Modern Rock No. 1s: Offspring and "Come Out And Play"
Offspring continues punk rock's push to the mainstream with "Come Out And Play," a sonic blast of guitar riffs and biting social commentary that is, in my estimation, one of the best songs of the '90s
Offspring - “Come Out And Play”
Weeks atop the Billboard Modern Rock chart: 2 weeks (July 30 and August 6, 1994)
Previous Modern Rock #1 hit: Toad the Wet Sprocket and “Fall Down”
Next Modern Rock #1 hit: Counting Crows and “Einstein on the Beach (For an Eggman)”
Billboard Hot 100 chart toppers during this time:
All-4-One - “I Swear” (11 total weeks from 5/21/94 to 7/30/94)
Lisa Loeb & Nine Stories - “Stay (I Missed You)” (8/7/94)
If you’re the type of person who visits my Substack eagerly reading paragraph after paragraph just to find out how I, a random middle-aged man in Pennsylvania, rates Modern Rock Tracks chart #1 hits, I’ll save you the trouble: This song — Offspring’s “Come Out And Play,” the first single off their multiplatinum album Smash — is a 10/10.
I’m going to spend the rest of the article explaining how the song influenced my life and is deserving of the high praise, all while trying my best to make an objective argument for the song’s greatness without diving too deeply into the fanboy well.
Simply put: Offspring is my favorite musical group, and is most likely the band that contributed to my Musical Awakening™️ the most. I’ve spilled a lot of digital ink expressing my love of groups like Dave Matthews Band and R.E.M. and Green Day; without those bands, my exploration of music would have been limited to the ‘60s standards my dad loved and the ‘80s new wave that my mother loved.
Offspring was the first band that captured me from the very beginning. I can tell you exactly where I was when I heard “Come Out And Play” for the first time, and from that moment on, I was all in. As with many of my formative moments in discovering alternative rock, it began with my high school’s policy debate club.
I’ve already talked about how I discovered Nirvana several years after the release of Nevermind during a social event at a debate camp in Michigan in the summer of 1994. It’s weird how this somewhat nerdy high school club both seems to exist in the shadows yet maintains a strong and omnipresent national presence even to the present day, but regardless of what you may or may not know about debate, I can assure you that, for most folks, it is not likely to be the epicenter for one’s love of alternative rock that it became for me.
My high school routinely traveled to different schools across the country to participate in debate tournaments, usually a gathering of anywhere from a dozen to hundreds of schools, and this travel often took place in massive 15-passenger vans owned by our school. We usually took these trips with our high school debate coach, but sometimes we’d have enough students participating and we’d have to drive multiple vans. This meant we’d get volunteer parents or recent graduates to drive us, and on these trips, we’d get to listen to whatever we wanted.
One trip in particular was in the late fall of 1994, to a fairly sizable tournament at a high school in Cincinnati. On this trip, one of the upperclassmen brought either a mixtape that included tracks from Smash or played Smash in its entirety, and they blasted it at full volume for a good portion of the trip. And I’ll never forget the sound of that guitar: a vaguely Middle Eastern, sitar-like strum that evokes both a snake-charmer-like vibe with a surf-rock edge. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before. I knew I needed the album.
The timing of this release was a perfect storm for me and others roughly my age. I was at the time in life when music tends to influence you the most, when your favorite songs get imprinted into your brain. But it was also the time when punk rock started to explode in the mainstream, an explosion that I’ve already discussed with the post-grunge movement that began with Nirvana’s In Utero and extended outward thanks to hit songs from acts like Gin Blossoms, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Live and Green Day.
Punk rock in the mainstream was so rare at this time that Offspring didn’t even consider the possibility that their new album and lead single would lead to much of anything. Band guitarist Kevin John Wasserman, known by most as “Noodles,” didn’t even quit his day job while “Come Out And Play” was in heavy rotation on major radio stations like L.A.’s KROC. He talked about this in a retrospective oral history of Smash with Kerrang! magazine:
“Prior to ‘Smash,’ we were pretty much a part-time band. Even when we blew up, I didn’t even quit my job [as a janitor at the Earl Warren School in Anaheim] outright – I took a three-year leave of absence. I was still working there when we were blowing up ’cause I’d promised my boss I wouldn’t quit until the end of the school year. There was this one high school girl that I knew [there] and she used to see me in the morning and say to me, ‘Man, what are you doing? I just saw you on MTV!’”
Lead singer and guitarist Dexter Holland was in school at USC, the first in a long series of scholastic endeavors that ultimately led him to obtain a doctoral degree in molecular biology in 2017, and had similar misgivings about the trajectory the “part-time” band would take.
“It was very surprising when things began to move so quickly. Just a couple of years before, there was no punk rock in the mainstream – at all. And we knew that, and we’d chosen our lot. We said, ‘Well what are we gonna do? Are we gonna move to Sunset Boulevard and become a hair metal band?’ Well no, because that’s not us… and then suddenly we were all over the radio, and on MTV too.”
All of this is a reasonable take on the state of punk rock at the time Smash was released, but the push of the post-grunge wave and the mix of raw emotion and energy in the Offspring’s performance made them a necessary fixture on the radio and an overnight success story. And there’s something about “Come Out And Play” that, on its own merits, put the band over the top and into the mainstream consciousness.
Lyrically, the song is dripping with social commentary, the result of Holland’s perspective on the state of society in the mid 1990s. In a review of Smash posted to Louder magazine in 2023, the author notes that Holland wrote about what he saw on his commute to school, “the dilapidated and violence-strewn streets of southern Los Angeles each day while driving in his beat-up car to the college campus.” It was then that he “composed a svelte and perceptive vignette about the gang warfare that had been scarring this most overlooked sector of the city for years.”
In my estimation, the song succinctly captures the raw emotion of that moment in time, and instead of reflecting on it in a subdued or reflective way, Holland and Offspring hit the topic head on, diving into the dynamics of gang violence and the reality that, for most people in this world, it’s kill or be killed. In any other era at any other time, this type of song wouldn’t go side by side with other mainstream music acts, but as part of the post-grunge wave, it proved to be an unstoppable force in music.
And “Come Out And Play” is, musically, a banger from start to finish. The percussive silence of the drums gives way to the maniacal “you gotta keep ‘em separated” verse, and an explosion of guitars and percussion that follows. The guitar movement that leads into Holland’s emotive vocals is the trademark of the song, but the lead-in to the refrain is where the song really shines:
Hey! Man, you talkin' back to me?
Take him out
You gotta keep 'em separated
Hey! Man, you disrespectin' me?
Take him out
You gotta keep 'em separated
Hey, don't pay no mind
If you're under 18, you won't be doing any time
Hey! Come out and play
I love how the band goes all-in on the refrain and then takes a break at the end of each refrain, Holland begging people to “come out and play,” and then the briefest of silences to recover and start driving the guitar again. There are plenty of tracks on Smash that have less-subtle flourishes and come at you full-speed ahead from start to finish, but the subtle speed changes in “Come Out And Play” really stand out.
Because of “Come Out And Play,” Smash became the first album I ever purchased with my own money. I remember taking some leftover Christmas cash with me to my neighborhood K-Mart while running errands with my mom, and I vividly recall grabbing the album with its x-ray skeleton cover and bright-red “SMASH” lettering on the front and putting it on the checkout conveyor belt. I still have that cassette in my basement, more than 30 years later.
The dual release of Smash and Green Day’s Dookie were a one-two punch of punk rock that continues to stand the test of time. Mainstream audiences may not have been ready for it, but the albums carved out a path for many of the artists that will follow in this space going forward. In the case of Smash, “Come Out And Play” was an appetizer that quickly led to a main course of polished, exquisite punk-rock tracks that cemented the band’s legacy as one of the premiere acts of the 1990s and beyond.
“Come Out And Play” would be Offspring’s highest charting single on the Billboard Airplay chart, peaking at #38 (again, due to Billboard magazine rules for charting on the flagship Hot 100, the songs from Smash were never released as commercial singles and therefore did not qualify for the chart). None of the other singles from Smash topped the charts, though they came close.
“Self Esteem,” arguable one of the band’s biggest crossover hits, managed a #4 peak on the Modern Rock Tracks chart and a #45 peak on the Airplay chart. This would be the closest Offspring would come to a “slow” single during their ‘90s run, a thoughtful but acid-tinged reflection on how one’s perception of themselves affects their relationships.
The album’s third single, “Gotta Get Away,” peaked at #6 on the MRT chart and #58 on the Airplay chart. But regardless of the commercial appeal of the album’s singles, Smash in its entirety remains one of the biggest-selling albums of all time, and still holds the record for single-album sales by an independent record label (Epitaph Records). Smash is currently acknowledged by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) at sextuple-platinum for sales exceeding 6 million copies, while worldwide sales of the album have topped 11 million to date.
I’ll be discussing Offspring again in this space, though it’ll be nearly a decade before the band hits the top of the Modern Rock charts again. That said, by every measure, Offspring is a massive success story. Even though the post-grunge wave of 1994 was a big driver of the band’s mainstream visibility, the sonic blast from Smash would likely continue to stand the test of time without that popular push. A heavy mix of rock, unique guitar riffs, an unpolished yet shiny musical edge, and lyrics that call into question social constructs and interpersonal dynamics all combine to make songs like “Come Out And Play” must-listen entertainment.
Rating: 10/10
Chart Check
Other notable MRT chart songs from this time period
Post-grunge continues its chart dominance, with Stone Temple Pilots holding down the #2 spot during Offspring’s run at the top. That said, we see top-10 chart peaks by mainstream-friendly voices like Seal and Frente!, and a fun chart anomaly courtesy of Lisa Loeb. And, also, the “last splash” on the charts for The Breeders.
“Vasoline” by Stone Temple Pilots (#2):
STP’s second single off Purple, “Vasoline,” peaked at #2 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart behind “Come Out And Play,” and hit #38 on the Billboard Airplay charts as well. Stone Temple Pilots generated a lot of buzz in the early ‘90s with their album Core, and with the release of Purple started to reap the commercial benefits via the aforementioned post-grunge wave. STP will soon find themselves back in the #2 spot again with the third single from this album, a “love song” that likely stands the test of time as their most well-known track.
“Prayer For The Dying” by Seal (#3):
Seal previously graced the Modern Rock Tracks chart in 1991 with his hit single “Crazy,” but with the release of his 1994 Seal album, the artist was able to find crossover success. “Prayer For The Dying,” the first single off the new album, managed a solid #3 peak on the MRT charts but also topped out at #21 on the Hot 100. His next single, however, connected to the Batman Forever soundtrack, would be the one that cements his legacy as a pop artist. We’ll see that single in this space when the Modern Rock Tracks chart eventually expands to 40 songs instead of 30.
“Stay (I Missed You)” by Lisa Loeb & Nine Stories (#7):
First things first: I love this song. It’s evocative of a particular time and place in life, and while I may have been in the throes of post-grunge heavy rock and alternative, I still love the occasional sensitive, saccharin-sweet pop ditty by an artist who 15-year-old Matt absolutely had a crush on. Lisa Loeb & Nine Stories released “Stay (I Missed You)” and it quickly climbed the charts, hitting #1 on the Hot 100 at the same time it reached a peak of #7 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart. This is the closest a song came to hitting #1 on both charts since Sinéad O’Connor pulled off the feat in 1990 with her superlative “Nothing Compares 2 U,” but even then, it didn’t peak on both charts at the same time. Loeb will appear in this space again, but this track remains her all-time greatest.
“Labour Of Love” by Frente! (#9):
Frente! is an interesting artist. She managed to chart on the Modern Rock Tracks chart twice in 1994, with her highest-charting single, “Labour Of Love,” peaking at #9 behind Offspring. Frente! disappears from the U.S. charts after this track, but there’s something about her voice and musical stylings that I appreciate. Much like Lisa Loeb, Frente! and her music evokes memories of mid-1990s coffeehouse music, the type of songs that would eventually become commercialized and mass produced but, at the time, were authentic and genuine. I appreciate that about her and this track.
“Saints” by The Breeders (#12):
I know you all know how I feel about The Breeders and their superlative album Last Splash, so you’ll know that it brings me no great happiness to share their final Modern Rock Tracks chart peak with “Saints,” which topped out at #12 behind Offspring in the summer of 1994. The Breeders would go on to release three more albums after Last Splash, and while they are varying degrees of good, none would contain a charting single, so barring another comeback by the band, this will be the last time I reference a new single of theirs. It was a good run, though, and “Saints” is a solid “last splash.”
I really enjoyed reading this tribute to the band that was so transformative for you. Your love for Offspring comes out clearly as you examine the different aspects of the album. It is a great album and you did it justice!