Dookie Demastered
dookiedemastered.com
dookiedemastered.com
This degraded image effect was done by moving image viewport around within source images like this: https://www.dookiedemastered.com/images/gameboy-3-sheet.webp
Perhaps spotting that in a demastering project is bending the rules a bit, but still - I like how it indicates that our tastes and internet speeds have changed.
"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them." - Brian Eno
Stay away from my shellacs and waxes!
The whole site is polished to a high degree. Lqbor of love, just like all the quirky items rhey have to loved just as much.
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.
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.” :)
Some day Limp Bizkit will get the recognition they deserves.
The gap between Dookie and American Idiot seems significantly longer to me than the gap between American Idiot and today, yet it's half as long :/
Related: it sure seemed like the mid-90s were special for rock music; I was 13 when Dookie came out and I felt (still feel) like I was in a sort of alternative renaissance, just crammed with amazing new music. But I’m sure every generation feels that way about whatever happened to be popular when they were teenagers.
All of these has been fueled by social media, which to reduce some of the complexities, determined that "if we divide and polarize american politics we make boatloads of money"
That's really not how I see it. Trump sits on the shoulders of those who came before and set the stage for the Trump policy. My Alito example above is an instructive one. Bush can be seen as laying a 20 year foundation towards overturning Roe or the Chevron doctrine. I remember when Roberts was appointed, mainstream press talked up how moderate and reasonable he was, but I never bought it -- and how we see he isn't.
The rhetoric appeals to the base... But that base got radicalized by prior eras. Decades of complaining about big government. Fox News demonizing Pelosi and "San Francisco values". Karl Rove's permanent campaign mode. Much of that discourse was fully formed in 2004. The Bush people knew to reign it in sometimes, that is the difference.
1) Positions and messaging strategy. Trump tends to take up the positions you hear Republican voters talk about over a coffee at the diner or over a beer on an aluminum-hull outboard motor fishing boat. As with Democrats, typical Republican planks aren’t terribly close to what their voters want, so (Trump proved) you can win elections by targeting this unmet demand directly.
“Why don’t they just build a wall?”; “Fucking NAFTA, sold us all out”; “gotta do something about that trade deficit with China” and/or other comments on restricting trade with China; “Obamacare sucks” but also kinda vaguely supporting something to fix healthcare (this muddled set of positions came out rather directly in Trump’s speeches—sometimes it’d sound like he was about to advocate single payer); “we should stop being the world police for free” and/or “Europe’s freeloading on NATO”; lots of complaints about illegal immigration’s and crime generally; Washington corruption (“drain the swamp!”); et c.
If you know many Republican voters, not politicians, you may recognize that as stuff that’d inform their wishlist. Trump heard that, and just… did exactly that, turned around and said exactly those things instead of taking up the typical Republican platform. Got him elected. He even sort-of followed through on some of it. This is true for at least the first election, his positions this time seem to have gone a bit more tail-wagging-the-dog (creating issues and demand for a particular solution to the created issue, through messaging, rather than going to where voters already are on existing issues)
2) Relatedly, and especially because he did follow through on some of it, he’s the only big two party Presidential candidate since perhaps 1980 to not be fully on-board with neoliberalism. That’s definitely remarkable. Vance alluded to this at one point in the recent debate.
(Disclaimer because it’s a polarizing topic: observation without condemnation should not be taken as support)
Green Day are still in their prime in terms of a live show. Yeah it’s not 3 kids packing a basement anymore, but they absolutely crushed Dookie in their 50s. I felt not old for a couple of hours.
I went to Pixies concerts when I was at BU in the 80's. They were a rich white kid college band.
Punk was a very specific movement.
It's like saying, "Yeah, impressionism is same as Cubism." No. It isn't. Don't rewrite history because it suits your invented personality.
"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.
It would have been nice if they made it a limited run (say, 100 copies) instead of singular pieces.
Am I understanding this correctly to mean that some of the audio channels on a Teddy Ruxpin cassette are silent tracks that control the motors in the toy? That's kind of interesting. I wonder if there are any other examples of a custom Ruxpin track being made . . .
Edit: comment directly below this one addresses this.
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.
But should it? There used to be a time when people put this stuff on the internet for fun, not as a side huste or to "monetize" it... Maybe there's not so much money in this idea, but you can make people laugh for a few seconds.
Here's what I was reading http://www.illiop.org/workings.html
[edited to say 8 channel to avoid confusion with 8 track]
Tried and true distribution channel for hit music - see dial-a-song ((844) 387-6962) or the lovely "callin' oates" ((719) 266-2837)
"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"
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.
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
Kudos to the designers and devs on this.
> 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.
The raffle style business model stood out, so I read the terms. The terms weren't any more clear, they sort of lump sweepstakes/raffle together in section 14. Sweepstakes and raffles are high regulated but they are legally distinct, and raffles are treated as gambling in many jurisdictions.
I hope they have it all worked out, it’s an awesome distribution of music.
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.
> Having to provide an address and a credit card
You don't usually complain about providing an address if the only factor is the payment/price.
I suspect the GP would have been fine paying if they had an extremely low-friction payment system (e.g. one-click).
Edit: I completely missed it. Everything is now perfect.
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.
Edit: Aha, I see now, this is a mic'd recording of an MD player with a built in speaker.
> Deletion:
> IrreversibleAnd then followed by Chump in the teddy bear, which also sounds incredibly nostalgic. I'm starting to feel like Dookie actually sounds better on a lofi arrangement...?
P.S. Yes, it does. Basket Case and She just ended this argument. What a blast!
Edit: well to be fair I see now that they are very limited
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.
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.
If anything the prices are far too low.
Thanks for your help!
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.
>Free to enter. You only pay if you’re selected to purchase.
https://brain.runfair.com/en-US/us/brain-green-day-having-a-...
Idk, not many people can sell tens or hundreds of thousands of pricy tickets to see them do their thing for 90 minutes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Re. the site - for some dumb reason I have to click on the page to get arrow and page up/down keys working as if the page needs to grab focus.
I should also take a moment to recognize how great the site design is as well.
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.
What bit rate does Spotify use for streaming online regular quality?
About the 90s though - people used gameboys. People used PCs. Those devices had tons of music and music culture. Chiptunes, mod music makers and players, the demo scene are all late 80s into early 90s. The very first sound blaster card wasn’t even launched until November 1989; before then it was all pc speakers.
On the streets in the 1990s, people used walkmans, listened to tapes; in cars eight track was nostalgic, people listened to the radio and their tapes a lot. I didn’t have my first portable CD player until 1997 or so.
It's just done at a much larger scale, with the aim of making money instead of curiosity/funny memery
Of course I am!
Creating vinyls out of xray images sounded ingenious, its amazing to hear one now.
I have no feelings.
90s? Ween of course.
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?
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.
...but then, what would be the point? ;)
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!
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.
^Community reference
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.
Whether or not an ethos espousing rejecting authority should be applying authority on what other people sound like is another matter altogether :)
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.
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.
Alternative take: punk, as enjoyed by the connoisseur, sounds terrible to people who don't like punk, which limits its success
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Who’s punk what’s the score?”
Get outta here with the gatekeeping
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.
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.
https://wmbr.org/cgi-bin/show?id=8533
"It's like sewing your ear to a vacuum cleaner. "
though they include metal now.
RIP in peace
Looks like a cool art project.