The Offspring covered a lot of firsts. They were the first band I listened to that my dad hated. Conspiracy of One was the first CD I ever bought. “Why Don’t You Get a Job” was the first song I ever heard use the word “bitch.” And at the risk of sounding overwrought, listening to them was my first messy step towards cultivating a taste in music beyond what my parents played in the car. For better and for worse The Offspring stands like a holy temple, longboards strewn about the steps and fountains gushing with Mountain Dew, in the acne-riddled history of my adolescence.

And at the center of this legacy sits Americana. It arguably isn’t The Offspring’s best album, but it has the most memorable singles, and it’s the one I return to when thinking about the landscape of my youth. It also turns twenty this month and I’ve been dying for an excuse to write about it as an artifact of the ’90s and a product of the fraught times right before the internet fully took hold and changed everything. So here we go.

Beyond the thrashy guitar riffs, fast-paced bass lines, and distorted effects that have been codified to the genre, Americana is not a punk album, and by extension was the moment The Offspring dropped any pretense about being a punk band. The B-sides that ape a punkish sound fall short and the big singles don’t try to be anything other than pop. With this album, the band fully committed itself to widespread appeal. Shirking the frayed indie sound of their previous effort, Ixnay The Hombrey, they began churning out frat-rock bangers that fit seamlessly into the soundtracks of “coming of age” movies where a group of college-age friends try to steal their hot professor’s underpants, or whatever. It was the logical conclusion of course for a band that, a few years earlier, helped forge a path for punk to mainstream syndication. In fact, an argument could be made that this record, along with acts like Blink-182, set the mold for the influx of radio-friendly emo, pop-punk, and punk adjacent acts that dominated most of the 2000s.

This isn’t an indictment of pop-punk, emo, or the litany of genre offshoots that unfurled over the start of the millennium. It isn’t even an indictment of The Offspring. The songs on Americana are listenable to a fault and they’ve been manufactured for easy digestion. I like challenging and complex music, but easier listenings shouldn’t be written off due to some weird perceived sense of integrity. As much fun as it is to put a quasi-academic lens on everything, music is an innately visceral experience, and, postulations aside, is primarily valued on whether or not you enjoy listening to it. That being said, what’s not to enjoy? The instruments are bright and energetic, seasoned with just the right amount of distortion. Dexter Holland’s voice blares like sugar mixed with battery acid, sweet and caustic. And the sound is predominantly accompanied by a buoyant, albeit mean-spirited, sense of humor. It was the perfect formula to gain widespread appeal in the late ’90s and resulted in songs like “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)” and “Why Don’t You Get a Job” receiving inescapable amounts of radio play. When something climbs to a high enough level of popularity it becomes a touchpoint for understanding the tastes and demeanor of a specific period of time, and you’d be hard-pressed to find another record that did that for white, suburban America in 1998 like Americana. And what this snapshot reveals is that America in 1998 sucked real hard for anyone who wasn’t white and from the suburbs.

Although its title might suggest otherwise, Americana was starkly apolitical. And why wouldn’t it be? 1998 was late-stage Clinton era “post-racial” America. The economy was up, and little white boys like me were more interested in rallying against our parents than ideas like fascism and oppression. Information and perspective were as insulated as they ever would be, with the internet and its power to decentralize viewpoints looming on the horizon. Political charge wasn’t selling. What was in high demand was overcoming male impotence and the anxiety over preserving the neo-puritan sensibilities of the conservative, white, middle class (If you don’t believe me on this just remember that people were apoplectic over a show like South Park and also that in 1999 a movie about Kevin Spacey regaining his vitality by wanting to fuck an underage cheerleader won the Oscar for Best Picture. Also, Fight Club). The consensus was, paradoxically, that suburban living was tougher than it seemed, but also anything that threatened its manicured veneer of respectability was dangerous. The Offspring capitalized off of this zeitgeist by dropping an album that maintained an edge of persecution but turned its critical sites on things that laid outside the norms of this status quo. Often times the album’s ire was directed at societal elements that were symptomatic of the system that it refused to address directly. Viewed in a broader context we start to see that to do anything different would be to undermine the conservative “bootstrap” philosophy that runs throughout the record, and once we understand this we also can make an educated guess as to which limited viewpoint (based on class, race, and gender) The Offspring were speaking from.

Out of all the songs on Americana, “She’s Got Issues” has aged the worst. The song ostensibly tells the tale of a dysfunctional relationship between Holland and an unknown woman, but ultimately is about how much of a drag her mental health issues are for him. With a chorus that repeats “Oh, man she’s got issues / and I’m gonna pay,” I’m honestly surprised there wasn’t a verse in which Holland attempts to surgically remove the woman’s uterus in order to temper her hysteria. If this song came out today it would either be completely ignored by everyone or ignite a firestorm on the same level as “Blurred Lines.” That’s not to say that this song wouldn’t make the cut in 2018 because of our culture’s increased sense of outrage, but more that we are finally moving away from narratives in which men play the role of victims when dealing with “dramatic” women. The fact that it was billed as a single, licensed for film placements, and didn’t stir the pot in any memorable way is a pretty glaring indictment of attitudes towards women and mental health at the time. The Offspring’s brand is to be slightly off-color, so it isn’t shocking to see this track in their catalog, but it does force us to consider the culture in which it was fostered.

According to Holland, the album is a series of short stories that examine the darker elements of American life. “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy),” the biggest single off the album, introduces us to a young, white poseur unsuccessfully emulating black culture, or his reductive understanding of it as informed by the burgeoning hip-hop genre. With our modern lexicon of socially conscious terms, this is a story about cultural appropriation and has aged the best out of every memorable cut on the record. It’s easy to replace the proto-meme whiteboy, who tries to buy an Ice Cube record but ends up with Vanilla Ice, with his modern, face-tattooed, SoundCloud rapper counterpart. It is bitingly sarcastic and peppered with the postmodern absurdity that would become dominant in the coming internet age (the song opens randomly with a Def Leppard sample and then has a second intro of someone counting to five in Spanish. What?).

As a standalone piece, we can appreciate “Pretty Fly” for examining the hollowness that comes with appropriating the most visible aspects of a culture without having any understanding of the significance of the culture itself. However, I would argue that the song became as popular is it did due to the anxiety white America had about hip-hop, by which I mean blackness, at the time. It might be hard to imagine now with hip-hop being the chart-topping juggernaut that it is, but in 1998 the genre was still regulated as niche “urban” music, and it would be another two years before Eminem showed up to kick down the gates of suburban households with his manic serial killer persona and cosign from Dr. Dre. Hip-hop had a home on MTV and dedicated radio stations and, while there was a young white audience for it, the only mainstream representation of a white fans was that of the wigger. I can’t help but wonder if the song was so successful because of its critique of wannabes or because the dominant mindset of the time thought that hip-hop was beneath white consumerism, and anyone who listened to it was, therefore, debasing themselves.

The tracklist goes on in this fashion with the exception of songs like “Have You Ever” and “Freeway” which serve as general thesis statements for the sense of dislocation and isolation that come from modern American life. In “Walla Walla” Holland makes fun of an acquaintance for going to prison: “Goodbye, my friend, you’ve messed up again / You’re going to prison, you’re off to the pen / You’ve gotten off easy so many times / I guess no one told you how to get a life.” There is glee in his voice as he chastises the future inmate, a revelry almost, with no mention of how predatory or unjust the prison industrial complex is known to be. “The Kids Aren’t Alright” is an elegy for the youth of Generation X who grew up to be junkies, burnouts, or casualties, but again there is an odd sense of finger-pointing, “Chances thrown, nothing’s free / Longing for what used to be.” While the characters are portrayed in a tragic light it bothers me that Holland chalks up their fates to chances that they’ve thrown away. In The Offspring’s America, if you are a criminal, crazy woman, walking punchline, or drug addict, the important thing to remember is that it’s all your fault.

I didn’t expect this to be the retrospective I would write when I started thinking about Americana. My original idea was to sing its praises over eight hundred words and enjoy the nostalgia of revisiting this aspect of my childhood. The tricky thing about nostalgia, though, is that it requires you to cross its threshold wearing rose-tinted glasses, and given the state of the world right now I am having a harder and harder time agreeing to those terms. I still like The Offspring and I can’t really hold this album at fault for being a product of its time, but I also can’t approach it as an insulated entity that is above criticism because of its ridiculousness. The album sought to expose the dark underbelly of America and, if you ask me, it indirectly succeeded. Not in the subject matter of its songs, but in giving voice and instrumental backing to the angry, judgmental isolationist lurking in the homes of the American middle class on the cusp of a new era.







Author Details Jordan Ranft Author Jordan Ranft is a California Bay Area native. His poetry has appeared in ‘Rust+Moth,’ ‘Midway,’ ‘(b)oink,’ and here. He has worked as an arts/culture and music writer for The East Bay Express, Sacramento News & Review, and Brokeassstuart.com. He’s at a point in his life where a lot of his favorite musicians are also his friends. It is delightful. Follow him on twitter, or don’t.

