Music

The Offspring's 'Smash' turns 20

by Mark Teo

Holy shit. How in the hell is the Offspring’s Smash 20? Let that sink in for a second: It’s old enough to buy booze in every province in Canada. It’s two years removed from high school. It’s two decades old. We repeat: Holy shit.

OK, laugh if you want. We get it. The Offspring fucking suck. They’re all whiteboy dreads, Joakleys, dad janitor bassists, and since the ’00s, they’ve released Splinter, Rise And Fall, Rage And Grace, and Days Go By, all albums I’ve never heard and never will. (This is, of course, the band who wrote “Pretty Fly For a White Guy,” which doesn’t even pass my Limp-Bizkit’s-Break-Stuff-is-a-jam post-post-post-ironic bullshit test. Some things are unforgivable.)

We know. The Offspring fucking suck. They’re a stupid garbage band, made even stupider by the fact that Dexter Holland is a molecular biology PhD student, making him the dumbest objectively smart man in existence. We want to shake him by his doughy beige shoulders, and tell him to take cues from the other punk rock profs: Sure, we’d yell, Greg Graffin dropped dude n00dz, jerked off on a webcam, and released Christmas albums. But somehow, Bad Religion isn’t nearly as embarrassing as the Offspring. Get your shit together, Noodles.

But forget the Offspring. Let’s talk Smash, one of the most essential alternative—nay, punk—albums of the 1990s. While Green Day’s Dookie was the bigger commercial success (opening up conversations about genre authenticity, corporate involvement in underground music, and whether or not dads can listen to punk), in the middle-school playground of my mind, Smash was all about the rawer side, more essential side of punk. If Dookie led impressionable minds onto the Riverdales, the Ramones, and the Mr. T Experience, Smash brought us into the world of the Circle Jerks, the Adolescents, and TSOL. A nardcore obsession would soon follow.

Despite its de facto status as mall punk, Smash, unlike Dookie, never felt like it belonged outside an Orange Julius. For that reason, it was the perfect gateway album, and somehow, it was delivered by Dexter Holland, a man who resembled a beat-up loaf of bread crowned with braids knotted outside a Señor Frog’s in Cancun. Y’know?

In other words, Smash had some serious playground cred. From the oh-so-ironic introduction of “It’s Time To Relax”—surely hearkening back to some bygone, kitschy era of relaxing audio I never experienced—it leapt right into the frenetic riffage of “Nitro,” a fuck-the-world anthem that sounded hard as nails if you’d never heard Hatebreed’s Satisfaction is the Death of Desire. Which, you hadn’t—when you were spinning Smash for the first time, it was like, 1995 and you were barely in double digits.

So, let’s run down a few of Smash‘s poseur-bashing highlights: You learned how to play the bassline to “Bad Habit” the first time you picked up some Ibanez piece of shit at Cosmo’s Music. You thought Agnostic Front referenced “Gotta Get Away” when you bought your first Punk-O-Rama comp, but never told anyone (good call, ace). You requested “Genocide” at your grade 8 dance, and right before some fucking Live track came on, you push-moshed so hard, you lost your stuffed animal backpack. “Come Out And Play” sounded every bit as exotic as the Tea Party’s “Bazaar,” which, on the exotic scale, landed somewhere around the Hawaiian Punch guy level. You acted pretend-drunk while singing along to the “LA LA LA LA LA LA” in “Self Esteem,” despite the fact that you were 11 and didn’t even know what being drunk felt like, much less what “getting laid” meant.

We could go on. We really could.

Smash‘s immediate earworms—and its je-ne-sais-WTF notion of credibility—led it to, arguably, greater heights than Dookie. In many ways, it became a torchbearer for both punk and independent music: Having gone gold and platinum, it was one of the most successful indie records of all time. It helped establish Epitaph Records, who, after building gateway punk as we know it, now trades in fucking Weakerthans and Saul Williams and Skip the Foreplay and Falling in Reverse records. It launched the Offspring’s Nitro Records, which brought up Bay Area punk classics like AFI and Nerve Agents. It, in itself, was the gateway for plenty of ’90s babies into hardcore.

And, perhaps most importantly, it helped launch the template for successful independents for the years coming—it’s no stretch to believe that Victory, Fearless, and countless others couldn’t have existed without Smash‘s groundwork. That might be a good thing. It might be a bad thing. But that’s another conversation.

Most of all, though, Smash was a great album—not because, but despite the fact that it was created by The Offspring. Happy Birthday, Smash. Listen to it below, or buy a ludicrously priced $130 anniversary boxset—which comes with like, a commemorative patch or something—right here.