If you were never a Green Day fan, you have at least heard of the band’s third album “Dookie” and if not, there is something terribly wrong with your music vocabulary.

The punk rock band’s album turned 20 years old on February 1 and has sold more than 16 million copies since 1994, ultimately serving as the main ingredient for the highly successful and worldwide phenomenon we know as Green Day.

There are hundreds of newer musicians and bands today who accredit “Dookie” as being one of the major influences for wanting to play music. It is an album that still is not old enough to listen to no matter how many times you press “play.”

There isn’t anything that screams nostalgia every time “Basket Case” gets played. You can just hear millions of people sing “Am I just paranoid, or am I just stoned” right before vocalist and guitarist Billy Joe Armstrong plays that legendary power chord riff. If “Basket Case” wasn’t for you, “When I Come Around” certainly was. It’s “Dookie’s” power chords, fun drum and bass lines and catchy choruses that made this album so successful, straying away from the grunge sound the early 90s had so much of.

Green Day’s third album is what sparks those memories from our generation’s childhood and reminds us why we fell in love with that kind of music from the very beginning. It’s when we first realized what real music was, or is, and we liked it even more because we thought it was what other people weren’t listening to, making it 10 times cooler. It brought out that adolescent early stage of angst and started a small passion for many music lovers who are now adults.

The album will be in the history books for many years to come and will still serve as an influence for musicians starting their career many years from now. Your children will be screaming “I am one of those, melodramatic fools” in their bedrooms.