Do you have the time to listen to “Basket Case” on a flailing Big Mouth Billie Bass? To mark three decades of Dookie, Green Day is raffling off special editions of all 15 tracks from the band’s third studio album.
Only, in lieu of dropping shiny remasters, the band chose to “demaster” its songs in truly bizarre and obsolete formats. Along with the talking, plaque-mounted bass, the band’s songs were also painstakingly transferred to wax cylinder, HitClips, toothbrush, Game Boy cartridge, 8-track, and player piano roll, along with some other weird ports.
Dookie was never supposed to woo a crowd of touchy audiophiles. The abrasive and hooky rock album debuted in 1994, and though it ushered in the California band’s major-label era, Green Day seems well aware that the album’s longevity has more to do with its punkish flare than its sonic subtleties. Through that lens, a nonsensical release actually makes a whole lot of sense.
“Instead of smoothing out its edges and tweaking its dynamic ranges, this version of Dookie has been meticulously mangled to fit on formats with uncompromisingly low fidelity,” the band and its collaborator Brain, a Los Angeles-based art studio, said in a statement. They added, “The listening experience is unparalleled, sacrificing not only sonic quality, but also convenience, and occasionally entire verses.”
On to the raffle details: The cost to enter each drawing starts at $19—for a chance at one of ten MiniDisc reproductions of “In The End”—to a heftier $99, for a ticket to potentially snag a one-of-a-kind Teddy Ruxpin that mouths along to “Chump.” You could enter to win, but you don’t really need to; anybody can stream a teaser of each track on the Dookie Demastered website. According to a post on the band’s YouTube account, the raffle will wrap on October 11 at 11am ET.
Brain is additionally responsible for a Fall Out Boy vinyl record that includes the band’s actual tears, which they suitably dubbed Crynyl. Beyond musical collaborations, the studio made an artificial intelligence chatbot called Goody-2; it was satirically trained to avoid even the slightest possibility of offending anybody.
Though nowhere near as eccentric, vinyl album sales continue to climb despite the popularity of digital streaming services; even cassette tape sales have popped in recent years. Clearly there’s a certain something offered by these analog formats that Spotify isn’t delivering, and I’m not talking about the streamer’s extremely delayed Hi-Fi plan.
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