Playlouder - Music is the Network

1995 I was performing rope tricks in a mock circus as part of an end-of-year activities week at school. Another 'act' in this mock circus comprised of fellow school students doing synchronised diablo tricks. The leader of the troupe, the official diablo artist from the circus, a slack-jawed generation X slimebag, insisted on using Come Out and Play by The Offspring as the soundtrack to their act. They deemed it necessary to play ths record three or four times every half hour for five days. I conclude it's the worst piece of music ever recorded.

1997 The Offspring release Ixnay on the Hombre, their fourth album, and the first I remember. I buy for my friend's 13 birthday. We make our own Jackass-style home video where we set up a static camera in his brother’s bedroom, and then beat each other up using cushions and mattresses. To add authenticity and to make it more like the BMX videos on TV, we put his cassette player next to the camera, and basically gave each other beatings for several hours to the soundtrack of All I Want

1999 Pretty Fly (For a White Guy) is a number one single. Ron Welty 'drums' onto a line of plastic skulls on TFI Friday. The Offspring release Why Don't You Get a Job?, arguably one of the poorest songs ever recorded, a lacklustre slacker Ob-la-di Ob-la-da rip off regarded as the zenith of the sell-out punk rock era at the turn of the decade.

2000 The Cuban Boys release their cover of Self Esteem. Original version confined to history and rendered entirely useless.

2001 The Conspiracy of One skull hoodie overtakes the KoRn 'bottles' design hoody as the most desirable winter-wear for disaffected posh kids.

2002 Mike Skinner shouts "shut up Offspring" from the Dance tent at Reading. More people are crammed into the dance tent than are watching the band on the main stage.

2003 Dexter Holland proffers his wares on the band's seventh album 'Splinter' as being a more adult, serious and a big departure from their much more poppy, novelty rock. Blink 182's self titled album released in the same month does all of the above and more. The Offspring's comeback single is "Hit That!" LIES.

2005 The 'credits' for Propagandhi's fourth album, Potemkin City Limits, read "We have no sponsors because we’re not fucking posers (but we would take a ride a ride in Dexter Holland’s multi-million dollar private jet that he’s christened Anarchy Airlines, which clearly honours the spirit and vision of a long history of people who have struggled and often died fighting concentrations of wealth and power. Pretty fly for an asswipe!)"

2007 The Foo Fighters release Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace

2008 The Offspring release Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace. It includes the songs "You're Gonna Go Far, Kid"  "Let's Hear It For Rock Bottom"

The Offspring have never sat right for me. They've never sat right at all, they're easily digestible, like a piece of hot buttery toast but they've never really sat right in the stomach. Even on Smash, I found myself having to lump in the aural equivalent of Rennie, a couple of tabs of Dookie or Britpop to get around how generally unlistenable Dexter Hollands voice is. They've achieved ridiculous popularity, far more than they warranted, had the biggest indie album of all time, own their own airlines, yet I can't find a single person now, who ever liked them. People have flushed them down the same toilet as Semisonic, the Barenaked Ladies, The New Radicals and Len, despite being significantly more universal and lasted longer than all. I certainly can't find anybody, even if I stopped every last motherfucker trotting in and out of the metal section of Zavvi, who could give a microdoodle what the po-faced monikered Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace sounds like. It's rubbish. But it's not rubbish in the way that Original Prankster, or putting Wiseguys remixes on your B sides was rubbish, it's rubbish in the way that they've tried to sweep all that shit under the collective carpet by having a black-and-red colour scheme, a big-dumb-rock-bird-phoenix-flame-thing on the cover and ambiguous social commentaries instead. It reminds me of that news report from years ago when William Hague wore a baseball cap to go on Logger's Leap at Thorpe Park, and the TV stations had a field day trying to digest whether he was making an "I'm not a fuddy-duddy bald northerner, I'm hip and trendy and have a baseball cap and can ride log flumes" statement or not. My understanding was that he was going on a ride where he might get wet. With this utterly inept turd of a record, it's more through necessity rather than ill-conceived statement that The Offspring are trying to pass themselves off as a trendy young angst-core bunch of troubadours. I'd love to know what Dexter Holland made of American Idiot, because evidently it has taught him, and the other hoards of bloated punk pissbags precisely jack shit about staying in the game, as this is an album chock full of petri-dish-identikit boring, uninspired, unfunny, illogical, pathetic and largely tuneless, aimless drivel that's stuffed like a corpse-eyed fucking turkey, with power chords and dear god - pianos. This is absolutely fucking AWFUL, and marks a new low in a career already dominated by big fat troughs: Let's Hear It For Rock Bottom. Hell Yeah!