10 Rock Bands EVERYONE Tried To Copy
6. Green Day
There's no real road map of where to go after a genre falls. As rock fans made their way into 1994, the alternative wave seemed to die in one fell swoop with the devastating suicide of Kurt Cobain. The sad melodrama of grunge had gotten way too real, but Green Day ended up being the jolt of positivity that we needed.
Though Billie Joe Armstrong and co. still fell into the alternative category, their punk rock heart managed to snap everyone out of their post-grunge stupor. With the release of Dookie in 1994, Green Day became the ambassadors for pop punk, as they tore through songs that had the attitude of the Sex Pistols and the hooks of Cheap Trick. Any band would kill to have that kind of record in their arsenal, but most record labels just kept trying to invent their own version of Green Day.
By the time the new millennium arrived, the entire rock scene was infested with bands trying to make their own Dookie, with everyone from Sum 41 to Blink 182 riding the pop punk wave. Even when Green Day ended up pulling a musical 180 with the concept record American Idiot, bands like My Chemical Romance were still trying to put their own twisted spin on what Green Day had created.
There may have been a few cheap knockoffs of Green Day's sound, but when it comes to unbridled teenage fury, this is about as real as it gets.