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 americana movie
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. Information and perspective were as insulated as they ever would be, with the internet and its power to decentralize viewpoints looming on the horizon. The economy was up, and little white boys like me were more interested in rallying against our parents than ideas like fascism and oppression. And why wouldn’t it be? 1998 was late-stage Clinton era “post-racial” America. And what this snapshot reveals is that America in 1998 sucked real hard for anyone who wasn’t white and from the suburbs.Īlthough its title might suggest otherwise, Americana was starkly apolitical. 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. 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. And the sound is predominantly accompanied by a buoyant, albeit mean-spirited, sense of humor. Dexter Holland’s voice blares like sugar mixed with battery acid, sweet and caustic. That being said, what’s not to enjoy? The instruments are bright and energetic, seasoned with just the right amount of distortion. 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. I like challenging and complex music, but easier listenings shouldn’t be written off due to some weird perceived sense of integrity. The songs on Americana are listenable to a fault and they’ve been manufactured for easy digestion. It isn’t even an indictment of The Offspring. This isn’t an indictment of pop-punk, emo, or the litany of genre offshoots that unfurled over the start of the millennium. 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. It was the logical conclusion of course for a band that, a few years earlier, helped forge a path for punk to mainstream syndication. 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. With this album, the band fully committed itself to widespread appeal. The B-sides that ape a punkish sound fall short and the big singles don’t try to be anything other than pop. So here we go.īeyond 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. 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. 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. 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.Īnd at the center of this legacy sits Americana. “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. Conspiracy of One was the first CD I ever bought. They were the first band I listened to that my dad hated.