selling punk album ever?

What is the best-selling punk album of all time?

Let’s address the inherent contradiction in the title right away. “Actually,” says the most insufferable music fan you know, pushing their glasses up so high they practically pierce their brain, “the biggest-selling punk album of all time can’t be punk at all!” Wrong. Yes, it can. Of course it can. The notion that a movement as complex and multifaceted as punk can be reduced to “big = bad” is so reductive it becomes self-defeating.

In fact, punk has always had a symbiotic relationship with mass communication. At its worst, punk is an exclusionary, closed-minded cabal of identikit politics and bad hair. A bunch of unwashed Jeremys in a squat in Streatham, adamant that no one who “doesn’t get it” will be allowed in their treehouse but secretly praying for a girl to show up sometime in the next year. For the very idea of punk to blossom, it needs to reach people who don’t understand it.

Do you know what the most punk thing I’ve seen in a good long while is? Knocked Loose and Poppy’s incredible performance of ‘Suffocate’ on Jimmy Kimmel Live, which, at the time of writing, is about a day old. No, I’m not joking. Because it’s heavier than an osmium elephant, half as commercially viable, and a shit-ton of people who’ve never heard of Pig Destroyer and War On Women will have watched it.

A bunch of them would have turned it off before Poppy showed up in sheer disgust, and a few of them would have had their entire minds blown. Both of them make that performance punk as all hell, even if it is a live music slot on a talk show. The sprinkle of hipsters scoffing, “This is what hardcore is now?!” also makes it punk. Never, ever forget that sneering hipsters are just as much the enemy of punk as reactionary conservatives, no matter how many UKHC tattoos they have.

So, what is the best selling punk album?

OK, imagine a scenario. An album makes the band who made it the biggest in the world. It sells 20 million copies, and about half of that 20 million are people who’ve never heard that kind of music before. Can that record be truly punk? Absolutely. We know this because it happened in real life. The name of that band is Green Day, and the name of the record is (regrettably) Dookie. And before anyone gets any ideas, yes, pop-punk is punk you tiresome chuds.

If you haven’t spun the record in a while, Dookie still absolutely rips. The singles are all basically perfect and album tracks like ‘Having a Blast’, ‘Pulling Teeth’ and ‘Sassafras Roots’ still hit like a train 30 years on. Even beyond the music, the story behind Green Day is as legit as you get. Three working class kids from Oakland form a band while skiving off school and work their way up through the Bay area punk scene, releasing records on indie labels until a major label takes a chance on them. More legit than the Sex Pistols ever were.

It was the winds of change started up by 1980s indie rock breaking into the mainstream with the likes of Nirvana that made Green Day such a shockingly huge deal. It’s easy to imagine that if Billie Joe, Mike and Tre came together at any other time, they would have made very similar, if not identical music. They were honest with what they were doing, and it connected with a generation of kids who made the late 1990s punk boom of NOFX, Blink-182 and The Offspring possible. That is why yes, the biggest selling punk album of all time, is still punk as fuck.