDs that caused me to devour everything I could find when I searched for “hardcore punk” on my family’s gargantuan computer. By the time American Idiot exploded in 2004, I was eight years old, and only one or two years later, I was using YouTube— then in its infancy— to explore all kinds of subterranean music (no shit, I heard Orchid before I turned 10, although it would still be a few years til I actually “got” them). And make no mistake, even when bands like Punch and Dangers were inducting me into the world of then-contemporary hardcore, I was still jamming burned CD-Rs of Green Day songs in the car, much to the bemusement and occasional consternation of my family. Along with Nirvana (with whom I had a deep and emotional love affair that definitely became an unhealthy obsession), Green Day holds the distinction of being one of my first favorite bands and are at least partially responsible for my relationship to music in general.
I say all this to explain that I am part of a generation of kids who, even when they reached a point where they should have “outgrown” Green Day, never really left them on the shelf. No matter how embarrassing they got— “21 Guns”? A Broadway musical? A trilogy of albums called Uno, Dos, and Tre? Green Day Rock Band? Whatever the fuck Father of All Motherfuckers is?— I still gripped their early work tight, never relinquishing my emotional attachment, and as my musical vocabulary evolved, I became ever more impressed with the songwriting talent they displayed in their early years.
Which brings me to Insomniac (make no mistake, we’re still in for some lengthy digressions, but I promise it’s all going somewhere). While, don’t get me wrong, I still think Nimrod and Warning are great albums, in my mind, Green Day’s golden era ends with Insomniac. Nimrod in particular is the demarcation point where Green Day fundamentally shifted from an effusive, highly vulnerable punk/power-pop band and became the more contemplative, eclectic pop rock band that plays three-hour sets in stadiums today. I’d be foolish to claim that this period doesn’t contain gems: Nimrod is home to “Hitchin’ A Ride,” “Scattered,” “Platypus,” “Take Back,” “Uptight,” and “Haushinka,” among many other classic gems; Warning has three of their most unfuckwithable singles in the title track, “Minority,” and “Waiting,” along with fantastic deep cuts like “Deadbeat Holiday,” “Church On Sunday,” and “Blood, Sex & Booze,” and formalistic detours like “Misery”; American Idiot has fucking “Letterbomb”; they have a fine roster of B-sides including severely underrated bangers like “Ha Ha You’re Dead”; and I’ll even admit that 21st Century Breakdown’s “Restless Heart Syndrome” is a damn fine stadium-rock track. But something changed, and their later work just doesn’t have the same emotional resonance for me as their first four records.
But what’s most puzzling to me in 2020 is that it seems like Insomniac is perhaps the only Green Day album that doesn’t have its own community of slavish devotees (the aforementioned trilogy and the disgusting dreck they’ve produced since notwithstanding, although the kids on /r/greenday will defend anything). Dookie is near-universally regarded as one of, if not the, best pop-punk records of all time, and American Idiot’s cultural legacy has almost the same legs as Dookie does. Nimrod is often cited as their best work by diehard fans of the band, and Warning has enjoyed critical acclaim since its release in addition to experiencing renewed interest and reevaluation due to it being the one album where the band leaned into pure pop songcraft. 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours, a compilation of their earliest EPs and their debut record, is the go-to Green Day album of choice for many grizzled old punkers who were around before their big break, and their younger equivalents today (myself included) are often ride-or-die for Kerplunk. Even 21st Century Breakdown, confused and self-cannibalizing trainwreck though it is, has its defenders on the basis of pure ambition. So where is the cult of Insomniac? Aside from some people I’ve come across on social media and this piece by the esteemed Andrew Sacher, you almost never hear people sing this record’s praises.
As Insomniac’s 25th anniversary edges ever-closer, I find myself asking that question more and more. Especially as someone who identifies much more as a hardcore kid than a “punk” (which, to my mind, conjures up images of the rich white kids I’d see at shows with lovingly-tended-to leather jackets and Casualties back patches vomiting outside and casually using the n-word while shitty ska-punk bands played— very much not my vibe), I always felt as though Insomniac deserved credit for being, indisputably, the hardest and heaviest Green Day album, relatively speaking. The guitar tone on that record is a massive, scraping, rattling monster, and on the particularly abrasive “Brain Stew,” it’s almost comparable to bands like Quicksand and Helmet. The lyrics on Insomniac, in addition to being some of the band’s best, are also by far their darkest; it’s an unremittingly anxious and angry experience to listen through, despite only clocking in at just above 30 minutes. I mean, no, it’s not as oppressively miserable as Alice In Chains’s Dirt or Dystopia’s Human=Garbage, nor is it as clearly dysfunctional and unhinged as, say, No Comment or Despise You, but by the sonic standards of MTV-approved 90s pop-punk, Insomniac is a pretty anguished and aggressive listen, in a much more authentic and confessional way than the wiseass smirk of the Offspring’s Smash or the Clash cosplay of Rancid’s …And Out Come the Wolves (though both are still good albums).
And the especially funny thing about this is that Green Day never sounded all that particularly angsty or even stereotypically “punk” before they signed to a major label. The whole reason so many people in the scene took Green Day into their heart was because their sugary harmonies, the layered melodic interplay between Billie Joe Armstrong’s guitar and Mike Dirnt’s bass, and their overtly innocent, naive, puppy-love-addled lyrics stood in stark contrast to the Bay Area scene they came up in. The place of 924 Gilman Street in Green Day’s legacy isn’t just manufactured to give them a veneer of credibility or to explain their cover of Operation Ivy’s “Knowledge”; Green Day started off with the almost hilariously-un-punk, hippie-evoking name Sweet Children, playing shows and rubbing shoulders with diverse, dyspeptic, and difficult bands like Neurosis, Spitboy, Econochrist, Corrupted Morals, and Spazz. Their persona, goofy and unassuming, complete with an almost wholesome and virginal theme song about the wonders of smoking weed for the first time, was almost comically juxtaposed with the righteous political militancy of their Bay Area compatriots, many of whom were either obnoxiously dorky rule-followers or mired in hard drug abuse (although Green Day, like almost everyone else in the scene at that time, was poor as shit and occasionally homeless). Green Day had a song about two young lovers having sex for the first time; much of the Gilman scene’s moral compass was shaped by Jeff Ott of Crimpshrine and Fifteen, who has a well-documented sketchy past that he himself has openly admitted to. Their songwriting, much like their spiritual forbears Hüsker Dü and the Replacements, hid heavy influences from 60s pop, doo-wop, and 70s power-pop and hard rock acts beneath extremely trebly and fuzzy guitar work; even next to their melodic peers like Samiam, Monsula, Tilt, and Cringer— or even other outright poppy bands like Sweet Baby Jesus or the Mr. T Experience— it was clear that Green Day had pop hooks running deep in their bones. A large part of their earliest appeal was probably a desire to become connected to something truly special before they inevitably became superstars.
In fact, Green Day’s early sound was so extremely un-punk that they couldn’t get booked at Gilman until John Kiffmeyer, who had previously played in the performance art/punk band Isocracy with a pre-Samiam Jason Beebout, became their drummer. (Their first Gilman show was still never booked until Tim Yohannon, who had refused to book them from the beginning, had ceased control of the venue.) Watching early live videos from this period is kind of funny— Billie Joe and Mike are all hyper-sentimental stage presence, dressed in gas station attendant jackets with backwards baseball caps atop long and unwashed hair, offsetting their youthfulness with a surprisingly professional and tight level of musicianship. Meanwhile, Kiffmeyer is hanging out in the back, calm and detached, often wearing shades. Kiffmeyer is a great, loose, fast, punk drummer, but his habit of fucking up the tempo with ill-timed fills was a bit too sloppy and cool-for-school for Green Day, even in their early days. Although it wasn’t too far from the manic four-chord workouts they’d eventually base much of their sound around, Green Day’s earliest recorded material excels when the band leaned into the sophistication of their songwriting, and songs like “I Was There” and “Going to Pasalacqua” are extremely polished, wistful, and, dare I say, gorgeous pop tunes that are disguised as fuzzy, tinny punk songs. “Disappearing Boy” made an appearance on the soundtrack for Plan B’s absolutely essential Questionable video, and even amid a diverse soundtrack (which included everything from Fu-Schnickens to the Doors to Louie Armstrong to Cat Stevens), Green Day’s tunefulness and accessibility was immediately notable next to songs by bands like Pennywise and Bad Brains.
When Tre Cool stepped in as drummer for their 1991 sophomore record Kerplunk (which, full disclosure, is my personal favorite record of theirs), things gelled into something more propulsive and direct. Tre Cool and Mike Dirnt together formed perhaps the best rhythm section in the history of pop-punk, each pitching their own sharp, well-timed, and intricate contributions to Billie Joe’s increasingly pared-down and immediate songs. On their oldest songs, Billie Joe’s composed more textured guitar parts that, in conjunction with the almost-jangly guitar tone, competed with Mike Dirnt’s bass work for sonic space; he also had had a tendency to center songs around flashy, rock’n’roll-style guitar solos (“The Judge’s Daughter” is the most successful example). While the thin guitar tone on Kerplunk still felt closer in spirit to, say, Blake Schwarzenbach’s guitar work on Jawbreaker’s Unfun, the songs were becoming a lot more compressed and focused, with the bass and vocals playing off each other in interesting ways while the guitar formed the main rhythm of the songs (many of the songs on Kerplunk were written while Kiffmeyer was still in the band, so Tre Cool’s contributions weren’t as pronounced yet). Even amid diverse songs like the achingly emotive and restrained “No One Knows” and the Violent Femmes-aping “Words I Might Have Ate,” songs like “2000 Light Years Away,” “80,” and “Who Wrote Holden Caulfield?” (which is my all-time favorite Green Day song) are powerful power-pop gems, and the altogether tighter performances were obvious harbingers of big things to come for the band. Notably, Kerplunk features the first appearance of “Welcome to Paradise,” which would become considerably heavier and more dynamic when they retrofitted it for Dookie.
(I could seriously write a whole essay about the songs on 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours and Kerplunk, and I might do that when both records hit their 30th anniversary next year, but for now we gotta move on).
And as for Dookie itself, it’s weird to listen to it in 2020 and think, “This is the album that people thought was them selling out?” Even coming out on a major label, Dookie was the most straightforward and sonically “punk” record Green Day had produced to that point— sure, there were some diversions, like the Beach-Boys-with-more-distortion codependency anthem “Pulling Teeth,” but even the acoustic closer “F.O.D.” exploded into a fiery four-chord climax. And the songs themselves were some of the best Green Day would write in their entire career, nearly all of which sound just as fresh and vital today as they did when they came out. The crisp, dry, punchy guitar sound makes the songs sound massive— the bridge of “Welcome to Paradise” provides the clearest contrast, going from “interesting” to downright menacing. Dirnt and Cool have melded into a godlike groove. Cool finally gets to show off his exceptional technical talent in moments like the fills on stunningly energetic opener “Burnout” or when “Basket Case” kicks in, while songs like “When I Come Around” and “She” would completely fall apart without Dirnt’s bass work, and of course the fluidly squishy, LSD-fueled bass line on “Longview” is undeniably iconic. It’s hard to look at the track listing of Dookie and name a song that’s less than essential: “Having a Blast”’s deeply empathetic portrait of a suicide bomber collides with a driving and gorgeous bridge to produce something deeply affecting; “Chump” self-destructs in the most glorious way possible; “Sassafras Roots” is almost sickeningly sweet and addictive; every single off this album is an untouchably timeless classic; even the late-album run of minute-and-a-half filler tracks feels necessary because of their emotional resonance, from “In the End”’s sketching of the damaged relationship between Billie Joe and his mother to “Enemius Sleepus”’s nimble condemnation of a failing friendship to “Coming Clean”’s tacit admission of Billie Joe’s bisexuality.
One of my favorite documents of this era of Green Day is their Jaded In Chicago performance, which is perhaps most remembered for Billie Joe’s meth-addled rambling before “She,” but functions as a portrait of an incredibly tight live band at the absolute height of their powers, when they could pull off a memorable and intense 45-minute set while tweaking their asses off.
It’s pretty clear that they could go into their follow-up to Dookie with songs written on total autopilot and still produce a massive hit, which is why it’s simultaneously tragic and impressive that Insomniac is as deeply informed by the band’s internal struggles as it is. The aforementioned meth use aside, Insomniac is drenched in a particular brand of self-loathing borne of unexamined anger issues and constant panic attacks that helps construct an extremely neurotic and edgy atmosphere; although Billie Joe had written songs about his anxiety issues on songs like “80” and “Basket Case,” Insomniac is entirely about anger, heartbreak, nervous breakdowns, and feelings of inadequacy and betrayal. Sonically, it’s muscular and single-minded in its intensity, despite the structural quirks of several songs (“Babs’ Uvula Who?” is a chorus-less track built around the explosiveness of a rage blackout; “Panic Song” has an extended intro that sounds like the aural equivalent of the build-up to a panic attack, with the bass and drums functioning as a frantically-pounding heart; the main riff of “Brain Stew” mimics the ticking of the clock that everyone who’s ever had a sleepless night is painfully familiar with). Lyrically, it’s a bloodbath, and no one, least of all Billie Joe himself, is safe.
In order to completely understand where Insomniac comes from, it’s important to look at how sustained, vicious, and personal the backlash was towards their decision to sign to a major label. Not only were they instantly banned from playing at Gilman, but Billie Joe Armstrong’s side project— Pinhead Gunpowder, a roughshod band that rode the edges of pop-punk and hardcore in a uniquely ragged way— almost fell apart because Sarah Kirsch completely bailed due to her deep ideological disagreement with Green Day’s decision.
(RIP to Sarah, by the way— a legendary figure within the Bay Area scene, she was also one of my top five hardcore songwriters of all time. She was the primary voice behind some of the most influential, amazing, fiercely politicized, and affecting emo and hardcore bands of all time: the Skinflutes, Fuel, Silver Bearing, Sawhorse, Navio Forge, John Henry West, Sixteen Bullets, Torches to Rome, Bread & Circuits, Please Inform the Captain This Is A Hijack, Colbom, Baader Brains, and Mothercountry Motherfuckers. Although Pinhead Gunpowder’s lyrics were mostly written by drummer/writer of the most prominent zine of all time/personal hero Aaron Cometbus, Sarah’s inimitable voice and guitar style was impossible to replace, and their material recorded with her— compiled on 1994’s Jump Salty— is my favorite stuff that the band ever did. She was eventually replaced by Jason White, who at the time was most known for playing in emotive hardcore band Chino Horde, but would also later go on to join Green Day proper.)
It didn’t stop at behind-the-scenes drama, though— even while Green Day was going through a grueling tour cycle, the shit-talking back home never stopped. Letters written to Maximumrocknroll advocated for physical violence against Billie Joe for “betraying the scene,” and didn’t receive any pushback from Tim Yohannon, sparking disapproval from Green Day’s erstwhile punk dad Jello Biafra as well as igniting a longstanding feud between Green Day and Tim Yo that never subsided before his death. The Gilman bathrooms were often covered in anti-Green Day graffiti, and the general vibe was that continuing to listen to and support Green Day was tantamount to heresy.
The most puzzling part of this controversy was that it’s not like Green Day embraced everything that was supposed to be anathema to punk— quite the contrary, as they regularly gave back to their community by doing things like benefit shows for Food Not Bombs and have donated their time, money, and star power to Gilman on more than one occasion. Even when they had just signed to Reprise, they took the brazenly, loudly gay band Pansy Division on tour to open for them, and outright refused to play shows if any venues or promoters ever made a stink about it. Green Day’s underground popularity was reaching fever pitch at the same time as early 90s Riot Grrl, and Gilman was home to Miranda July’s 1992 debut play The Lifers as well as brash feminist acts like Spitboy, Blatz, and the Yeastie Girlz; Green Day might not have written many songs that openly espoused radical feminist ideology, but the song “She” was a deeply empathetic and explicitly pro-woman anthem, one that Armstrong has often referred to as one of his absolute favorite Green Day songs. People often forget that Gilman was an early incubator for the career of Michael Franti of the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, and was a major flashpoint for the punk scene’s violent rejection of an encroaching Nazi skinhead invasion; Green Day’s “Road to Acceptance” was often introduced live as an explicitly anti-racist song, and few mainstream bands have been as vocal about their support for Black Lives Matter as Green Day (and those who are haven’t been vocal about it for nearly as long). They were also one of the first mainstream bands to be explicitly pro-trans, something that a lot of ostensibly open-minded people in the punk scene still struggle with, and they promote political literacy and engagement in working-class communities to this day. Green Day took the morals that Gilman instilled with them while they were bringing punk to the masses; that’s not something that should easily be taken for granted, and it’s something that sets them apart from many later bands who were simply cashing in on the sound and image.
(Are Green Day liberal capitalists and not leftists? Yes. Were they ever going to start Tim Yo’s Maoist revolution? No. But Tim and MRR’s legacy of associating leftism with subculture in itself wasn’t the best praxis anyway— when people’s vested interest in leftism is irrevocably associated with being contrary to the status quo, it hobbles outreach and accessibility quite a bit. And at the end of the day, what’s more useful— getting people in working-class, non-urban areas interested in politics, or holding endless sectarian meetings that exclude people on the basis of Punk Points?)
But back in the 90s, people were even resentful of bands like Rage Against the Machine for selling out their ethics by being on a major label (how anyone can argue that Rage Against the Machine had no ethics is beyond me, but that’s an argument for another time). It was a different time; having a bar code on your record meant you were a sellout in a lot of circles, and the emotional investment many people had in these issues was intense and often formed a crucial part of their identity. This attitude seems to have mostly died out, but it seems insultingly arbitrary these days, especially because the standards applied were never really consistent and were largely dependent on how “punk” your home scene was— Jimmy Eat World were broadly accepted in the fiercely DIY hardcore/emo world of the late 90s despite being on Capitol, but Against Me! caught flak simply by going from No Idea to slightly larger indie Fat Wreck Chords (and then no one gave a shit when they signed to a major anyway).
All of this is to say that to suddenly achieve these great things as a band and be met with almost nothing but disgust and disapproval from the people who you looked up to during your nascent years wasn’t just a slap in the face; it was devastating. By channeling these feelings into their music, they achieved a sort of emotional consistency that feels immediately recognizable and understandable; I don’t know how many of Green Day’s new fans understood that “86” was specifically about getting 86’d from Gilman, but “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass” communicates such a profound sense of alienation, and such a potent acknowledgment that some bridges are impossible to un-burn, that knowing the particulars wouldn’t matter anyway.
Green Day’s songs, even and honestly especially in their early days, possessed an extremely unique and compassionate emotional complexity that is a large part of what makes Billie Joe one of the greatest punk songwriters of his generation. Many people were surprised by the forthright maturity of the songs found on Nimrod and Warning, but it was their mistake to write Green Day off as apathetic, immature slackers in the first place; even their most-cited anthem of apathetic immaturity, “Longview,” is less about how fun jerkin’ it is, and more about the process of using masturbation as a coping mechanism, an inoculation against an overbearing numbness and depression that comes with having few-to-no economic prospects or paths forward in life.
So when the band says that Insomniac was their attempt to show “the darker side of what Green Day is capable of,” you know that you’re in for some pretty tortured and dark songwriting. There’s no less than three songs that are about meth, and that’s just textually— the subtext and atmosphere of the entire record feels almost indescribably informed by crank, especially the contrast between the euphoria of the speedy, catchy music and the bitter hopelessness of the lyrics. Despite their stoner-friendly name, meth had been a part of the band’s story from the beginning, and fueled a lot of Billie Joe’s songwriting sessions— its use was just reaching fever pitch during this era. This is definitely Green Day’s most consistently fast record— the only two real breaks from this monochromatic palate are, ironically, the songs that are most explicitly about meth, the mid-tempo “Geek Stink Breath” and the jagged, fitful steamroller “Brain Stew.”
(If you’re wondering what the other song about meth is, it’s “Tight Wad Hill,” which mentions speedballs but is about a hill near John Swett High School in Crocket, California where mostly meth addicts and dealers hung out. If you’re disputing that “Brain Stew” is about meth— “It’s about his kid keeping him awake all night!”— first of all, if there’s another song explicitly about meth on the album, what makes you think it didn’t influence the song about insomnia? Second of all, Billie Joe has said it’s about meth. Third of all, I know not everyone went to high school with tweakers, but referencing cross-tops is a dead giveaway [yes, cross-tops are speed and not tina, but that’s on Billie and not me].)
But even without the influence of meth, Insomniac would sound deeply anxious and wound-up. “Panic Song” takes a tremolo-picked bass riff from Dirnt and stretches it out for a minute and a half straight; it makes me feel like my fingers are about to bleed just from listening to it. “Babs’ Uvula Who?” rests on a stop-start riff that feels like an irregular heartbeat before it explodes in the climax of the song. Even “Westbound Sign,” which most would consider to be the only even somewhat-optimistic song on the record— it’s about Billie Joe’s wife, Adrienne, moving from Minneapolis to California to be with him— harbors uncertainty and potential regret: it references Xanax and nervous breakdowns, and the last line before the final hook is “Is tragedy 2000 miles away?”, a grim echo of the carefree effervescence of “2000 Light Years Away.”
Green Day’s sense of humor— best encapsulated by drummer Tre Cool’s toss-off songs like “Dominated Love Slave” and “All by Myself”— is also singularly warped and damaged on this record. Whereas before Billie Joe’s wit was mostly in service of absurd and playful interjections in between arresting gutter poetry, here it’s much more corrosive. “Brat” is unflinchingly told from the perspective of a snot-nosed kid waiting for his rich parents to die— “My parents’ income interest rate is gaining higher clout” is such a specific line that the narrator’s sociopathy immediately turns from unnerving to comical. (Green Day aren’t strangers to sick humor— check out this fucking hilarious story written by Larry Livermore for the liner notes of Kerplunk— but this is really the only time they engaged it openly.) Their penchant for wordplay is also all over this record, from “Jaded”’s sneering of “Count down from 9 to 5, hooray we’re gonna die” to the entirety of “Walking Contradiction.”
Insomniac is, on the basis of sonics and subject matter, the most prototypically “punk” Green Day ever sounded. A nagging and incessantly buzzy, crunchy guitar tone, deliberately simplistic chord progressions, and obnoxiously immediate hooks were the modus operandi of 70s punk, and Insomniac is also the album where Billie’s adenoidal, smarmy vocals most clearly sounded like a direct imitation of the British-isms of bands like the Buzzcocks. And although bands like Crass are the archetypal example of punk-as-radical-politics, the vast majority of 70s punk lyrics weren’t so much explicitly political as they were an implicit intimation of the rage and hopelessness of late 70s ennui. Insomniac’s deeply beleaguered snottiness is, again, the closest Green Day ever came to echoing those influences.
But all the quibbles of where exactly they fit into genre fall to the wayside when actually focusing on the music. That Jaded In Chicago show was recorded very shortly before Green Day entered the studio to write and record Dookie, only seven months after its release. The get-in-the-van-honed tightness of their performances and energy melded with the members’ inherent musical chemistry and their unstoppable songwriting consistency to create the album that best represents them at the peak of their powers. Insomniac’s production also sounds both bigger and more claustrophobic than Dookie’s, leading to moments like the extremely hard-hitting drum fill that opens “Armatage Shanks”— one of the most iconic openings in their entire discography.
Tre Cool’s drumming is one of Insomniac’s secret weapons— much is made of his ability to stay “in the pocket,” especially in contrast to Kiffmeyer’s occasional showboating, but what stands out to me most upon listening is that when he does digress into moments of rubbery complexity, it’s extremely tasteful, adding to rather than distracting from the harmonies and hooks. He and Dirnt are also more fluidly in-sync than ever before, and probably would ever be again— their in-tandem percussiveness is a large part of what makes the intro to “Panic Song” sound so powerful.
Dirnt himself is at his peak here as well— with Armstrong’s guitar work sanded down only to its most essential, driving attack, the onus is on Dirnt to add the melodic flair of the instrumentals, and he pays off in spades— moments like his fills on “Brat” or the beginning of the album’s best track, “Stuart and the Ave,” are quite frankly indispensable. This record would not be half as good without Dirnt, and he deservedly receives a quick and dirty scale-solo, complimented by an understated scratch from Armstrong’s guitar, on early standout “Stuck with Me.”
When you strip away everything else from Insomniac— the punk politics, their deliberately alienating marketing campaign (the video for “Geek Stink Breath” was banned from many MTV outlets due to its graphic footage of a meth addict getting teeth removed), the chaotic cut-and-paste artwork by frequent Dead Kennedys collaborator Winston Smith— what you’re left with is one of the most lean and well-oiled hook machines of the 90s punk ouvre. There is not one throwaway track on this album (not even “No Pride”). It is, pound for pound, the most consistently well-written, arranged, and performed album in their discography, and certainly a fitting conclusion to their earliest era.
One last note, however— although it technically came out in between Dookie and Insomniac, I always feel it necessary to complement a run-through of Insomniac with their contribution to the Angus soundtrack, a concise ditty with lyrics penned by Dirnt called “J.A.R.” The initials stand for Jason Andrew Relva, a friend of the band who unfortunately died in a car accident in 1992; “J.A.R.”’s gorgeous bass chords and propulsive vocal harmonies are a natural contrast to the straightforward aggression of Insomniac, and the lyrics— a melancholic meditation on living your best life to honor your friends who weren’t able to— are a perfect antidote and salve for the turbulent journey you’ve just gone through. It is one of my favorite songs of theirs, period.
By the way, if you’re wondering what my personal ranking of Green Day releases would look like, it’d be something like:
Kerplunk!
Insomniac
1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours
Dookie (although it is so close to Slappy Hours that it might as well be a tie and the two fluctuate often)
Warning
Nimrod
Shenanigans
American Idiot
21st Century Breakdown
Uno
Revolution Radio
Tre
Father of All Motherfuckers
Dos
And my top 10 Green Day songs are:
“Who Wrote Holden Caulfield?”
“80”
“Stuart and the Ave”
“One of My Lies”
“Babs’ Uvula Who?”
“The Judge’s Daughter”
“Having A Blast”
“Paper Lanterns”
“F.O.D.”
“Geek Stink Breath”
I know that this essay ended up being slightly less about Insomniac than expected, but I hope you liked it regardless. My standard conclusion is usually to simply plug my Patreon, but today I’m also going to ask that, if you have any extra money to spare, you donate to the Louisville bail fund. The people in that community are fighting the real good fight right now. Breonna Taylor was murdered in her sleep by filthy fucking cops, and the system responded by reinforcing the very reason that civil unrest has been exploding all over the nation. Louisville deserves your solidarity and support.
-xoxo, Ellie
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