The Offspring
Greatest Hits

THE REVIEW

After the release of the highly acclaimed "Smash", the name of the Californian band was praised (almost) by everyone, and they had managed, thanks to deadly riffing and a no-compromise approach, to achieve the incredibly difficult feat of bringing together many punk rockers and several metal kids. Then, the downfall. Corrupted by the (damned) god money, puppets in the hands of their record labels, the Offspring have plunged headlong into the abyss of ephemeral commercial success: enslaved to the necessity of having a chart-topping hit at all costs, on one hand, and lost in the systematic repetition of the same compositional patterns, on the other, the Californian band has long been inexorably on their way down the path of decline.
This "Greatest Hits" now proves useful mainly to highlight the trajectory of their artistic decline and to compare the urgent expression of their older and more authentic tracks with the embarrassing mediocrity of their recent and pandering singles: exemplified in this sense by "Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)", the ideal soundtrack for a twelve-year-old girl with braids and braces celebrating her birthday. We can finally note how the first two albums of their discography, the self-titled and "Ignition", are completely ignored in this collection, while two (neglectable) unreleased tracks are included, the opening track and the closing (ugh?) remix. The focal point, however, remains the same: in the end, we couldn't care less about the Offspring.