hmmm, the process of creating offspring rocks for sure.

/scuttles away

I'll agree that arguing about what category a group fits in is rather pointless as it is all subjective. I go less by lyrics and more by sound when making those judgements, and under those circumstances I would put Offspring closer to Pennywise than New Found Glory, but to each their own. I'm not going to really defend a band that isn't in my top three favorites

Oh Orph, you couldn't be farther from the truth.

1. Rammstein
2. Nine Inch Nails
3. Fear Factory

Have you seen the cost of a single? Ever? They were always like $4 a cassette, $7 a CD-single. That's about half the price of a full album. Until a year ago, when legal music downloads became available, it was horribly pricy to buy a single. Now, the going rate online seems to be 99 cents, which is a reasonable price for just one song.

The only people who bought singles were die-hard collectors that needed that obscure b-side for completeness.

Edit: Hmm, seems nearly all of this was said right after ReNo said his thing. Frankly, reading through the thread, this grabbed me so much I felt obliged to respond before reading further.

So, um, The Offspring. As the proud owner of Ignition and Smash, and the shamed owner of Americana, I gotta say they really did hit a slide where they stopped putting emotion and though into lyrics and instead headed towards (not-so) witty jokes and stupid sound effects to match. "Why Don't You Get a Job"'s success as a single solidified the approach to their terrible follow-up, Conspiracy of One. "Hit That" seemed just as bad. I would be extremely leery of purchasing an album by The Offspring again. Oh, and for graphic earlier work, you can't really match "Beheaded."

As to explicit lyrics stickers, a lot of the time they really seem to be about image. It's trendy to have one. I own somewhere nearing 80 CD's and only two have explicit lyrics stickers: Songs for the Deaf and Judas O. Judas O. is the B-Sides CD that comes with Rotten Apples, the Smashing Pumpkins greatest hits album. Songs for the Deaf, so far as I can understand the lyrics so far, has the outburst during "Six Shooter" and a fairly pervasive degree of sexual imagery, but it's hardly a swear-fest. Marginally adult. Judas O. contains the f-bomb about three times over the course of an 80-minute disk, some drug references, a song about infidelity and a song about date-rape. Frankly, I'm exceedingly surprised it received an explicit lyrics sticker, far more graphic content on the last two subjects is allowed in government sponsored Public Service Annoncements and that's far from an over-use of the f-bomb, especially in lieu of any other cursewords.

Anyway, what I'm really saying is that there's no need for something to be labeled Explicit Lyrics to be dark, serious and adult. Alice in Chains managed to never release an album with an Explicit Lyrics sticker, and frankly, I haven't seen anyone talk about heroin more than them.