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What is the best-selling pop-punk album ever?
A look at the stigma attached to pop-punk and how major names like Green Day have done just as much to keep punk alive as anyone else, if not more.
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(Credits: Far Out / Press / Alamy / YouTube Still)
Music » From The Vault
Fri 13 June 2025 22:00, UK
Pop-punk has a stigma attached to it. One that, for as long as I’ve been a fan of the genre, which is getting on for about two decades now, has never sat right with me. It’s viewed as the sellout corner of punk rock. The cynical, artless side of the movement flashing its frilly knickers for radio play and mainstream acceptance. At least, that’s what the dyed-in-the-wool punk lifers with Crass tattoos within their Crass tattoos will tell you.
Most of the time, what they really mean is two things, possibly both at the same time. The real no-hopers who don’t get punk rock at any level hate pop-punk because historically, it’s had a bigger following among young women than other kinds of punk. The slightly better adjusted, but no less wrong, will hate it for a different reason. It reminds them of the person they were before they got into punk.
Because that’s the big secret of pop-punk: No one gets into punk because they just so happen to look up from their Backstreet Boys singles, find a Cro-Mags B-Sides collection and have their life changed forever. Every single person you see at the all-ages all-dayer got into pop-punk first. Whether it’s the newbies into KennyHoopla and Yungblud, or generations back still in thrall of Machine Gun Kelly, 5 Seconds of Summer, Paramore, Sum 41, Blink-182 or the band who, let’s be real here, started it all.
Not from a genre point of view, to be clear. I’m still personally of the opinion that Ramones were the first pop-punk band, and that’s a hill I will die and kill on. No, I mean this band convinced the world of mainstream music that a pop-punk band couldn’t just be cult favourites but one of the world’s biggest bands. And they did so with the extremely convincing argument of releasing the single biggest-selling pop-punk album of all time.
Honestly, if you couldn’t figure it out from context clues, then thank you very much for sticking with this article and learning something new! However, it’s obviously Green Day. Their major label debut, Dookie, their third album overall, has sold over 20million copies since its release in 1994. An absolutely shocking feat that, depending on who you talk to, is either the best or worst thing to ever happen to punk rock.
After all, the cool option when you want to talk about best-selling rock bands from the early 1990s is and almost certainly always will be Nirvana. Kurt Cobain’s grunge megastars maintained an air of underground edge and anti-authority cool despite Nevermind selling ten million copies more than Dookie. Uncomfortably, I’m sure a big part of that comes from Cobain’s untimely fate, but had he survived, I feel like they would still be the hipsters’ choice over Green Day’s sunbeam pop-punk.
However, the two bands have loads in common. I would say that Green Day have just as much to do with taking the 1980s alternative rock scene overground as Nirvana ever did, both from a musical standpoint and a cultural standpoint. Both of them, along with REM a few years previous, showed that a band could transcend an alternative scene to become mainstream sensations.
This may cast them out from those scenes, as Green Day infamously were from the Gilman Street Punk scene. However, that band will remain a mainstream lighthouse, guiding new fans towards those scenes and keeping them alive more than any group of two-bit hardcore no-hopers ever will. So if Green Day were that band for you, the way they were for me, give one of their records a spin today.
Just understand that, while you may cringe at the memory of the punk noob you were, it’s a universal feeling. One that should be embraced rather than repressed.
Related Topics
Green Day
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