from Smash (1994)

“Come Out and Play” was one of the three songs I knew very well from the album, along with “Self Esteem” and “Gotta Get Away.” (God, it was great when radio stations played a bunch of songs from one release.) I loved the song “Smash It Up” when it showed up in Batman Forever, but I assumed incorrectly that it was the song called “Smash” on the album of the same name. It was this assumption, however, that added that fourth song to the mix, putting the album over the top, if erroneously. And despite my father’s looking at me weirdly for the CD having a skeleton/x-ray on it, at that Nobody Beats the Wiz on Route 110 on Long Island, Smash became the first CD I’d ever own.

It wasn’t the first album I’d ever own, to be clear: That honor fell to the imitable Hall and Oates. Not Whole Oats, as I recently tweeted about, but another, possibly more recent one. I can’t shake the image in my head of the two of them just kind of standing there on the cover, which unfortunately doesn’t match any in their discography, but it was certainly one of theirs and I was certainly about 4 or 5 and it was most definitely at random, after my father indulged me and said I could pick out any album in the place. (To complete the useless trivia trifecta, the first CD I ever loaded into a player was The Sign, Ace of Base. I didn’t own Smash yet and picked one of my sisters’ – also at random – to play in the old boombox she gave me after getting her new one. How about that?)

Bringing it back around, Smash was one of the CDs playing at the first middle school party I went to. The more I think about it, this collection of songs, with some others, was eighth grade for me. It just so happens that this was one of the prevalent albums at the time, but that’s how these things work, right? I can say that the songs on this list all have the privilege of being the ones to have opened my eyes and ears to new sounds, visions, describing chapters of my life. The exotic sounding riff in “Come Out and Play” claimed that spot first – it might have been “Misirlou” for others, the song being older but Pulp Fiction being right around this time – or still other songs for people older or younger: It’s musically connected to that other song on this list, “Everything In Its Right Place,” and also Aerosmith’s “Taste of India” (another “first” song, by the way). All songs that came after it and sound like it will make me think of it, even though in and of itself it’s not at the root of that tree. For me, “Come Out and Play” defined a point in time and broadly so a subsection of music, too, so here it is, nestled reverse-chronologically at #4.

Incidentally, if I’m not mistaken, this is the only song on Dan’s Definitive Top 10 that I have not seen the artist play live. I’m proud to have seen all the other bands, sometimes multiple times, but I have not seen the Offspring. So:

1. Green Day, “Basket Case”
2. Melissa Etheridge, “I’m The Only One”
3. Weezer, “Buddy Holly”
4. The Offspring, “Come Out and Play”
5. Bush, “Machinehead”
6. Foo Fighters, “Monkey Wrench”
7. Muse, “Unintended”
8. Radiohead, “Everything In Its Right Place”
9. Stage, “Live Happy, Live With Anorexia”
10. Ludo, “Save Our City”
Dan’s Definitive Top Ten 2010: Introduction