The Offspring - Ixnay on the Hombre

Welcome to the disclaimer. We all remember The Offspring morphing into the cheesy pop-hop prankster image ensemble they became, and Ixnay on the Hombre has the first hints of that transition, but it's still a good album. It's structured the same as Smash, and the concept is somewhat similar. Smash was wrapped in the humorous enjoyment of the album with an adult beverage as an intellectually stimulating art experience (you know, like i do), and Ixnay extends that to another thing i like to do: lecture on the experience of life from a personal perspective. It might be completely disagreeable to you, and you are welcome to go away if you can't find some way to engage with it.

It also tests your irony muscles. The beauty in The Offspring is that they neither telegraph their sarcasm, nor clarify afterward. That's actually hard to accomplish. You can listen to the whole thing either way and it gives some rewarding perspectives. It also has a bunch of my own personal philosophies and sentiments on it, but i won't beat the dead horse you represent in this scenario. 

Part one is a nice little story. It starts with the realization that everyone is out to push their own agenda on you, a recognition that he doesn't want to live that way, and a final statement that ultimately you choose to participate in whatever situation you find yourself. Life is a nightmare, but you can in fact just walk away if you want to do so.

Let's take a brief pause to thank our sponsor, coffee. Coffee, stimulating brain cells and making you go to the bathroom more often since Kaldi watched his goats tweak out after eating those particular berries. 

Nobody wants to "be controlled." Yet, at the same time, if you find yourself stuck in the same miserable cycles of making being human terrible, you should listen to advice and break out of it. 

Now obviously the title is a Pig Latin based pun, and there's a certain level of juvenile humor involved, but really the total message is pretty coherent. Whether you're sad, or angry, or perpetually lazy, or fatalistically depressed, or pretending you're out to change the world for completely selfish reasons:

Stop being such a douchebag.