THE OFFSPRING
The Offspring is an American rock band from Garden Grove, California, formed in 1984. Over the course of their 34-year career, the Offspring has released nine studio albums. The Offspring is often credited — alongside fellow California punk bands Green Day and Rancid — for reviving mainstream interest in punk rock in the 1990s. They have sold over 40 million records worldwide, being considered one of the best-selling punk rock bands of all time. The Offspring achieved its first commercial success with their third studio album Smash (1994), which has sold over eleven million copies worldwide, setting a record for most albums sold on an independent record label, and was the first album released on Epitaph to obtain gold and platinum status. (More from Wikipedia)
Allmusic says about this bunch (courtesy of Steve Huey): “The Dickies were the clown princes of punk, not to mention surprisingly longstanding veterans of the L.A. scene. In fact, by the new millennium, they’d become the oldest surviving punk band still recording new material. In contrast to the snotty, intentionally offensive humor of many comedically inclined punk bands, the Dickies were winningly goofy, inspired mostly by trashy movies and other pop culture camp. Their covers were just as ridiculous as their originals, transforming arena rock anthems and bubblegum pop chestnuts alike into the loud, speed-blur punk-pop – basically the Ramones crossed with L.A. hardcore – that was their musical stock in trade. As the band got older, their music slowed down little by little; but their sound and their sense of humor stayed largely the same, and they were an avowed influence on new-school punkers like Green Day and the Offspring.”
(March 2017)
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But Green Day is easy; everybody knows about them. When I tried to come up with other punk revival bands to talk about in this post, I started coming up short. The Wikipedia article mentions: “Green Day was widely credited, alongside fellow California punk bands Sublime, Bad Religion, the Offspring, and Rancid, with popularizing and reviving mainstream interest in punk rock in the United States.” I really don’t know much about those four bands other than a few stray tracks, like the Offspring song “Self Esteem”.
(June 2017)
