Platter Du Jour

The Offspring
Ixnay On The Hombre
Columbia

Of course the Offspring hail from Orange County. They have to be from Orange County. Frontman Dexter Holland was a high school punk rocker who was also a class valedictorian who was also a jock. If he had composed that résumé in the Midwest, the internal contradictions would have made him look like a freak or some kind of wannabe. In Orange County, where the promise of infinite possibility flows out the gates of Disneyland, dissolving subcultural distinctions into youth culture proper, he was simply an overachiever. Holland's dreadlocks were the mouse ears of an OC rebel.

About those dreads, now gone: No white man ever looked as white as Holland did peering from beneath his gangly blond knots. He did with dreads what Dizzy Gillespie did with berets and English tailoring, flipping the man's signifiers and somehow looking all the blacker for it. Holland is a man resplendent in gawk, comfortable with his six-foot-plus self. Being cool is the last thing on his mind. This record begins with a parental-disclaimer satire so witless it could almost be Jello Biafra (hey, according to the liner notes, it is Jello). And why else would the Offspring be dabbling in ska on Ixnay on the Hombre's "Don't Pick It Up," long after that bandwagon left the station and crossed the county line?

Ixnay marks the spot where the Offspring depart indie label Epitaph for a major label, two years after their breakthrough album Smash. Punk-rock zealots can take their rage to the grave, but what this band cares about beyond everything else is what zealots can abide least: songs. Holland outdoes himself, the Misfits, the Benedictines with the sing-along chant of "Way Down the Line." "Mota" brings back that vato who made "you gotta keep 'em separated" a virtual tattoo, and its laceration of potheads accompanies a drumbeat that obliterates your short-term memory. "Cool to Hate" is the un-nicest way you'll ever hear somebody admonish "if you haven't got something nice to say...." But that's what Holland's about. He's a positive punk, and he'd be no easier to take than an airport Krishna if his tunes didn't stomp.

If Smash's success -- it spawned two Top 40 hits, sold eight-and-a-half million copies -- has marked the Offspring, it's first of all changed the nature of their paranoia. They are no longer suburban punks fearful of a system that might swallow them, they are stars, alienated from the system that has embraced them. They can hardly bond with the kids so simply. So it makes sense that on Ixnay they stray from the studied self-loathing and enforced slop of the California punk-rock model. They've traded that in on a guitar that sounds like a million bucks. Unlike Green Day, they slept through the fallout of The Year Punk Blew Up, ducking the unreasonable expectations attached to a follow-up. But they come out of the bomb shelter different people.

There comes a time when reiterating what won you cheers in the beginning suddenly looks like schtick, a time when even the faithful turn on you. (Tell it to deposed crackpot Republican Congressman Bob Dornan, who, like the Offspring, hails from the OC town of Garden Grove.) The Offspring don't have a purchase on a moment or a milieu anymore. What they do have today is a constituency -- KROQ listeners, and Buzz Binners nationwide. Which is probably the reason they're not mimicking the Adolescents or Circle Jerks on this record, but fellow post-indie phenoms like Bush ("Amazed") and Jane's Addiction ("Me and My Old Lady"). Ixnay even has a dance tune ("I Choose").

The Offspring sound so good today because of how far we are from the age of Anarchy in the U.K. They want to make a hit, not an ethos. Their rebellion has always seemed more inspired by '60s one-hit wonders with Ultra Brite smiles than '70s bomb-throwers with bad teeth. Holland yelps about breaking rules, and while you may long for some definition -- which rules, whose? -- it's probably just as well that he doesn't go into it (we might find out he was a tax rebel). The Offspring are the only punks who could justify crossing the major-label rubicon by saying they were breaking more rules without seeming disingenuous. Both Never Mind the Bollocks and Ixnay on the Hombre have a song keying on the phrase "and we don't care"; but what Holland specifically doesn't mind is if people gape while he and his girlfriend cuddle in public.

One-time Epitaph labelmates Rancid offer fans a myth of punk-rock penance; they heard a noise and it lifted them from the gutter. Maybe they even had to be in the gutter to hear it in the first place. But the Offspring believe in a punk rock you don't have to suffer for, one that doesn't interfere with after-school clubs or life at home. Yeah, Holland wails about changing the world, but his music is more about finding a place in it. He may think he's lobbing bombs, but really he's lighting bottle rockets, and that's just fine. He's already calling his girlfriend "my old lady." These are songs imploring you to rip it up, but they always feel like a prelude to getting on with the rest of your life.

By RJ Smith, from SPIN magazine - February 1997