By the 1990s, punk rock was sufficiently ingrained in Western culture that punk trappings were often used to market highly commercial bands as "rebels". Marketers capitalized on the style and hipness of punk rock to such an extent that a 1993 ad campaign for an automobile, the Subaru Impreza, claimed that the car was "like punk rock". Along with Nirvana, many of the leading alternative rock artists of the early 1990s acknowledged the influence of earlier punk rock acts. With Nirvana's success, the major record companies once again saw punk bands as potentially profitable.
In 1993, California's Green Day and Bad Religion were both signed to major labels. The next year, Green Day put out Dookie, which became a huge hit, selling nine million albums in the United States in just over two years. Bad Religion's Stranger Than Fiction was certified gold. Other California punk bands on the independent label Epitaph, run by Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz, also began achieving mainstream popularity. In 1994, Epitaph released Let's Go by Rancid, Punk in Drublic by NOFX, and Smash by The Offspring, each eventually certified gold or better. That June, Green Day's "Longview" reached number one on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart and became a top forty airplay hit, arguably the first ever American punk song to do so; just one month later, The Offspring's "Come Out and Play" followed suit. MTV and radio stations such as Los Angeles' KROQ-FM played a major role in these bands' crossover success, though NOFX refused to let MTV air its videos.
Following the lead of Boston's Mighty Mighty Bosstones and two California bands, Anaheim's No Doubt and Long Beach's Sublime, ska punk and ska-core became widely popular in the mid-1990s. By 1996, genre acts such as Reel Big Fish and Less Than Jake were being signed to major labels. The original 2 Tone bands had emerged amid punk rock's second wave, but their music was much closer to its Jamaican roots—"ska at 78 rpm". Ska punk bands in the third wave of ska created a true musical fusion between the genres. …And Out Come the Wolves, the 1995 album by Rancid—which had evolved out of Operation Ivy—became the first record in this ska revival to be certified gold; Sublime's self-titled 1996 album was certified platinum early in 1997. In Australia, two popular groups, skatecore band Frenzal Rhomb and pop punk act Bodyjar, also established followings in Japan.
Green Day and Dookie's enormous sales paved the way for a host of bankable North American pop punk bands in the following decade. With punk rock's renewed visibility came concerns among some in the punk community that the music was being co-opted by the mainstream. They argued that by signing to major labels and appearing on MTV, punk bands like Green Day were buying into a system that punk was created to challenge. Such controversies have been part of the punk culture since 1977, when The Clash was widely accused of "selling out" for signing with CBS Records. The Vans Warped Tour and the mall chain store Hot Topic brought punk even further into the U.S. mainstream.