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In the early 1990s, there was no greater insult you could fire at an artist than to label them a “sell-out.”
This was an unfortunate consequence of the generally noble DIY sensibilities of the era, as bitterness and envy could now be stealthily repackaged as righteous indignation.
No shortage of once-beloved indie bands suffered the wrath of the “sell-out” shouters as their record sales exploded, from REM (Warner) to Nirvana (Geffen) to Green Day (Warner). The latter example was arguably the most vitriolic of all, as Green Day faced a deluge of abuse from former fans who felt they had betrayed the Bay Area punk scene and the revered Lookout! record label that had put out their first two albums.
As frontman Billie Joe Armstrong told Kerrang! back in 2021, the enormous success Green Day experienced with their major label debut, 1994’s Dookie, wasn’t enough to drown out the noise from the detractors and the sense of guilt that came with it.
“I couldn’t find the strength to convince myself that what I was doing was a good thing,” Armstrong said. “I was in a band that was huge because it was supposed to be huge, because our songs were that good. But I couldn’t even feel that I was doing the right thing, because it felt like I was making so many people angry. That’s where I became so confused, and it got really stupid. I would never want to live that part of my life over again.”
What could be more ‘90s than having the biggest album in the world and feeling awful about it?
Like many “it bands” before them, ‘90s era or otherwise, Green Day concluded the nearly year-long Dookie tour at a career crossroads. Many fans and haters alike anticipated a follow-up album with an even bigger, slicker sound and a half-dozen more earworm singles. This would either permanently transport the band into the dreaded “modern rock” category or blow up their career entirely, leaving them on the heap of flash-in-the-pan has-beens.
Fortunately, Green Day reconvened in the studio in 1995 with a rather unique mindset for a platinum-selling act. They wouldn’t be shooting for the mainstream’s expectations, nor would they attempt to re-create Dookie in hopes of avoiding the infamous sophomore slump. How could it be a sophomore slump anyway? This was going to be their fourth album, even if only those angry kids from the Lookout! days knew it, and on a fourth album, anything goes.
The result was Insomniac, an album that certainly delivered some more pop-punk radio hits (‘Geek Stink Breath’, ‘Walking Contradiction’), but that also felt refreshingly unaware of Green Day’s pop cultural status at that moment. It wasn’t a big swing, the way American Idiot would be a few years later. If anything, it was an exhale from the Dookie experience, tinged with a little more anger and darkness courtesy of the band’s internal struggle with the sell-out tag.
This is referenced lyrically in the song ‘86’, in which Armstrong acknowledges that “there’s no coming back” from being disowned by the punk community. The real spirit of Insomniac, though, comes through in the tracks ‘Brain Stew’ and ‘Jaded’, a slow, sludgy loner’s lament that slides right into a rapid, Ramones-style banger with some of the most depressing sentiments in the Green Day catalogue: “There is no progress, evolution killed it all / I found my place in nowhere.”
Arriving hot on the heels of Dookie, Insomniac sold well, but not anywhere near its predecessor, leaving some to view it as a misstep. However, it looks more like a band expertly navigating an impossible assignment in the scope of Green Day’s career.
“The fact that that album came out, like, a year and a half after Dookie was us trying to cut off the bullshit in its tracks and just keep making music,” Armstrong told Kerrang. “That’s all we wanted to do, keep making music. Sometimes I feel that Insomniac is the most honest record I ever made at the particular moment that it was written and recorded.”
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