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| Green Day - Basket Case |
Green Day - Basket Case Lyrics and Youtube Music VideosAlbum:
Dookie Released:
1994 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?
Or 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?
A ya-ya-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?
Or am I just stoned?
Writer/s: ARMSTRONG, BILLIE JOE / COOL, TRE / DIRNT, MIKE
Publisher: Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.
Lyrics licensed and provided by
LyricFindBasket Case This song is about anxiety attacks and a feeling that you are going crazy. Lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong suffered from various panic disorders while he was growing up - he would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night with a panic attack and walk around his neighborhood to settle down. "Basket Case" was a cathartic song and personal song for him. "The only way I knew how to deal with it was to write a song about it," he explained.
This song stereotypes the whole condition of paranoia and compares it to being stoned. By the time this came out, Green Day had already released two albums on an independent label. They had a small but ardent following that led to a bidding war for the band, which was won by Reprise Records. "Basket Case" was the third single from the album, following "Longview" and "Welcome To Paradise," and it was their breakout hit, getting airplay on Rock, Top 40, and Alternative radio stations.
The singles from Dookie were not available for sale (an effort to spur sales of the album), but were released to radio, making them ineligible for the Billboard Hot 100 chart. "Basket Case" peaked at #26 on the Airplay chart of October 8, 1994, which was around the time of peak frenzy during Green Day concerts. The song also got a nice push from MTV, which put the Mark Kohr directed video in hot rotation. In their early years, the band was constantly on tour and eating some real bad food. This food didn't always digest well, and the album title is what they called the result when it didn't. A basket case is slang for an emotionally unstable, dysfunctional or completely useless person. Originally, the word referred to an amputee, especially a soldier, who had lost all four limbs; it was coined during World War I. (thanks, Bertrand - Paris, France) Blasting right into the verse at the beginning of this song is something that set it apart. Simplicity was a hallmark of the Dookie album, and while omitting an intro made little marketing sense (DJs couldn't talk up the song), it got right into the meat of the track. Tre Cool of Green Day cites the first Beatles album, Please Please Me, as an influence on Dookie, since those early Beatles songs also got right to the point. When Billie Joe Armstrong spoke with Rolling Stone in 2014, he explained that this song will always be a part of the band's setlist, but that its meaning has changed for him. "It's about other people now," he said. "When I look at people as we play that song, they're having their own moment. At that point, I'm the audience." The band played a raucous version of this song when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015.