***The the offspring Band Announces 2025 Tour and New Album After Over a Decade ***
some 20 yards away. “I’d done it before,” the Offspring‘s 32-year-old singer says later. “But this was going to be the record for distance.”
Barely ten feet into the crowd, the horizontal Holland loses the beers—seized and guzzled by fans. Then he loses his shoes. Then his socks. Then he simply disappears, leaving his bespectacled aide-de-camp, guitarist Kevin “Noodles” Wasserman, squinting out from the stage. After a good five minutes—”It was definitely the record for time,” Noodles reports—Holland reemerges from the club’s antechambers, barefoot.
“That’ll teach me to try that with a New York crowd,” he yells.
The offspring
The Offspring Roll Back the Years on ‘Supercharged’
On a dime, L.A.’s platinum mosh engine jumps back into its chief metier, the action-packed set of speedy thrash numbers and novelty rock songs. It’s rec-room hardcore in the ’80s West Coast tradition: breakneck tempos, rubber masks, a Larry “Bud” Melman cameo—fun, fun, fun till your daddy takes the beerbong away. While the gigantic hooks of hits like “Self Esteem” and “Come Out and Play” stoke the crowd, an undeniable part of the thrill comes from that combination of self-consciously sophomoric attitude and gleeful loathing that American punk rock perfected.
“You know what?” Holland tells the crowd. “I hate the Backstreet Boys!” The testimony gets a roar of approval and the Offspring tear into the fast-and-loud “Cool to Hate,” a ditty that professes distaste for cheerleaders, jocks, geeks, trendies, freaks, Doc Martens, muscle tees, TV, and, while we’re at it, “you.” Then, after a pause, guitar-tech/percussionist Chris Higgins taps one of the baby doll heads that trigger his sampler and there’s an echt-Offspring moment. Def Leppard counts “Gunter, glieben, glauben,” disembodied hootchie-mamas leer “Give it to me, baby,” and the band locks into the funk-grunge groove of its MTV smash “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy).” What may have begun as a send-up of a white wannabe B-boy comes off here—four samples, three power chords, and one heavy-rotation video later—as a hard-rock salvo against all things “jiggy.” The crowd loses it.
(Photo by Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images)
Suddenly, out pops 18-year-old Guy Cohen—the kibbutz-born ersatz playa from the video—and fans surge the stage. A sublimely gawky teen actor, Cohen’s got moves for days. “I do the Running Man, I do the Roger Rabbit,” he says later. “I get down and freak the ground—oh, man, people just explode!” And explode they do as he pulls his leg back behind him, freakin’ it dorkstyle. Cohen has had to bring his own security to Offspring shows and was even chased through the streets of New York earlier today. He finishes his routine with a statement of rockist affiliation—a stagedive—leaving fans to wonder whether they’ve just witnessed a retrenchment of rock values, some new multiculti youthcool, or both. “Thank you, New York,” says Holland after the encore. “Now where are my fucking shoes?”
THE OFFSPRING ARE THAT PUZZLING ANOMALY OF 1999: AN ALTERNATIVE-ROCK band that sells. It was one thing for such a species to thrive in the early ’90s, when anything loud and scuzzy in a Melvins T-shirt seemed state-of-the-art. It’s quite another for them to suddenly pop up betwixt ‘N Sync and Jay-Z, yelping wisecracks over music redolent of Bud and shag carpeting. In a year when fabulous postpunks from the Smashing Pumpkins to Hole failed to capture the mass imagination, here come four 30-ish guys in bowling shirts with their fingers on the pulse of young America.
Somehow, in the middle of impeachment season, Noodles’s ragged guitar and Holland’s treble rants have struck a nerve—possibly a deep one. When the Offspring broke in 1994, punk purist critics wrote them off as hopelessly pop—neither “challenging” nor “dangerous”—mere soundtrack music for extreme-sports videos. But now with their fifth album, Americana, the Offspring have a hit single that actually flirts with one of the last dangerous topics available to a bunch of SoCal whiteboys: race.
The song “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)” portrays a white kid who “isn’t cool but fakes it anyway,” i.e., acts Black. “It’s really inspired by wannabe gangsters,” Holland says. “Guys who go to malls and get the gangsta rap clothes. Guys on Ricki Lake who won’t listen to their moms.”
It’s a fairly shopworn motif—a staple of daytime TV and Jennifer Love Hewitt movies—but the music takes it in all sorts of new directions. The track rams the band’s first hit, “Come Out and Play,” through the MTV Jams machine. It mixes Latin percussion and ghetto-girl voices. (“We wanted a Rosie Perez type,” Holland says; they settled for two voiceover pros, one of them Welsh and seven months pregnant.) It throws samples at aggro guitars, and features quasi-rap verses that show the rhyme skills you’d expect from someone named Dexter (e.g., “He’s not quite hip / But in his own mind he’s the dopest trip”). The mix is explosive. Even more so when bolstered by its McG-directed video, which, like an earlier Monster Magnet clip, both lampoons and exploits the whole glitzy, dancing-girl overkill of late-’90s rap videos. Wickedly appropriating hip-hop sound and image, “Pretty Fly” sends up way more than just white wannabes. It takes a longtime villain of the Offspring oeuvre—the “trendy asshole”—and locates him in the dominant trend of the moment, which happens to be African-American.
(Photo by Vinnie Zuffante/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Rest assured, most of Holland’s bile is directed at bands like ‘N Sync and the Backstreet Boys, with their mall-friendly bleaching of street style. “I mean these groups make Hanson look like Rancid,” Holland says. “I really do hate that stuff. Buff white guys singing slow jams.” Holland actually likes some rap—Ice-T, N.W.A, Public Enemy, the Beastie Boys—and is careful not to be misconstrued as anti-hip-hop. “I really didn’t want [the song] to be a Black/white thing because that wasn’t exactly the issue,” he says. “It’s definitely part of it, but it’s more about poseurs of any kind.”
Guy Cohen, who beat out Buffy the Vampire Slayer regular Seth Green for the role of the fly guy in the video, says, “I’m sure lots of people see the video and go, ‘Dang, that guy’s cool.’ I was watching MTV, and one of the ‘N Sync guys had the same Fubu jersey I wore in the video. The Offspring didn’t even realize it, but we were making fun of the biggest teeny-bopper group there is.”
“‘Pretty Fly’ is a reaction,” Tom Calderone, senior vice president of music and talent at MTV, says more generally. “The Offspring were able to take hip-hop, an incredibly strong musical force, and comment on it on so many different levels. It’s a great reflection of where the times are at right now.” And where the times are at right now is boy groups, Jewel, and most of all, R&B—things not rock. Cast your mind back 20 years and you’ll realize the Offspring’s latest gesture is quite familiar. It’s a cry from the marginalized white rock sector against an ascendant culture of urban fakery: Poseurs! Trendies! Wussies! Phonies! What we may have here, ladies and gentlemen, is the great premillennial Disco Sucks song.
CHRISTMAS IN ORANGE COUNTY. A HOLIDAY STAMPEDE AT DISNEYLAND JUST SENT several people to the hospital and the malls are almost out of Furbys. Past a traffic-choked strip mall and down an industrial parkway we find Nitro Records, indie punk label and unofficial HQ of the Offspring. Inside, Christmas carols play on the oldies station and friendly young men and women wearing Doc Martens and Vans sit typing or stuffing envelopes. A framed photo of the Nitro-sponsored West Corona Little League team shares wall space with posters for Social Distortion and the Damned.
Holland and Offspring bassist Greg Kriesel started Nitro in 1995, and the label is currently home to such neo-punk upstarts as Guttermouth and the Vandals. Their posters fight for attention with ten old-school video games: Defender, Asteroids, and other classics occupy the adjoining hangar, next to T-shirt boxes and instrument cases. Upstairs, Holland’s office boasts campy executive touches: a huge tropical fish tank and one of those desk ornaments with the hanging silver balls that click back and forth. “I’m really into office toys,” Holland says, setting the spheres in motion. As the balls click away, the men of Offspring sit back and reveal the weighty global vision behind the album Americana.
“Actually, we were going to title it You’re Too Fat to Make Porn,” says Noodles. “That was right off of Springer, I think.” The 35-year-old guitarist has a black-dyed, rectangular haircut and super-thick glasses, very Metal Shop Teacher circa 1978. When a caller to a radio show asked him what superpower he’d most like to have, Noodles answered, “I’d settle for some decent eyesight.” His T-shirt says WHITE TRASH under a turnpike-sign-style silhouette of a trailer.
Holland sits across from him, his long legs splayed out on either side of the chair. Shorn of the cornrows Courtney Love once dubbed the “worst hair in rock,” Holland has a spiky blond Billy Idol-ish crew cut and ice-blue eyes, lending him a slight resemblance to the toothy actor Gary Busey. Even in silver creepers, he is so clean-cut and all-American-looking the nickname “Skippy” seems as apt as “Dexter.”
“It wasn’t like w
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