This song is about gang and gun violence in schools, and was the breakthrough hit for The Offspring. In a Rolling Stone interview, lead singer Dexter Holland recalled writing the song: "Back then I was a grad student and I was commuting to school everyday in a s--tty car, driving through East LA Gangland central. I was there the day of the LA riots. So I was very aware of that part of the world, and a lot of that gun stuff came out in songs like 'Come Out And Play.' But there was also some humor to it, like with 'Bad Habit.' There was a lot of freeway violence and road-rage at that time. And my car was so s--tty that people used to literally throw things at me on the freeway because I wasn't going fast enough. So I decided to write a song about it."
This song was written after a trip to the Middle East. This is what inspired frontman Dexter Holland to write the catchy guitar riff.
The phrase, "Gotta keep 'em separated" came from when Dexter Holland was in medical school. At the time, the band was unsure of how to tie the parts of the song together. One day, Holland was experimenting with bacteria in vials. He left the vials of bacteria in a room to let them cool down, came back after an hour or so, and noticed that the bacteria were still warm because the two samples were interacting with each other because the vials were close to each other. Dexter thought to himself, "I gotta keep 'em separated" and decided to use it to tie the new song together.
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Matt - Houston, TX, for above 2
In the 2006 Adam Sandler movie
Click, this song can be heard being played by the marching band in the background during the swimming meet scene in the beginning.
It was also used in the 2001 comedy movie
Bubble Boy, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, and the 2012 biographical drama
Chasing Mavericks, starring Jonny Weston as surfer Jay Moriarty. It appears in the TV series
Cold Case in the 2006 episode "Detention."
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Kevin - Bethlehem, PA
"Come Out And Play" was the lead single from The Offspring's third album, Smash, which stands as the best-selling album of all time released on an independent label with their own distribution. They were signed to Epitaph Records, the label owned by Brett Gurewitz of Bad Religion, which specialized in punk. Just a few years earlier, punk rock was an outlier that you had to seek out to hear, but it became shockingly popular in 1994, with Green Day and The Offspring breaking into the mainstream. The Offspring ended up leaving Epitaph and signing with the major label Columbia for their next album, Ixnay On The Hombre.
The 1979 movie The Warriors, which deals with gang violence, features a famous line similar to the title of this song: "Warriors... come out to play."
The music video features the band performing interspersed with scenes of snake charmers, fencers, and dogs. According to guitarist Noodles, it was shot on a shoestring budget. "We did the 'Come Out and Play' video with Darren Lavett for, like, $5,000. Which was unheard of. Guns N' Roses were spending millions of dollars making their videos, but we shot ours at some guy's house in the LA suburbs. We all crammed into his garage and covered the walls with mylar, like what you see in helium balloons. It was a million degrees in there. Then we brought in a big fan. So this reflective plastic was kinda blowing around while we played. I think most of the budget was spent on beer and meat for the barbeque after the shoot."
The band enlisted their friend Jason "Blackball" McLean to deliver the famous phrase, "Gotta keep 'em separated." "[He] had kind of a distinctive voice," said Noodles. "He grew up in a Mexican neighborhood, all his friends were Mexican, he had the slang down, the accent. He was a Scottish cholo from Whittier. So we asked him to come in and do the line. He wound up doing it in the video, too."
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Bertrand - Paris, France, for above 3
The band's mainstream success was met with disdain from punk purists, who accused them of selling out. Dexter fumed at the accusation, telling the Los Angeles Times in 2008: "Who decides what is and what isn't punk? I want to write songs that people hear and feel and I want to be successful and reach a big audience ... I'm not trying to be the coolest guy in the world, I'm trying to write songs that mean something to people. As you get successful, sometimes you lose one set of fans and gain another."
The Offspring shared
a reworked version of "Come Out And Play" for the Coronavirus era on their Instagram. They replaced the line "you gotta keep 'em separated" with "you gotta go get vaccinated," as a fun way of encouraging fans to get their COVID jabs.
In America, the song was released only as a promotional single, so you had to buy the album to get it. This ploy worked: the Smash album sold over 6 million copies in the US.
"Come Out And Play" climbed the charts so fast that Noodles was still a janitor at a high school when the Offspring's videos started playing on MTV.
