Anarchy is good for business: The 10 best-selling punk albums of all time
One night, in a nightclub in Sheffield, a group of drunk students were still dancing at about 3am. Drinks were being spilt, one-night stands cemented, friendships both made and broken, and the heavy introduction of Rage Against The Machine’s ‘Killing In The Name’ started playing. With it came a wave machine of banging heads as everyone in the room sang along, rising to rebellion on a Thursday, a chorus of “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” screamed by a sea of people who were almost certainly going to be missing their 9am lectures.
As the track finished, the lights to the club went up, and one voice from the back of the room yelled, “OK, everyone, that’s it, time to go home.” With that, all the students who were at the forefront of the revolution only moments ago drank up and headed out of the door in an orderly line. Music is full of fun contradictions, such as when the message of a song, compared to how it is enjoyed, completely contradicts one another.
The best example of this is for a record to be a best-selling punk album. The definition of what punk is is often lost on people. In John Robb’s book Punk Rock: An Oral History, he speaks to all of the big names that contributed to the movement to get a definitive answer on what punk is and still isn’t able to get one. The fact is, it is open-ended, but one thing that all those involved in the punk movement could agree to is that the music should be anti-pop culture.
Punk was the musical equivalent of screaming into a well. People were angry and turned to making punk music to vent that anger. That meant the act of making music was important; people hearing it didn’t matter. Who cared if you could play guitar or not? No one can hear you in a well. All that matters is if you have a message and you’re willing to speak it.
With the above in mind, the commercial success of punk is pretty ironic, but what started as a means to try and provide a voice for those who struggle to speak up themselves ended up being a good way of making money and profiting off the system they were raging against. The best-selling punk albums of all time are undoubtedly great records, but the fact they exist on such a scale is inherently funny.
Green Day, arguably one of the world’s least punk, punk bands, claims spots one and five on the list of the biggest-selling punk albums ever with Dookie and American Idiot. As if to add fire onto the flame of punk bands being anti-punk, their best-selling album American Idiot, which spoke out against small-mindedness and consumerism, became a hit Broadway musical.
Also on the list are bands such as The Offspring, The Clash, Blink-182 and the founders of punk, Sex Pistols. Highlighting the irony in the genre’s success are the ten best-selling punk albums of all time. Listed below.
The 10 best-selling punk albums:
- Green Day – Dookie (20,000,000)
- Blink-182 – Enema of the State (16,000,000)
- Green Day – American Idiot (12,450,000)
- The Offspring – Smash (12,000,000)
- The Offspring – The Offspring (11,000,000
- The Clash – London Calling (5,000,000)
- Bad Brains – Bad Brains (4,000,000)
- Sex Pistols – Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols (1,700,000)
- NOFX – Punk in Drublic (1,000,000)
- Dead Kennedys – Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (500,000)
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