So it’s come to this. The last song by The Offspring that I’ll ever write about on here. I don’t know if I’ve said, it’s been a long time since I’ve featured the band on the site, but The Offspring was one of my favourite bands at one point. A real starter group for me, I’m talking when I was about eight years old. 2003-ish. I was very obsessed with ‘Hit That’ at the time, which led me down a hole of watching their music videos on their website via Windows Media Player (pre-YouTube days, people), getting excited whenever they were showing on TV, and eventually getting their Greatest Hits compilation and Americana. Then it took five years for the band to release another album after Splinter, and my own personal hype for the group somewhat diminished in that time.

Some Offspring songs sounded much better then than they do now. ‘Least to me. ‘Pretty Fly’, ‘Why Don’t You Get a Job?’, ‘Original Prankster’… man, even ‘Hit That’ are just a few examples that I haven’t willingly listened to in a long, long time. But then there are others that I get a kick out of whenever, wherever. And ‘She’s Got Issues’ is one of them. The track was released as the fourth and final single from Americana, almost a year after the album’s initial release in 1998. And I think because people were so caught up in the three that came before and still are, I guess, to this day, ‘She’s Got Issues’ has flown under the radar for all this time. I think I saw the music video on MTV2 one day, featuring a young, pre-star Zooey Deschanel, and thought the song was all good. At whatever younger age I was, I assumed the singles that had the music videos were usually the best songs. So when I got Americana as a gift, I was immediately drawn to the track as a result.

There’s not much interpretation the listener has to do on their part while going through this one. It’s a very ’90s male take on a woman who, to be fair, may need some help in a professional way. But the way in which Dexter Holland tells the story is pretty funny. I think the listener is meant to feel sorry for the perspective from which the song’s told, but there’s definitely an asshole narrator element to the whole affair that I think levels the playing field. It’s a depiction of a relationship where the two involved are just as bad as each other. Though calling out an ex’s name when in bed is for sure a big red flag. Apart from the crunching riff and those whipping noises that alternate between the two speakers throughout, I think the main musical highlight is Holland’s vocal. He drily approaches the verses before belting out the “Yea-heah, YEAAA-HEAH”s in the louder choruses. As much as I try, I can’t replicate those without my voice completely breaking. But it’s always worth the effort.