"Why Don't You Get a Job?"

For some reason, Alamo gave me a rental car featuring XM satellite radio without telling me. Once I figured it out, I naturally turned to Lucy where every day is the ultimate nineties alt-rock party. At any rate, "Why Don't You Get a Job" by The Offspring came on, and while I'd remembered it as a bad song, oh my God it's terrible. In addition to its pure sonic badness, it's just an egregious rip-off of "ob-la-di ob-la-da," and is conveying what I've got to believe is the least punk message in human history. I'm almost inclined to believe that the whole thing is a kind of deeply ironic joke about the willingness of commercial radio programmers to give airtime to whatever crap the record companies feed them.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007/06/-why-dont-you-get-a-job/42819/