When the Offspring beat up the Backstreet Boys

We are towards the end of the 90s. The Offspring release “Americana”, an album that remains in the band’s history Californian because it was capable of selling over eleven million copies. A great commercial success. The group, in that period, was actually opening up to a punk mixed with pop influencesmelodic and captivating, ready to conquer an increasingly large segment of the public. All this is evident from the first singles released: the ironic and anti-radio “Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)”, “Why Don’t You Get a Job?”, the enthralling “The Kids Aren’t Alright” and “She’s Got Issues”. Beyond the singles, to fully frame the album, the tracks “Have You Ever”, “Staring At The Sun”, the unbridled “Walla Walla” and the oriental “Pay The Man” also deserve mention. The band, however, continues to slyly keep one foot in both shoes: it opens up to a more mainstream dimension, but at the same time criticizes the glossy world of commercial music. The Offspring have always been very good at coming up with marketing gimmicks.

And so, around this time, Dexter Holland gets into the habit of tearing to pieces, on stage, mannequins with the faces and clothes of the Backstreet Boysdemolished with baseball bats: everything happens for the first time during the tragic festival of Woodstock in 1999complete with background music featuring songs from the boy band. A gesture that contributes to exacerbating the climate of violence and intolerance of the public present at the event, exhausted by the heat, the lack of services and the terrible organisation.

To understand how incendiary the atmosphere was, just review the video of the performance, complete with the beheading of the mannequins, and notice the rain of thrown bottles flooding the stage. It came out on the festival “Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99”the documentary dedicated to that disastrous edition. It can be seen on Netflix. Divided into three episodes, the documentary recounts the explosion of violence and madness that involved the spectators of the 1999 edition of Woodstock. With a lineup featuring artists such as Rage Against The Machine, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica, Korn, Offspring and Limp Bizkit, Woodstock’99 brought together more than 400,000 spectators in New York State which set the area on fire, making it one of the most infamous festivals in the history of music.