Grab your popcorn and buckle up your seat belts, it’s time for another Scuzz Sunday!

• 

As always, Jacob Braybrooke here! Of course, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 24 hours, it is Sunday! This means it’s the day of the week on the blog where I take a trip down memory lane and revisit a cheesy emo rock/punk throwback tune from the 90’s/mid-00’s, which takes me back to THAT phase of my life, with a track which would typically be seen on the Scuzz TV music video channel. It’s a bit of a safe choice this week, but it’s still nonetheless worth covering. The Offspring are a Hard Rock band from California who had several hits in the era, such as “Pretty Fly For A White Guy”, “Original Prankster” and “Why Don’t You Get A Job?”, with the former track reaching the #1 spot on mainstream singles charts around the world, including my native UK Singles Chart. The band were a big part of the mainstream pop-punk rock movement in the late 90’s, along with fellow Californian bands such as Green Day, Rancid, Bad Religion and Pennywise (Hiya, Georgie)! The band have gone on to sell over 40 million copies worldwide, as of 2015. Today’s track in question is “The Kids Aren’t Alright” – a single from their fifth major LP, “Americana”, released in 1998. The track was a major commercial success, as it reached #11 on the UK Singles Chart.

The track, titled as an indirect reference to The Who’s 1966 classic “The Kids Are Alright”, also available as downloadable content for the “Rock Band” video game series, is a surprisingly heavy allusion to the Punk Movement of the late 1960’s. The lyrics are delivered with a sharp-witted, quick pace, as Holland starts off: “When we were young the future was so bright/The old neighborhood was so alive/And every kid on the whole damn street/Was gonna make it big and not be beat”, before he compares these ambitions to a harsh, materialistic reality: “Now the neighborhood’s cracked and torn/The kids are grown up but their lives are worn/How can one little street/Swallow so many lives”, with the chorus reiterating themes of scarred potential: “Still it’s hard/Hard to see/Fragile lives, shattered dreams”. As you would expect, this theme of repressed youth and deprived goals continues throughout the track, at a breakneck pace, with Holland referencing stories of Jamie, Jay and Brandon (Hope they made it out alright in the end), with a clear influence of 60’s/70’s punk bands like The Sex Pistols and The Strokes ringing through. The emo-punk style is obviously dated, but the track does have a certain maturity and forlorn seriousness which makes it stand out from it’s peer’s offerings. The rhythm is fairly catchy, although the overall aesthetic is a little bit too pop-oriented and uptempo to fully stand the test of time, for my liking. Nevertheless, it’s a track which clearly borrows some elements of older examples and it updates these morals for the audience of it’s time. It mostly succeeds in doing so, as the guitar riffs are infectious and fit the criteria well. The bass guitar riffs have a dark Americana quality that works and the lyrics, although straightforward, are timeless. Overall, I think it’s solid-as-a-rock stuff!

• 

Thank you for reading this post! Make sure that you check back with the blog tomorrow as I’ll be continuing to try and wash away those January blues with an in-depth look at a new-ish track from a Canadian Electronic Hip-Hop duo who describe their own sound as “Stadium Pow-Wow” and were named as a homage to African-American hip-hop legends A Tribe Called Quest! If you really liked what you just read, why not follow the blog to get notified when every new daily post is up and why not like the Facebook page here?: https://www.facebook.com/OneTrackAtATime/