The Offspring
Days Go By

This review is not a review; this review is an insight. And yes, I know the work in question has already been reviewed twice, I say twice, but this album gives the same feeling as having a 3310, or seeing Higuita make a scorpion save. Not that anyone cares.

Punk has always coexisted with that state of ambivalence perfectly spelled out in the Great Rock n' Roll Swindle, the contrast of “yes, we are rebels and make music for rebels” and the simultaneous commercial aspirations of the bands involved - or at least those who more than others have celebrated and spread such concepts. This alone could trigger an ancient debate about what comes first: 'pure' rebellion or its commercialization? But this is not the place. This ambiguity persists, underlying the movement, more or less until 1994, the year of the explosion of the happy pop-punk oxymoron with the release of Smash and Dookie, two albums that have sold a lot and will continue to do so. And it is here that the scam becomes evident; even for the most naive listener, these works appeal to TOO many people to constitute models of emancipation or even to be against the system. Because it becomes clear how they are part of the system itself and enjoy it neither more nor less than a Madonna, to say.

But the Offspring, Green Day, and even Blink-182 later, are not stupid and use a fundamental weapon; irony. And the higher the bar rises, the more evident the poppification becomes, the more necessary irony and sarcasm become, infiltrating more and more their pieces – just look at Pretty Fly or All the Small Things – and the more the pieces sell, creating a kind of perverse vicious circle from which it becomes increasingly unlikely to exit. And in fact, after about a decade, the creative push runs out, and they take different, more adult paths, outside those canons, more (see Blink's self-titled) or less successful (Rise and Fall of the same Offspring, which beyond the lucubrations was just plain bad).

The year of our Lord 2012. Green Day is increasingly sentimental and has headed towards an adult pop-rock, vaguely anchored to adolescent memories. Blink-182 have broken up and got back together. The Offspring, after a couple of poorly executed experiments (let's emphasize it again) – I still suffer seeing Dexter Holland slicked back like Jon Bon Jovi – come out with this Days Go By, and it's like getting back into a car used 10 years ago. A nice car, maybe half broken, but nice. Firstly, the album is fun (and this is undeniable). The album is fun also and especially because it is infinitely self-referential, almost reaching the parody of themselves, of the successful one. Yes, because in this carnival there is everything, from the exaggerated self-citations (Dividing by Zero, Hurting as One, even a re-recording of Dirty Magic), to pure foolery targeting the audience and themselves for mockery (I Wanna Secret Family With You, Slim Pickens), to historical references, ridiculed for the occasion - doesn’t OC Guns remind a lot of Guns of Brixton? -, and everything seems vaguely anachronistic when Dexter sings to me “I've got something more to say” in Secrets From the Underground, when it's obvious that more to say he hasn't had for at least ten years. Cruising California is the apotheosis: a mockery of chart pop in the style of Katy Perry which is simultaneously a mockery of themselves mocking. Many don't like it; I do, because it makes me feel silly. But not silly like a nerd loser, silly like a scatterbrained hyperactivity of a thrilled thirteen-year-old; it’s as if Dexter were asking me “And so, have you grown up all this time?”, and I: “Never!”.