Nobody Likes You by Marc Spitz

Author:Marc Spitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781401385798
Publisher: Hachette Books

“There’s this lyric that goes ’Call me pathetic, call me what you will,” Patrick Hynes recalls. “When they’d play the song at their shows, before Dookie came out, their friend Eggplant from the audience would shout, ’What you will!’” And so when they recorded it, if you listen really carefully you can hear him shouting it. They brought him into the studio just to do that. If you listen on headphones, you can hear it.”

“It’s one of those songs where you can really feel the scene,” Cavallo observed. “You can just know what Billie’s talking about. ’I’ve lost my motivation. Where is my motivation?’ You know, ’I’m smoking my inspiration.’ When it all fades down at the end, sort of like as he describes after you’ve masturbated or whatever, you’re kind of relaxed and then that soft guitar riff comes. It just sort of fades away.”

It’s perfectly realized punk rock. Alienated but longing to be understood. Adolescent but weary. “Longview” is Green Day’s first immortal single, as potent to teenage ears today as it was a decade ago and as it will be a decade from now. And it’s not even the best song on the record. “Welcome to Paradise” sounds crisper and even more furious than it did on Kerplunk!, now that the scary crash pad in West Oakland is even further behind him.

The girl in “Pulling Teeth,” a love gone wrong lament, is Dirnt’s girlfriend Anastacia. Dirnt, ever accident prone, cracked his elbows after a pillow fight with her. “I was running and turned around and hit a beam,” he recalled at the time. “It was lucky though; I happened to be ducking down. If I hadn’t I would have crushed my face.” The basic metaphorical equation of actual pain of a nearly crushed face with heartache works better than it should.

“Basket Case” is the album’s high point and probably its most enduring track. Like “Longview,” it’s a worrying bit of teenaged self-inventory; a plea for help with a little bit of pride that our narrator, paranoid, stoned, or both, is not like anybody else. Structurally, it’s simple three-chord pop punk, but there’s an authority to how it’s played that seems less fully formed on previous exercises. Green Day’s segue from influenced to influence really begins here.

“She” is another Beatlesque pop song that has as little to do with MRR-approved punk as possible. Its lyrics are gentle and poetic. A portrait of a disenfranchised punk girl: a recurring theme in Armstrong’s lyrics that extends all the way up to “She’s a Rebel” and “Extraordinary Girl” on American Idiot. “Are you locked up in a world that’s been planned out for you?” he asks his screaming (albeit “in silence”) subject. Green Day’s female audience exists largely because of songs like this.

“Sassafras Roots” is a throwback to Kerplunk!’s Gilman-approved stylings. The harmonies on the “wasting your time” refrain aside, it is the record’s only real regression, especially when sequenced into “When I Come Around,” destined to be Dookie’s third (and biggest) single.

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