Edward Cumming
In the spring of 1999 I went to Venice on a school choir trip. (It was that sort of school, and I was that sort of 12-year old.) Even by the standards of a city built on water, it was a wet week. Rain came down in thick sheets, and the tide swelled from below. After a couple of days St Mark’s Square was a foot-deep lake. Splashing about was quite good fun (at least until you ran out of dry clothes on the second day), but the water put the kibosh on some of our less essential church performances. Our audiences, of devout elderly Italians and baffled Japanese, might well have argued that none of our performances were totally essential, but then they should have learnt the English for “vada a bordo, cazzo”.
In short, we had plenty of time to ourselves. There are only so many ways that a group of 15 prep school boys can amuse themselves in a mid-range Italian hotel without alarming an in loco parentis DT teacher. ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’ had just dropped, so we spent lots of time watching that on mute and playing Uno. But there was only one minidisc coming out of the travel speakers: The Offspring’s ‘Americana’. Over and over and over again. Wired off gallons of duty-free Fanta, we listened with furious devotion, and gradually the album worked the whole choir into a state of deep agitation. As they burned into my brain, I honestly believed every song to be an ironclad classic. The simple anguish of “Have You Ever’, the psychological insight of “She’s Got Issues”, the satirical bite of “Americana.” The record asked two simple, timeless questions, both of which strike straight to the heart of any self-respecting Englishman: why won’t this girl sleep with me, and why is America so stupid?
Time has not been especially kind to The Offspring. Cruel words are bandied about: “infantile,” “samey,” “musically bereft.” But I think ‘Americana’ holds up pretty well, and I’ll defend to the death my belief that it is one of the great California pop-punk records of the late 1990s. I defy anyone to listen to ‘The Kids Aren’t Alright’ and not yell, or at least want to yell, “Woah-oh” at the appropriate moments. I still know all the words, and every time I hear them I am reminded that for one week fifteen white boys in Venice were pretty damn fly.
