'Dookie'

It's funny that if you Google "Dookie" the first search result is the Wikipedia page to Green Day's third album, the 1994 smash hit.

The second result is the Urban Dictionary definition for poop.

There are albums on the 1,001 list that have value for different reasons, whether they pushed boundaries, were popular or just brilliant. Dookie was popular, but it also a four category: The game changer.

I was told by a college literature professor that of all the people that say they read Moby Dick, probably 95 percent were lying. I'll go ahead and assume the same for people born after 1980 or so that say they cut their punk teeth on Black Flag or Circle Jerks or The Germs. That percentage increases the further you get away from, say, Los Angeles, New York or possibly Washington, D.C.

For a dorky kid living in the East Texas country, Dookie was our Damaged. It changed everything and not in the way that Nirvana's Nevermind changed the game. We didn't get Nevermind. It was full of influences and darkness that your average 13-year-old kid didn't understand.

Dookie we understood. Yes, Green Day sold out, and it was wonderful. The album's a pop-punk paradise. Re-listening to the record now, it's shocking that I knew 95 percent of the lyrics and how many "hits" there were off the album. It's melodic and danceable and singable.

I distinctly remember my first exposure to the album. I was watching MTV in my mother's house (I was 13 ... my parents had just separated) and the video for "Basketcase" comes on. It's the band, hair spiked with these wide-eyed looks on their faces wheeled into the activity room of an insane asylum. The lead singer has a guitar placed around his neck and he starts with the power chord intro. "Do you have the time ..." Like it was fucking yesterday.

The chorus comes in and there are harmonies. Harmonies with a distorted guitar being beat on like a rented mule? Then the end of the chorus and the machine-gun drums come in with that bass that had the best sound ever.

As accessible as the music is, the lyrics are even more so. Billie Joe Armstrong talks about masturbation, loneliness, depression, boredom and girls. There was a darkness to it, but unlike a Metallica album, it wasn't an obtuse or confused anger. It was an angry frustration of just always feeling left out.

We might have wanted to rage like Metallica or mope like Nirvana, but all we really wanted to do was pogo with Green Day. And masturbate.