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Sensible advice, perhaps, if again a little chaste. Verse two warns of the perils of sleeping around and contracting sexually transmitted diseases. Lol! Idiot! Even if you overlook the moral of this opening section - to act always in a manner of Victorian dignity and restraint - and even if you put to the back of your mind the elite's prolonged attempts to associate the underclasses with dirt, dirtiness, ferality and excrement (which they've been doing since at least the invention of early-modern plumbing), even if you do all this and view it as harmlessly light-hearted scatological ska-punk, the song only gets more sinister as it unfolds. To the kid's horror, he discovers it was actually "doggy doo". Verse one provides a cautionary tale about a child who lifts from the ground what he believes to be a discarded candy bar and immediately shoves it greedily into his hungry little mouth. Take 'Don't Pick It Up', for example, a track which inverts the oft-used ska refrain "pick it up, pick it up, pick it up" to not-so-humorous effect. They may not have been so guilty at first, but by the time of their fourth album (1997's Ixnay On The Hombre), The Offspring had adopted the rich's undignified habit of sneering down at those less fortunate and far weaker than themselves. And in both the dialogue of Friends and the lyric sheets of The Offspring, there is an awful lot of punching downwards from a smug and entitled position of privilege. Returning to the Californian punks' material from that era produces similarly queasy reactions to watching Joey Tribbiani's constant attempts to undermine the masculinity of his vaguely effeminate heterosexual buddy Chandler Bing. Many of its main and supporting characters were defined by personality quirks suggesting these people were actually suffering various forms of debilitating mental illness to which the apparently appropriate response was to point and giggle along with the studio audience.įriends ran for a decade from 1994, roughly coinciding with the halcyon period of The Offspring's career. Elsewhere, its scripts made the gender non-conformity of Chandler's father the butt of countless punchlines, or body-shamed "fat Monica", while committing various other politically incorrect, woke-less indiscretions.
THE OFFSPRING GONE AWAY STORY FULL
Generation Zedders viewing the sitcom for the first time alongside older re-visitors alike were stunned by the show's abundance of full plotlines and throwaway gags which functioned merely to poke fun at Ross's lesbian ex-wife or else disparage homosexuality in general. This slightly unnerving experience recalled that moment when Friends appeared on Netflix earlier this year. In fact, The Offspring come across as arch conservatives reactionary to the core. Having recently dusted off my old CDs of their 90s and early 2000 recordings in order to give The Offspring another listen, I have found they no longer seem remotely rebellious or counter-cultural. I began to lose interest in The Offspring at university when they were superseded by the likes of Hefner, Mogwai, Ween, The Flaming Lips, and various non-FNM recordings of Mike Patton spitting incoherent nonsense over a barrage uncompromising metallic jazz noise.
![the offspring gone away story the offspring gone away story](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/G36SgqqTz1Q/hqdefault.jpg)
At home, we'd play Smash too loudly from our bedroom stereos after another petty argument with our underappreciated parents who we now realise were total flipping saints. "I'm not a trendy asshole," we would chant along, not knowing whether to change the pronunciation of ass to arse, "I do what I want / I do what I feel like / I'm not a trendy asshole / Don't give a fuck / If it's good enough for you." Oh, how we'd crank it up in the sixth-form common room with the express intention of unsettling or at least irritating those who always wore the correct trainers and preferred the smoother productions of Madonna, Whitney Houston, TLC, and Bryan Adams - all artists I now realise had a lot more going on than The Offspring. "And it feels, yeah / It feels like the world has grown cold / Now that you've gone away." Such is the combined arrogance and pitiful naivety of youth.īack then, to our tender and inexperienced ears, The Offspring's brand of energetic pop punk sounded like the epitome of rebellion. "And it feels / And it feels like heaven's so far away," read its lyrics. When I was about fifteen years old I proudly announced to my schoolmates that the song I would most like to have played at my funeral would be 'Gone Away' by The Offspring.