Please Make Your Selection

Welcome. To. Americana. Please. Make. Your. Selection. Followed by. The. Pound. Sign. Now…

We have long thought about which albums and bands have had the most influence over our tastes today. There are many, many different tests for measuring influence, but perhaps the simplest is this: “Is there a before and after this album?” Americana very definitely passes this test, and we have to include it as one of the most influential albums in the Vault.

We had never heard of The Offspring before we saw the video for “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)”, which we’ll come to shortly, and we had only a passing understanding of what “punk” was. Americana was the gateway to The Offspring’s back catalogue, the irreverent Ixnay on the Hombre and the glorious Smash. It was how we discovered Bad Religion, and from Bad Religion we found a world of rebellion.

Americana was The Offspring’s leap into the mainstream, released by Columbia and given a lot of support on channels like MTV. The support paid off with Americana becoming a commercial success, reaching number 2 in the US and number 10 in the UK. Critical and fan responses to it were mixed, but to a teenage Ø, this was something very new.

We can probably skip over “Welcome”, the nine-second phone menu introduction, and go straight into “Have You Ever”. Even now it feels like this was always meant to be two songs. It’s three minutes of straightforward ’90s American punk with a coda about doing the right thing. Perhaps the last minute helps set up “Staring at the Sun”, which is more of the same by-the-numbers pop-punk.

So far, so what? Well, it turns out that The Offspring have been keeping their powder dry until song number four: “Pretty Fly”. The song that broke the band into the mainstream, reaching number 1 in the UK such was its ubiquity, is stupid fun. Poking fun at the shallow nature of pop culture isn’t new, and this doesn’t offer any new insight, but it does give us the immortal line about wanting Ice Cube but having to settle for Vanilla Ice. This was enough for us to laugh about it, thinking about the one friend who had made this kind of mistake trying to be cool.

If “Pretty Fly” was the lure, then “The Kids Aren’t Alright” was the hook that pulled us in fully. It’s played blistering fast, the mood is incredibly nihilistic, and it is insanely catchy. For us it is the best song on the album, and even now we still can’t resist singing along.

We wonder if “She’s Got Issues” would be released today, guessing that the answer is probably not. Even in 2005 The Offspring didn’t include it on the Greatest Hits album. It’s not a bad song; in fact, it is probably one of the catchier songs on Americana. It’s certainly better than the instantly forgettable “Walla Walla”.

“The End of the Line” and “No Brakes” are different, both musically and thematically, from the songs that have come before. Bitter and angry, they tackle themes of loss and losing control, something that The Offspring have always done well (see “Gone Away” on Ixnay on the Hombre or “Dirty Magic” on Ignition).

“Why Don’t You Get a Job?” picks up where “Pretty Fly” left off, shrugging off the angst of the previous songs with a burst of anthemic pop-punk energy. Inverting an insult typically levied at the album’s target audience is smarter than the band is often given credit for.

“Americana” is the dark horse, deserving far more credit than it gets. This song is closer to the band’s roots than anything else on the album and wouldn’t be out of place on Smash or Ignition. Listening back, we can hear how jarring it is after “Why Don’t You Get a Job?”, which perhaps is what holds it back. What it does do is set up “Pay the Man” to close out the album. The song broods for close to five minutes, taking its musical cues from bands like The Doors, before bursting into life to rail against the man. Original? No. Does it pay off? Yes.

Americana is a flawed album for sure. The track ordering is frustrating, and it can feel like some of the edges have been smoothed out as part of the jump to a major label. But we simply don’t care about that because it’s a fun album to listen to, and it introduced us to The Offspring, who opened our eyes to an alternative culture. Because of Americana, we heard Smash, and we heard Generator, and we heard The Art of Drowning.

Americana is Taped

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