Green Day’s Dookie is an all-timer of an album and, if you were fortunate enough to catch the band on the road this summer, you’ll know the trio sounds as good as ever. Audio quality, however, was not at the forefront of the band’s latest release: demasters of every Dookie song on ridiculous and outdated formats to mark the record’s 30th anniversary.
While other classic albums often get remasters for big anniversaries, Green Day (with the help of of an art studio called Brain) went in a lo-fi direction by re-releasing the music on defunct and/or inconvenient formats in very limited editions. As a result, you can hear what “Basket Case” sounds like through a Big Mouth “Billie” Bass, listen to “Welcome to Paradise” via a Game Boy cartridge and enjoy (or not) “When I Come Around” emanating from a wax cylinder.
Other formats the demasters appear on include an answering machine, toothbrush, animatronic stuffed animal, floppy disc, doorbell, Fisher Price record, HitClip (remember those?) and, be still my beating heart, MiniDisc. Meanwhile, “All By Myself,” an ode to self-love sung by drummer Tré Cool, actually sounds kind of sweet through a music box.
You can hear what each of the demasters sounds like on the Dookie Demastered website. But if you want to own one of them, you’ll need to be lucky. Only between one and 50 of each demastered format is available and they’re priced between $19 and $99, but thankfully it’s not a first-come-first-served scenario. There’s a random drawing and you’ll get the chance to buy one of the items if your name’s pulled from the hat.
Demastering is becoming more of a trend, especially in video games, but this is simply a bizarre way to listen to an album as important for punk rock as Dookie was. It would be very cool to have an X-ray record of “Coming Clean” in my collection, though. (For the tape, Green Day did release a deluxe anniversary edition of the album.)