The Offspring / YMMV

Common Knowledge: "Gone Away" is commonly believed to be about Dexter Holland's girlfriend who allegedly died in a car crash. As it turns out, this wasn't the case at all; Holland later revealed in an interview that he wrote the song after his then-wife almost died in a gang shootout.
Contested Sequel: Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace is either one of the best albums they've done or one of their worst, depending on who you ask.
Fandom-Enraging Misconception: A lot of fans don't like when they get lumped in with pop-punk bands from the late 1990s/early 2000s such as blink-182 or Sum 41, since their career dates back about a decade earlier.
Fan Nickname: Fans generally refer to the nameless protagonist of the Dividing by Zero/Slim Pickens Does the Right Thing and Rides the Bomb to Hell video as, well, Slim Pickens. His ordeal in the latter half seems apt enough.
Funny Moments:
- The video for "Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)", as well as the song itself.
- "My friend's got a boyfriend and she hates that dick (and the guy!)"
- The disclaimer titled "Disclaimer" from Ixnay On the Hombre. Said track opens the album, and is presented via an extra hammy and sarcastic Take That! to the RIAA, specifically, the Parental Advisory warnings. It needs to be heard to be believed.
- In 2020, the band released a Cover Version of Joe Exotic's song "Here Kitty Kitty" - the music video included a fursuited skateboarder, a fursuited drummer, and Dexter and Noodles wearing face masks and sitting six feet apart from each other (as illustrated with a giant ruler). Youtube comments tended to revolve around what a Unintentional Period Piece this is destined to become due to the combination of Tiger King and Covid-19 references.
Memetic Mutation: Thanks to "All I Want" being used as the main theme for Crazy Taxi, the "Yah yah yah yah yah!" lyric at the beginning has become one.
Misaimed Fandom: Quite a few of their songs. For a good example, "Hammerhead" is often assumed to be about soldiers in the Iraq war, but it's really about a delusional school shooter. The song starts out with lyrics that seem to be about someone fighting in a war, but at the end it's revealed that it's actually the delusional thoughts going through a school shooter's head. The lyrics at the end can be hard to understand if not following along with printed lyrics, so many don't realize the twist. In the video, too, there's plenty of military imagery, ranging from stealth bombers and generals to the main character being a soldier. However, it all starts to look suspicious when the stealth bombers are small and flap their wings like birds while using their nosecones as beaks, the general is warped and presumably a pure hallucination, and the stacks of Humvees and dead soldiers looks suspiciously like a simple junkyard. By the end, the revelation that this career as a soldier is all in the guy's head is horrifyingly obvious.
Moment of Awesome: In the video for "Dividing by Zero"/"Slim Pickens Does the Right Thing and Rides the Bomb to Hell", the protagonist is a fighter pilot whose plane is downed. He survives by launching a missile and hanging on to a chain attached to its back end, continuing the battle (at one point letting go, running across the top of an enemy craft, dropping a live grenade into it and grabbing the chain again as it swings past), and tries to take out the enemy commander's flying fortress.
- Dexter Holland got a huge one at Woodstock 99. In the middle of their set, he admonished guys in the crowd for groping the girls who were crowd surfing, saying that was NOT COOL, to knock it off, and if someone saw a guy doing it to knock them out. He then told girls that when guys crowd surfed, to grab the guys crotches.
Nausea Fuel: The video for "Original Prankster" has the prankster kid making sandwiches with... a disgusting filling.
Nightmare Fuel:
- The video for "Hammerhead". Being very similar to Twisted Metal Black cutscenes just adds to it.
- The Deranged Animation in "She's Got Issues" too.
- "Beheaded" is about as prosaic as it gets for a Murder Ballad, in that there's no allegory or depth of meaning to the lyrics; it's about a guy who just likes chopping off people's heads, apparently gets a sexual thrill from it, and he wants the one on the listener's shoulders next. Sleep tight, kids!
- The robot controlled Hell (possibly) in "Slim Pickens Does The Right Thing And Rides The Bomb To Hell." The damned all dance in some demonic rave while the robots drop them into a fiery pit, keeping them under control with a blue gas that causes their faces to split open and explode into limbs and tentacles. And then the protagonist gets a whiff of the stuff.
Paranoia Fuel: Several songs about conspiracies and "the man".
Retroactive Recognition:
- Their video for "She's Got Issues" was one of the first major acting roles for Zooey Deschanel.
- Remember the woman singing “give it to me baby” in “Pretty Fly For a White Guy”? That’s Nika Futterman, who has since gone on to become a professional voice actress.
Sampled Up: "Gunter glieben glauchen globen" is from Def Leppard's song "Rock of Ages". But, if you're too young to remember it (or haven't known the song before), you'll most inevitably associate it with "Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)".
Seasonal Rot: Everyone has a different opinion on when it started, but Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace and Days Go By were both less well-received than their 90s albums.
Sequel Displacement: The two albums before their mainstream debut Smash are usually ignored, even by the band itself (apart from a tour where they decided to play Ignition in full). In fact, their 2005 Greatest Hits album didn't include so much as a single song off either one. Although "Dirty Magic" from Days Go By was a re-recorded version of a song originally from Ignition.
Signature Song: "Self-Esteem", "Come Out and Play", "All I Want" (especially amongst Crazy Taxi players), "Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)", "The Kids Aren't Alright", "Why Don't You Get a Job", "Gone Away", "Hit That", and especially "You're Gonna Go Far, Kid" are all contenders.
Song Association:
- Play Crazy Taxi, and many Offspring songs will stick to your mind instantly. "Yah yah yah yah yah!" ("All I Want")
- "Come Out and Play (Keep 'em Separated)" gets this effect being one of the on-disc songs in Rock Band 2
Suspiciously Similar Song:
- "Why Don't You Get a Job?" is a rather blatant soundalike of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" by The Beatles.
- "Come Out and Play" allegedly got its main riff from part of the guitar solo to "Bloodstains" by Agent Orange. Oddly, The Offspring would later do a straight Cover Version of the song.
Tear Jerker:
- "Gone Away", a song about losing a loved one.
- "Kristy, Are You Doing Okay?" also counts, especially after you know what it's about. It's about a girl Dexter knew in his youth who was sexually abused, but no one gave a damn about it.
- Even "Self-Esteem" is pretty sad, just in how hard the lyrics avert Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male. The narrator's tongue is clearly in his cheek when he says "I like the abuse".
- "The Kids Aren't Alright". As the title indicates, it's all rather helpless-sounding (though paired with fast, fist-pumping music). Dexter Holland was inspired to write the song after discovering that his old neighborhood friends' lives didn't turn out so well. It hits even harder in the 2020's, where a lot of those "kids" who listened to the song when it was newly released are now grown up...and are beginning to experience exactly what the song was about.
  "Jamie had a chance, well, she really did
  Instead she dropped out and had a couple of kids
  Mark still lives at home 'cause he's got no job
  He just plays guitar and smokes a lot of pot
  Jay committed suicide
  Brandon OD'd and died
  What the hell is going on?
  The cruelest dream, reality"
They Copied It, So It Sucks!:
- Many songs on Days Go By have been accused of ripping off Rise Against, especially "Turning Into You" (compared to "Ready to Fall") and "The Future Is Now" (compared to "Savior").
- From Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace, "Fix You" is accused of copying "Wake Me Up When September Ends" by Green Day, and "Rise and Fall" is accused of copying the same band's "American Idiot".
Unintentional Period Piece: "You can always go on Ricki Lake" from "Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)" dates the song to before Lake's show was cancelled in 2004.
Values Dissonance: "She's Got Issues" is a song about dumping an emotionally needy girlfriend. Today, such a lyrical theme would be seen as misogynistic and insensitive.

YMMV / The Offspring

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