A prominent online music site recently ran a piece on the sale of SoCal punk godfathers The Offspring’s back catalogue for the princely sum of $35m.
In an age when the industry model has been through revolutionary change the value itself felt inflated, but the correspondent’s real critique lay in their acerbic deconstruction of the roster’s jewel in the crown, 1998’s multi-million selling global smash Americana.
The post is a long one but boils down essentially to how mainstream attitudes to songs like Pretty Fly (For A White Guy) have evolved; regardless of your perspective, the one indisputable truth about Americana’s dated, crass-to-gauche outlook is that it was in places the cultural equivalent of a whoopee cushion.
The gulf between now and then feels, at some of now’s more extreme moments, epochal, but in simple terms the mid-to-late nineties were a period when nice guy bands like Semisonic could sell millions of records without pretence.
Contemporaries of, for example, Matchbox 20, the unassuming trio from Minneapolis had made their debut two years earlier with Great Divide, but it was its follow-up that brought fame without The Offspring’s infamy, a collection that made up in honest simplicity for what it missed in lairy adolescence.
‘Sonics frontman Dan Wilson was already shaping himself as a songwriter outside of the group setting – and since their original split early in the century has worked as a pen for hire to no less than Adele and Taylor Swift. Back then however, unable to shake the feeling that their erudite rock was either too ephemeral or not enough, they made some bold choices, recording in their unfashionable home city and relying on spontaneity in the studio as opposed to arriving with near finished material.
Feeling Strangely Fine’s bedrock proved to be a glut of well observed musings that stayed within the tramlines of having emotion without being cheaply sentimental, and employed where needed some judiciously chosen and sincere power chords.
Wilson also crafted a minor epiphany in Closing Time, a song as much about leaving responsibility behind in downtown bars as needing to find it again with the premature birth and fight for life of his daughter. Relying as much for guidance on the seventies and eighties magi of American mainstream – Cheap Trick, The Cars, Jackson Browne – as the faded wares of its Pacific north west, the singer found himself in a rare bubble from which the signature touchstones of the future just kept coming, from Singing In My Sleep’s gritty pop, California’s epically bleary travelogue, to Never You Mind’s rowdy honky tonk.
More predictably though, it was the lilting Rhodes of Secret Smile that charmed Britain, a less declamatory take on intimacy and keeping private things just that.
Feeling Strangely Fine probably deserves another bow – expanded fractionally here with the addition of some liner notes and a few originally Europe-only b-sides – if only to remind us that not everything is meant to be judged in perpetuity by people who didn’t experience it. Unlike Americana, it’s still vulnerable, but mostly to itself and not to cross examination by the harsh mentats that stalk the world of shifting perspectives.
After it was released nothing would be the same again, which remains its greatest strength.
