13-year-old with a cache of The Clash

My 13-year-old cousin is a lot cooler than I am.

I made this startling discovery over… My 13-year-old cousin is a lot cooler than I am.

I made this startling discovery over winter break when my family took our annual Christmastime trip to Brooklyn to visit relatives. Every year, my parents revel in a few Broadway shows, my brother and I explore SoHo, Greenwich Village and the like, and then we all meet at some Chinese restaurant (the only type that’s open) for dinner. Afterwards we see an overpriced movie in a theater half-filled with other Jews who have nothing else to do on Christmas Eve. It’s a Jacobs family tradition.

Anyway, it was during our four-day duration in Brooklyn that I realized that my cousin Molly is, in fact, way cooler than I am. I had finished packing up and was ready to leave while my mother and aunt talked about boring and/or gross middle-aged women things, and Molly wanted to show me her iTunes.

“Sure,” I thought pompously, “I’m excited to see if she’s got that swell Jessica Simpson CD. Or maybe she’s more of a Nick Lachey girl.”

To my amazement, she was neither. Instead, her library was ripe with acts like the Smiths, the Flaming Lips, Thursday, Talib Kweli and The Clash. I was immediately taken aback – a 13-year-old girl who doesn’t listen to 13-year-old girl music! I was just barely out of my Led Zeppelin phase at 13! Nonetheless, we talked about The Decemberists and how much fun her Bat Mitzvah was until it was time to go.

The car ride home gave me some time to think, it being three hours long and I being, sadly, without iPod. I got to thinking about my own musical history – what was I into at 13? By the end of the New Jersey Turnpike I was happily reminiscing on my musical firsts – the first CD I ever owned (Pearl Jam’s No Code for my 10th birthday) and even my first cassette.

I soon concluded that it was not until I’d bought my first cassette – with birthday money from some year when I was only a single-digit-number years old – was I truly into modern rock ‘n’ roll. And hence, I shall relay to you the age-old tale of how Green Day’s Dookie changed my life forever – a tribute.

As I described in my first column, I was in second grade the first time I heard Green Day. Some totally rad fourth grader, after making fun of my quite awkward obsession with Boyz II Men, took me behind the playground and slowly handed me a set of headphones. To the lunch monitors, it must have looked like a shady drug deal. Luckily, I was too young to know anything about any drug other than Flintstones Vitamins, which I consumed every morning with breakfast.

The music that came out of those headphones was about the wildest thing I’d ever heard – my dad had done a great job of exposing me to rock, but R.E.M. was about as modern as he got, and I just thought they were weird.

Green Day’s Dookie was released in 1994, and, for better or worse, is a fundamental reason why bands like Fall Out Boy, New Found Glory and Blink-182 exist. It would also go on to sell more copies than the population of Austria. But I didn’t know that behind the monkey bars; all I could tell was that this kicked a whole lot more ass than those soulful heartthrobs from Philly.

Dookie is the type of album that only comes around once in awhile – that is, every song could have been a single – and five of them were. Each of these 13 tracks, excluding the acoustic, hidden 14th tune, is a hugely catchy pop-punk smack in the face.

The record’s cover art was perfect: a chaotic cartoon centered on a mushroom cloud, a party in the streets in the midst of some huge explosion. And Green Day could not have given me a more fitting gift than printing the lyrics on the album sleeve. I probably understood about half of them, but enough that I understood not to show my parents.

I was still playing with Power Rangers when I first heard Billie Joe Armstrong sing lines like, “When masturbation’s lost it’s fun/You’re f——g lazy” and “I’m so damn bored I’m going blind