Am I crazy?

It was winter, 1994. Our politicians were talking about Europe and globalization, Jugoslavia was torn by a civil war, Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction were shot and the following year they would win the Oscar prize. In the meantime, in Rwanda two enemy tribes, the Tutsis and the Hutus, were fighting each other cruelly.

In the USA and all around the world the radio was transmitting the song "Basket Case": punk rock was still alive, Green Day were the proof!

Listen to this song:

 

The American punk rock band released their third album, Dookie, in 1994. Its popularity made Punk music mainstream and it won the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album.

Even if the music sounds dynamic and overwhelming the real meaning of the lyrics is actually quite different and not so positive. Let's have a look at the meaning!

Do you have the time to listen to me whine

About nothing and everything

 

All at once I am one of those melodramatic fools

Neurotic to the bone

No doubt about it

Sometimes I give myself the creeps

Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me

It all keeps adding up

I think I'm cracking up

Am I just paranoid?

Am I just stoned?

I went to a shrink to analyze my dreams

She says it's lack of sex that's bringing me down

I went to a whore

He said my life's a bore

So quit my whining cause

It's bringing her down

Sometimes I give myself the creeps

Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me

It all keeps adding up

I think I'm cracking up

Am I just paranoid?

Uh, yuh, yuh, ya

Grasping to control

So I better hold on

Sometimes I give myself the creeps

Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me

It all keeps adding up

I think I'm cracking up

Am I just paranoid?

Am I just stoned?

 

The singer is talking about himself: he is worried about his actual situation. He asks to himself "Am I  just  paranoid? Am I just stoned?" He is going to a "shrink", a psychoanalyst, to a whore... he's looking for answers about his state, but nobody seems to be able to help him. The singer is cracking up, he doesn't know what to do and when he looks at his own situation he "gives himself the creeps".

The energetic music and the hallucinatory state of the dazed singer are the main features of the whole song.

 

Glossary

torn: divided, lacerated

shot: filmed

alive: if you are alive, you are living, in other words you are not dead

to release: to set someone or something free, like a caged animal or a prisoner / to prepare something for public distribution

mainstram: what is viewed my most people as normal

overwhelming: something very intense and

lyric: the words of a song

to whine: to complain in an annoying way, to cry like a baby

fool: idiot

bone: a single section of a stone

to give someone the creeps: to have the feeling of fear and revulsion

to play trick: to deceive, to make someone believe something untrue

to crack up: to suffer a nervous break down

stoned: under the influence of narcotics

shrink: it's the informal word to refer to a therapist, a psychiatrist

lack: the absence of something (eg. when there's a lack of food, people starve, they die)

to bring someone down: to move  something or someone to a lower position

whore: a prostitute

bore: if your freinds fall asleep every time you open your mouth, probably you are a bore (in other words, you are not very interesting)

to quit: to stop doing something

to hold on: to be persistent, to refuse to stop