5. “Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)” – The Offspring
(From the album Americana)
1998
The Offspring didn’t wait very long to follow up 1997’s Ixnay On The Hombre, releasing Americana just a year later. This quick turnaround was due to a couple of factors. First, the band had written too many songs for Ixnay On The Hombre and so they had a few songs already finished or partially completed, making the writing process much quicker. Second, while still very successful Ixnay On The Hombre was not the massive hit that Smash had been and both the band and Columbia wanted to not lose the momentum of that record. To that end, Americana moves back toward the band’s punk-oriented roots (although it does not abandon the broader and heavier sound of Ixnay either). This fusion of their punk roots and the harder, more alt rock based sound of their previous record, finds its best expression on the third single from Americana, the excellent “Kids Aren’t Alright”. “The Kids Aren’t Alright” was probably a welcome return to their longtime fans because the first two singles from Americana were both much lighter fare. The lead single (and most successful one the band would ever have) would be the humorous, if juvenile, “Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)”. Musically, “Pretty Fly” is a fairly catchy and muscular punk-pop song, but lyrically the song borders on Weird Al Yankovic territory and mimics their own “Come Out & Play” by including a spoken word hook done by a person with a Hispanic accent. The song is undeniably an earworm, even if it is a little silly. That said, it did help bring The Offspring back to the top level of alt rock bands. Second single, “Why Don’t You Get A Job?” borrows from ska and other island musics (the ska/punk scene was big at the moment with other SoCal bands like Sublime and No Doubt doing well) and feels like The Offspring’s version of The Beatles “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”. It is pleasant enough and was another success for the band commercially. In the end, these three hits (along with fourth single “She’s Got Issues”) helped Americana become The Offspring’s most commercially successful album, but the near-novelty hit success of “Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)” would also be a turning point for the band. Moving forward in the minds of many people, The Offspring would be equated with being a party band more than being a politically-mind punk rock group and the band would ultimately accept this and move more in that direction.
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